By John Antonik
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — As the pause button was hit on football practice Wednesday for the West Virginia football players to begin their first day of classes for the fall semester, why not take a step back into time for a little history lesson?
The year was 1984 and West Virginia had just ended Penn State’s 29-year winning streak at Mountaineer Field.
Up to that time, Morgantown resident Jay Redmond had only watched West Virginia lose to Penn State. It began with coach Art Lewis in the late 1950s and continued in the 1960s with Gene Corum and Jim Carlen.
In the 1970s when Bobby Bowden took over … more losses, some by discouraging margins. Jay was right there in Beaver Stadium to watch Heisman Trophy winner John Cappelletti score all of those touchdowns for his dying kid brother Joey in a 62-14 victor in favor of the Nittany Lions.
That’s the game when a dejected Bowden famously said afterward, “Had I known that, I wished he would have scored a couple of more!”
Frank Cignetti followed Bowden in 1976 and his West Virginia teams continued their losing ways against Penn State.
But once Don Nehlen replaced Cignetti in 1980, Redmond could finally see a ray of sunshine.
Perhaps Nehlen was the guy who could finally beat Penn State, Redmond thought.
Jay picks up the story from here.
“When we moved to the new stadium at that time I was still spotting for Homer Shaffer on the scoreboard at old Mountaineer Field. I was 24,” he recalled. “They put in a scoreboard, obviously, but they also put in a new message board and when I say message board today it looked like a video game. Think of the game Pong.
“It was very rudimentary,” Redmond continued. “It would do little animations, but it was little stick-figure animations and you could put advertiser names up on the board, which we did that too. We did it with those 5 1/2-inch floppy disks. Anytime you wanted to put something up there you had to put in a different disk.
“The memory that was on the computer wouldn’t hold all of that information, so you had to constantly [change disks]. If you wanted to put up like something that flashed DEFENSE or whatever, you had to put that DEFENSE disk in.”
Having watched West Virginia’s futility for years up in State College, Jay knew the long losing streak wasn’t going to end there.
There was just no way in hell the Mountaineers were going to beat the Nittany Lions in the lion’s den.
But with this new guy Nehlen and a brand new football stadium, it might happen in Morgantown, Redmond figured.
Consequently, he had to be ready.
The problem was he could only use one word. Even though the scoreboard made by American Sign and Indicator out of Spokane, Wash., was touted as one of the biggest in the country at the time, the technology was still primitive and space for messages was severely limited.
“The only information you could get up there yourself was real, real simple things like the word TOUCHDOWN flashing,” Redmond explained. “They even had some sort of stock things I think they were sending to everyone in those days, but anything customized to your situation had to be super simple so it could fit on one small panel.
“I thought, ‘Hey, I’ve got to be ready when this happens. I’ve got to be ready for every Penn State game because someday we are going to beat this team,’” Redmond said.
So in 1980 he decided to make one disk specifically for a Penn State victory, whenever it happened.
He thought he might have a chance to use it in 1980 when the Mountaineers recovered an onside kick in the freezing rain and had a chance to score the go-ahead touchdown late in the game, but quarterback Oliver Luck’s pass into the end zone was intercepted and Penn State ran out the clock.
West Virginia climbed to No. 13 in the national rankings in 1982, but couldn’t crack the goal line against the ninth-rated Nittany Lions in a 24-0 defeat at Mountaineer Field two years later.
And then came 1984.
“I thought about it for really a long time, and I was really restricted to just one or two words,” Redmond said. “What is the word that really says it all? I came upon the word FINALLY so I put it on that disk, and I kept that disk beside me and kept it for four years.
“In ’80 I didn’t get to use it. I was ready with it in ’82 and didn’t get to use it and then in ’84 I got to use it. It was my 15 minutes of fame,” he added.
Dale Spark’s iconic picture of the students tearing down the goal posts and Redmond’s simple word FINALLY flashing above it moved on the national wire and was picked up by every major newspaper in the country.
Redmond had missed a big opportunity a week before when the Mountaineers knocked off fourth-ranked Boston College 21-20.
All he could come up with was the stock WE WIN supplied by the scoreboard manufacturer.
He wasn’t going to miss his chance again a week later.
“The combination of that word and the shot Sparky got of the goal post half-down and bodies hanging all over it … I was told that picture ran in the Los Angeles Times and big papers all over the country,” Redmond said. “I don’t really know if that’s true or not because in those days you couldn’t go online, but I think it ran all over the place.
“I was prepared four years before it happened, and it was a fun moment to be able to stick that thing in there and put it up there, that’s for sure. And I do think it said it all. I do think it was the right word.”
In fact, Jay’s simple word worked so well that four years later, when West Virginia defeated Syracuse to conclude its first undefeated, untied regular season in school history another single word was used to describe the moment — PERFECT.
By then, Jay was West Virginia’s ticket manager, but the word FINALLY used to describe West Virginia’s unforgettable win over Penn State undoubtedly provided the template for the word PERFECT used four years later.
And now, as they say, you know the rest of the story.
