Game Over

by Bill Moushey

  Gary Schultz also minimized McQueary’s allegations. “I had the feeling there was some kind of wrestling around activity and maybe Jerry might have grabbed the young boy’s genitals,” he told a grand jury. Schultz admitted that any such conduct was clearly inappropriate but said, “The allegations came across as not that serious.” As for criminality, Schultz said there was no indication of a crime. He didn’t make any other reports. Yet he later said that he was under the impression that other Penn State officials—he did not say who—contacted a social service agency about the allegations. When Schultz learned that no one from Penn State had reported McQueary’s allegations about the incident to an outside police or child welfare agency, the man charged with oversight of Penn State’s police department said only, “Wow, I thought it was turned over.”

  He later admitted to the grand jury that when he heard McQueary’s report, he knew about the 1998 allegation from the young mother who had wanted Sandusky arrested for his behavior with her son. Schultz would say much later that he didn’t make a big deal out of the earlier report because he did not think it was right to impugn the reputation of a guy like Sandusky over child molestation accusations that did not merit prosecution.

  In the 1998 case Schultz was aware that the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare was involved in the investigation. He also knew his own police department had collected almost a hundred pages of evidence and admissions from Sandusky in the earlier probe. He never read the reports, but figured if a prosecutor didn’t believe they merited prosecution, the case was closed.

  Schultz rationalized his not reporting Sandusky to authorities in 2002 or requesting an investigation into McQueary’s report because he knew Sandusky personally. He believed the former coach may have been misunderstood. He said the man had always been a physical person. He always touched folks, young and old, during conversations. He frequently put friends in headlocks, slapped them on the back, grabbed arms and other body parts in physical displays of affection.

  At the time, that was it. There was not even a cursory investigation by any police agency into McQueary’s eyewitness account. The Penn State officials did not make any reports because they did not believe Sandusky’s conduct was criminal. They made no effort to learn the identity of the ten-year-old child or get his version of what happened.

  While the noninvestigation into Sandusky’s actions in 2002 ended without internal or external reports being written, McQueary said neither Schultz nor Curley ever told him to keep the situation quiet. McQueary, as well as members of the football team and staff, said the only time they saw Sandusky with children on Penn State premises after that was during group activities at The Second Mile summer camps. However, they said the retired coach continued to use Penn State’s weight room and other facilities. Sandusky did not surrender his keys to the facilities either.

  McQueary himself never pushed the investigation further. In his mind, by talking to Schultz he had gone to the police. Within a year of his report McQueary was hired as a full-time assistant football coach. The rumors of Sandusky’s interest in young boys was locker room fodder among football players who jokingly warned teammates to be careful not to “drop the soap in the shower” when Sandusky was around.

  Despite his claims, McQueary continued to participate in Second Mile charity events. He played in a flag football game coached by Sandusky, as well as a golf outing and other events for The Second Mile. He also saw Sandusky in the football facilities on a weekly basis, albeit without children.

  McQueary’s father said he too talked with Schultz about the situation during an unrelated business meeting shortly after his son’s report. He told Schultz, “There should be something done about it.” The elder McQueary said Schultz told him it was not the first time he’d heard allegations of abuse at the hands of Sandusky, so John McQueary was under the impression that something substantial was going to be done.

  Meanwhile Mike McQueary never made public his opinions about the way university officials handled his report. He told a grand jury that his last contact with Penn State officials about the incident occurred three months after the shower scene. That’s when Paterno asked him if he was satisfied with the outcome. McQueary said he told the coach that he was fine with it.

  Eight years would pass before a state trooper trolling the Internet for background information about Sandusky would run across a blog suggesting a former Penn State football graduate assistant now employed as a coach saw Sandusky molesting a young boy in a shower. The investigator quickly determined it was McQueary. At that point, investigators started focusing on the incident in the shower. They sought to find out who on the Penn State staff knew about it, what they knew and when they knew it. One of the first people they went to for answers was Joe Paterno.

  Chapter 6

  Paterno’s Impact

  Joe Paterno was a man who cared deeply about everybody in his circle. When Mike McQueary came to him with his upsetting account of what he had witnessed in the locker room, Paterno did what he thought was his obligation. He believed the best thing was to pass the problem to his own bosses, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, who he felt were better equipped to deal with the situation legally and objectively. Once he reported to them and made sure McQueary was okay with the resolution the two men came up with, he returned to being the best coach and leader that he could.

  Paterno was proud to be accessible to the State College community. His telephone number was listed in the phone book; he never moved to a fancy neighborhood. He wasn’t ostentatious or technocratic. He never owned a cell phone or a computer or ever understood the social networks. But this one-time kid from Brooklyn had done great things by surrounding himself with great people.

  Steve Smear was among his most ardent admirers. He was the co-captain of the undefeated Penn State teams in 1968 and 1969 and a member of Paterno’s first recruiting class in 1966. Smear recently talked about what it was like to play for Joe: “He let us be students. He had guys who belonged in college. We were able to have a complete college experience.”

