Game Over

by Bill Moushey

  If Penn State football was about success on the field and in the classroom, Penn State University had always been more than a football program. Through the years it had accumulated a lengthy list of renowned graduates. It was the school of Hugh Ellsworth Rodham and Hugh Edwin Rodham, the father and brother of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Penn State educated Lieutenant Michael Murphy, an honors student in political science and psychology who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for fighting in Afghanistan as a member of the Navy SEALs. Valerie Plame, the former CIA officer who wrote the book My Betrayal by the White House, was an alumna of Penn State.

  Seventeen graduates of Penn State became presidents of colleges and universities. Among the alumni were three former or current U.S. senators and four U.S. congressmen. Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania and the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, went to Penn State and frequented the Paterno home for Sue Paterno’s dinners after football games.

  Penn Staters made their mark in the business world as well. One alumnus was Frank Smeal, a partner in the Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs, whose name is attached to the school’s Smeal College of Business. Patricia A. Woertz of Archer Daniels Midland was named to Fortune magazine’s list of most powerful women in business. Her fellow Penn Staters include William Schreyer, chairman emeritus and former CEO of Merrill Lynch; Louis D’Ambrosio, CEO of Sears Holdings Corp.; Richard A. Zimmerman, CEO of Hershey Foods Corp.; Tom Clarke and Mark Parker, CEOs of Nike Inc.; Steve Sheetz of Sheetz Inc., an Altoona-based chain of gas stations and convenience stores; Joel N. Myers, founder and CEO of AccuWeather; and Kathleen Casey, commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. What’s more, Penn State produced the labor leader Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.

  Scientists came from Penn State. Paul Berg was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Erwin Wilhelm Muller, inventor of the ion microscope, was the first person to see an atom. John Almquist won a Wolf Foundation Award in 1981 for his work on the artificial insemination of dairy cattle. Guion Buford, the first African American in space, attended Penn State. So did fellow astronauts Robert Cenker, James Pawelczyk, and Paul Weitz.

  Penn State graduates also contributed to bringing fun to the world. Herman Fisher was a cofounder of the Fisher-Price toy company, and Richard T. James invented the Slinky, the official toy of Pennsylvania.

  The university provided a college education to John Aniston, the actor and father of Jennifer Aniston; Jonathan Frakes, an actor and the director of Star Trek: The Next Generation; and Benjy Bronk, a comedian and writer for The Howard Stern Show.

  Writers who attended the school include Julius Epstein, the screenwriter of Casablanca; David B. Morrell, author of First Blood, the book that inspired the movie character John Rambo; and Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. Margaret Carlson, the first female columnist for Time, graduated from Penn State. So did Norman Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former chief of the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau, and Tom Verducci, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. Penn State’s School of Journalism taught the basic skills of professional reporting to Sara Ganim. Working as a reporter for the Patriot News in Harrisburg, Ganim first broke the news of the Jerry Sandusky investigation in a story on March 31, 2011. She reported that a statewide grand jury was looking into allegations that Sandusky had indecently assaulted a teenage boy.

  But a cloud hangs over everything Penn State these days. “Heartbreaking” is the word used by Charles Pittman, the first African American recruited by Joe Paterno to play football at Penn State and the man who sent his son, Tony, to play for JoePa. The Pittmans wrote the book Playing for Paterno, published by Triumph Books in 2007. In it they describe how they applied the lessons they learned from Paterno to the business world. As a newspaper executive for Schurz Communications and a member of the board of directors for the Associated Press, Pittman has struggled to process the raw hurt resulting from a child sex abuse scandal that caused the fall of a coach who was a father figure and brought disgrace to the school he loves so much.

  “It’s like a death in the family,” said Pittman. “I was defined by Penn State football and the Joe Paterno Way. I bought into the concepts of trust and loyalty and respect, that it’s important to win, but it’s more important to prepare for how you approach life. I taught my son those same concepts. In my professional career, I managed people in the business world with those concepts. It’s the way I lived my life.”

  Pittman was in private contact with Paterno through letters and phone calls after the coach was fired. He has not given interviews and doesn’t pretend to speak for other alumni, but when asked, he spoke from his broken heart about his shock and anger and something much, much deeper—the distressing feelings of embarrassment and shame.

  As for Jerry Sandusky, Pittman said simply, “He deceived us.”

  His thoughts of Paterno are more complex. “Was I hoodwinked?” Pittman asked himself rhetorically. “I don’t think I was hoodwinked. I’ve always known him to be a genuine person. I bought into what he was saying, and it worked for me. I like to think I have Pittman family values, but Joe shaped them and made them better. I think he got trapped by his own success. It’s like a Greek tragedy. I don’t want to presuppose anything because most of the story has yet to come out. But Joe didn’t have a boss at Penn State. He hand-picked his own boss in Tim Curley. It got to a point where people didn’t question him. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I’m not saying he was corrupt, but the power he created provided the opportunity for corruption to breed. That’s what makes this so mind-boggling.

  “People love to tear down icons in America. They love to see the mighty fall. They can’t wait to see them fail. After all that Joe accomplished, he will also be remembered for saying that he wished he would have done more. O. J. Simpson, Richard Nixon, Pete Rose, Bill Clinton, Barry Bonds, Tiger Woods—they are all remembered for their last, worst act. I try to live my life remembering that one bad act can destroy everything I’ve built, and that it’s better to leave too soon than to stay too long. That’s why I’m heartbroken.”