  Paterno’s singular voice, demanding discipline from his players on the field, was impressed in Smear’s memory. “That voice! We used to joke that we had to learn another language when he would scream in that Brooklyn accent,” he said with a chuckle. “He had a voice that could cut through steel. But he’d also encourage you. A lot of times his bark was worse than his bite. We were fortunate to have a coach like him.”

  Paterno was also a stickler for being on time and remaining disciplined. “If you were late for a practice or a meeting, he would tell you that you let down one hundred teammates and the coaching staff. It was a fate worse than death. He would yell and scream and make you run laps. Sometimes I still have this dream that I’m late for a meeting, and I can still hear his voice in my head. I’m never late for anything because of him.”

  Smear said that he and his teammates called Joe’s “clock” Paterno Time. “If he said be there at a certain hour, you had to be ten to fifteen minutes early. Joe had a saying, that if you keep hustling, something good will happen. If you watch his teams, they always keep hustling until the end.

  “We were part of his family. He was legitimately interested in us as people. He was a unique guy. I have the utmost respect for him.”

  Charles Pittman was another JoePa devotee. The Nittany Lions’ storied running back had reached a crossroads in his life in 1972. Until then football had defined him. In the thirty games in which he had been a starting player, the team had never lost a game. The only blemish was a 17–17 tie with Florida State in the 1967 Gator Bowl. Pittman was the first player to achieve All-American honors on the football field under Paterno, and he so excelled in the classroom he earned honors as an Academic All-American as well.

  After graduating from Penn State, Pittman tried his hand at professional football, playing one season each with the St. Louis Cardinals and his hometown Baltimore Colts. In those two seasons he carried the ball only four times for seven ya
rds. He was seriously considering continuing his career in the Canadian Football League when he met with Paterno on a return trip to State College. Once again Pittman got some fatherly advice. “Joe put his hand on my shoulder and told me I was trying to prove that my college career wasn’t a fluke,” Pittman said in an interview in December 2011. “He told me I didn’t have anything to prove to anybody and that I should get on with my life. So I got on with my life.”

  With Paterno’s help, Pittman got a job as an executive with Marine Bank in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he and his wife, Maurese, settled down and began raising a family. That job didn’t work out, so he decided to pursue a career in the newspaper industry. He was hired as promotions manager for the Times Publishing Company of Erie, headed by Ed Mead, whose family had been newspaper publishers in northwestern Pennsylvania for a long time.

  As the years passed, his son, Tony, built his own reputation as a star running back at Erie McDowell High School. Tony wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and play at Penn State, but he was considered too small to play major college football. To get another year of growth and extra training prior to college-level sports, he enrolled at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in his senior year. George H. W. Bush had gone to Phillips Academy, and he tried to talk Tony into attending Yale University, his alma mater. An offer from Yale followed, but Tony had his heart set on Penn State. Twenty-five years after his father scored his last touchdown for the Nittany Lions, Tony became a member of the 1990 recruiting class. “I trusted Joe with my son,” Charles Pittman said. “There’s not a parent who wouldn’t want his son to play at Penn State. Foremost, Joe is an educator and builder of men.”

  Tony wore number 24, his father’s number. He started at offense but soon switched to defensive back under Defensive Coordinator Jerry Sandusky. Tony wasn’t a starter right away, but in the spring of 1993 he earned the Jim O’Hora Award, presented annually to the defensive player who has displayed exemplary conduct and attitude. The award is named for a former Penn State assistant coach who served on the coaching staff for thirty-one years. Tony’s best season came in 1994, his senior year, when at cornerback he led the Lions with five interceptions. That season the team won all twelve of their regular season games, as well as the Rose Bowl, claiming the Big Ten Conference championship. When Tony was in the starting lineup, the Nittany Lions won sixteen games and lost none. Like his father, he was an Academic All-American. He earned a business degree and a master’s degree in business administration, and like his father, he became a successful business executive. As of this writing, he serves as a director in the global supply chain services of Hewlett Packard.

  The Pittmans were the first two-generation father-son combination to play for Joe Paterno, but not the last. In the forty-six years that Paterno was Penn State’s head coach, twenty-six such combinations played for him. In games that Charles and Tony Pittman started for Penn State, the Nittany Lions were 45-0-1.

  A year after his son graduated, Charles Pittman was working as a newspaper publisher at Lee Enterprise Inc. of Davenport, Iowa. For six years he served as a senior vice president of the fourth largest newspaper chain in America, publishing fifty-four newspapers in twenty-three states. In June 2002 he was told to find twenty jobs he could cut to reduce costs and improve the company’s bottom line. He wanted to consider other cost-cutting options that wouldn’t leave loyal employees without jobs, but he was told he needed to execute the order. Rather than do so, he quit as a matter of principal.

  “Now where do you think I learned those principles?” said Pittman, currently a vice president of Schurz Communications, publishers of the South Bend Tribune in Indiana. The answer is Penn State and Joe Paterno. Pittman learned to get the best out of himself on the football field and beyond. Paterno taught him that his word must be impeccable and that a manager’s most important task was to remove obstacles that stand in an employee’s way, not to boss him around or do his job for him. As one who had been recruited in the original class of the Grand Experiment, Pittman learned the Paterno Way and took what he learned into the business world: “I didn’t understand all the things he was teaching us, but as you grow older, I understood that he was preparing us for life beyond the football field.” Joe Paterno considered himself to be a teacher first and a coach second. He wanted everyone he had a chance to mentor to strive for personal excellence.

  Jack Ham, a linebacker from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was another early recruit for the Grand Experiment. Ham received a scholarship in 1967 after another recruit turned it down. He went on to become one of the greatest linebackers ever to perform for Penn State, earning All-American status while playing on teams that were a combined 29–3 in his three seasons as a starter.

  “Joe’s order of priorities was family, education, and football,” Ham said in an interview. “He said the only time you get into trouble is when you get those things out of order. The thing I remember most is that he always told us not to think we were something special because we were football players. To him, football was an extracurricular activity, and we were all part of the university. Joe didn’t believe in separate dorms for football players. We were mixed in with the student population.”

  By Ham’s senior season, Jerry Sandusky had taken over as the defensive coach in charge of linebackers. But Paterno, the dominant voice on the team, told Sandusky not to overcoach the young player. The defense and offense conducted their practice drills on adjoining fields, with Paterno noticing every detail in both places and making adjustments in his high-pitched Brooklyn accent if things weren’t to his liking.

  “If you heard him scream, it would put the fear of God into you,” Ham said. “Everybody on those practice fields knew where he was. You had to have your head on a swivel, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. You didn’t know who he was screaming at, but you hoped it wasn’t you. He was a big believer in preparation. He was a tough disciplinarian because he really cared about us as people. He used to say that you either get better or you get worse every day. Fun time was Saturday, when we played the games.”

  Ham went on to have a stellar career with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He played on four Super Bowl championship teams, and in 1988 was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. For his induction, Ham asked Paterno to be his presenter. “Joe did more for me than anybody in my career,” he said. “I was just a kid looking for an opportunity, and he gave me that opportunity.”

  Matt Bahr was an atypical example of what it was like to play for Paterno. Bahr was an electrical engineering major and a soccer player when Paterno asked him to be his kicker. “The thing with Joe was that school came first,” Bahr said in a recent interview. “You weren’t going to be part of the team unless you had good grades. To him, football was part of the journey, not the destination. Education led to opportunities. He wasn’t concerned about guys playing football. He was concerned about their ability to earn a living after graduation. I was like every kid up there. I enjoyed the college experience, got the most out of my education, and made friends for life.”

  But Bahr still remembers those practices and hearing that Brooklyn accent when things weren’t up to Joe’s standards. “I might miss a field goal from two hundred yards away,” he said, exaggerating for emphasis, “and he would come running up and yell, ‘Aw nuts! Bahr, you stink.’ I still get goose bumps to this day thinking about that voice. He wasn’t an easy coach to play for. He was very demanding. No matter what your best was, he expected you to get better. But we all appreciated what he did for us.”

  Bahr, now a design engineer in Pittsburgh, was an All-American at Penn State and played sixteen seasons in the National Football League, including stints with the Pittsburgh Steelers, San Francisco 49ers, and New York Giants. “I have fond memories of the football program at Penn State. Joe was one of the best coaches I ever knew.”

  Paterno’s loyalty to Penn State was unwavering. In 1969, three years after he took over as head coach, he rejected an offer to coach the Pittsburgh
Steelers. Four years later he verbally agreed to become head coach of the New England Patriots under a package that would pay him $1.4 million as coach, general manager, and part owner. It would be a huge jump in pay for a college coach raising a family of five on $35,000 a year. But on the day the deal was to become official, he called the Patriots’ owner Billy Sullivan to say that he was staying put. In a story that he recounted a number of times over the years, Paterno said he told his wife, “You went to bed with a millionaire and you woke up with me. I’m not going.”

  Over the years Paterno was offered a number of coaching jobs, but he always turned them down. “I stayed because this is where I thought I would be happier, and where I could do more good.”

  Learning that Paterno had turned down the Patriots’ offer, the Penn State student body elected him to give the school’s commencement address that spring, 1973. Paterno told the graduates, “Money alone will not make you happy. Success without honor is an unseasoned dish. It will satisfy your hunger, but it won’t taste good.”

  “Success with Honor” soon became the catchphrase of Penn State football. Paterno was a sympathetic figure in his early coaching days. He had unbeaten teams in 1968, 1969, and 1973, but he was never awarded a national title by the pollsters. The frustration of not being recognized boiled over after the 1973 season. Penn State, led by the Heisman Trophy winner John Cappelletti, was a perfect 12–0. They went on to beat Louisiana State in the Orange Bowl, but they still finished a disappointing fifth in the polls. A disgusted Paterno sought out the sports writers who covered his team and told them, “I had my own poll, the Paterno poll. And the vote was unanimous. Penn State is Number One. I took the vote a few minutes ago.” He even had championship rings made for his players.

  Then, in 1978, Penn State finally achieved the No. 1 ranking for the first time in its history. The only thing standing in the way of a national title was second-ranked Alabama, which was chosen as the Nittany Lions’ opponent in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. Alabama won 14–7 as Penn State failed twice to score from the one-yard line in the closing minutes.