  To Pittman, football was not a game of knocking people down; it was about helping people back up. In his understanding of the Grand Experiment, it was important to win but it was more important to prepare for life outside the football arena. After the 1999 football season Pittman was invited back to Penn State to speak at the banquet honoring the senior players. Too shy to sing when he arrived on campus thirty-three years earlier, he eloquently sang the praises of the school he attended. “I used to tell people that I did more for Penn State than Penn State did for me. I was wrong. Penn State did more for me than I could ever do for Penn State,” Pittman told his audience. “Joe always said that people would ask him which of his football teams was the greatest. He would answer to ask him in twenty years, after his last team played, so he could see how many CEOs, teachers, doctors, lawyers and elected leaders were on that team.”

  Gregory White, a senior manager at CommVault in Austin, Texas, was particularly upset about the riots in State College following Paterno’s dismissal. He interpreted that support for JoePa as support for pedophilia. He wrote in a letter to the editor of the Daily Collegian at Penn State dated November 15, 2011, that said, “I have had my corporation’s staff working this holiday weekend to go through all employee files. Anyone who went to Penn State will have their final checks waiting for them Monday morning and no one from Penn State will ever be hired by any company I run in the future.” This was an example of just how far-reaching the scandal had become.

  Even students who collect money for charity have been vilified. Penn State is known for having the largest student-run philanthropy in the world. Since 1977 students have raised $78 million for The Four Diamonds Fund, supporting Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital. But when a first-year student, Holly Semanchick, was out collecting money for the fund in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on th
e first weekend of December 2011, a driver in a passing car spit at her.

  “All the faith is now being questioned. People are trying to invalidate what was validated,” Pittman said. “We can’t undo what happened. And we can’t undo what Penn State stands for and what it represents. We are not defined by the school we attend or how many football games we win, but how we perform and take advantage of our opportunities. If a guy says he won’t hire a Penn State graduate, I don’t want to work for that guy anyway. It’s going to take time. We don’t know the full story yet. But we should not be deterred by these events. It was a few people who failed to do what they should have done. Why should what happened diminish what any of us stands for?”

  Gary Gray, an investment banker and a visiting professor of finance in the Smeal College of Business, is among those Penn State alumni who don’t believe the university engaged in a whitewash. A three-year letterman in football from 1969 to 1971, he was coached by Jerry Sandusky and played racquetball with him once a week. “The thing that bothers me is the accusation of a cover-up,” said Gray. “It doesn’t make any sense. There’s no cover-up. No one thought anything of this nature was probable or even possible. I still can’t believe any of this.

  “The Jerry I know is an all-around good guy. Nobody thought he was capable of doing anything like he’s accused of. But it almost doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t. The fallout has happened. People are embarrassed to say they went to Penn State. It’s just sad. I understand that there are ten young men beating the same drum, saying the same things. My personal view is, if this occurred—and let’s not forget the justice system has to play itself out—it’s the act of one person. You can’t condemn an entire university for it.”

  Some white-hot anger has been directed at the thirty-two members of Penn State’s board of trustees. The board has become a target for not knowing more about the investigation, for firing Joe Paterno, and for the late-night phone call during which Paterno was fired.

  A group called Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship has held a series of meetings around the state to call attention to their belief that Joe Paterno was denied due process before he was fired by the board of trustees on November 9, 2011. The leaders of this group are Anthony Lubrano, a 1982 graduate of Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, and Franco Harris, a Penn State football player who had a Hall of Fame professional career with the Pittsburgh Steelers. They say their message is not about guilt or innocence, but that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. “The university responded inappropriately to the situation. Their response set us down a path that has harmed our reputation,” Lubrano said.

  Harris has been outspoken from the start about the board of trustees. “We cannot let them write this last chapter. We have to keep fighting for Penn State,” he said. The night of Paterno’s firing, Harris said, he sent a text message to one of the trustees that said, “You guys are a bunch of wimps.”

  FOUR GENERATIONS OF ANNE RILEY’S family have gone to Penn State. Her father, Ridge Riley, a sports journalist and longtime president of the Penn State Alumni Association, was the creator and author of the Association’s Football Letter, a two-sided, single-sheet letter filled with highlights and photos of every Saturday game. Ridge worked on the Football Letter for thirty-eight years. One of the honors Penn State bestows on a football player at the conclusion of every season is the Ridge Riley Award, named for the man everyone knew as “Mr. Penn State.” Every Sunday during football season Ridge would show up at Paterno’s house and talk football with the coach around his kitchen table. On his last visit, in January 1976, he asked, “How do we stand right now, right here, with the football program?” Before he could get JoePa’s answer, he put his head down on the table, saying he didn’t feel well. He had suffered a fatal heart attack. Paterno held him in his arms until the ambulance responding to the 911 call arrived.

  Anne Riley met Paterno when she was only eight years old. She grew up in the State College area, graduated from Penn State with a degree in liberal arts, taught English at State College High School, and in her conversations with Paterno they discussed opera and Virgil’s poetry. In her father’s book, Road to Number One: A Personal Chronicle of Penn State Football, published posthumously by Doubleday, the coach quoted Virgil’s Aeneid. “Of arms and the man I sing,” he wrote to his dear friend in the book’s introduction.

  Anne Riley serves on the Penn State board of trustees, just as her father did. During an agonizing night, November 9, 2011, she voted in favor of firing Joe Paterno. “It took everything I had,” Riley said two months after casting that vote. “I won’t tell you why. But I’ve lived here all my life. To me, Penn State and State College are inseparable. I taught at State College High School, my mother’s high school. I taught the children of Penn State. I thought of them as my children. Children are number one with me. That’s why we’re here as educators. So I can tell you the night the trustees voted, we did what we had to do.” It was the thought of the young men who said under oath that they had been abused by Jerry Sandusky and the thought of tomorrow’s children that influenced her thought process.

  “We aren’t past this crisis yet. We have to let it all play out in the courts,” Riley said. “But collectively, we need to get on with our work. I want us to be reminded of the true purpose of this school. Because of our situation, our place in this terrible story, I want us to do everything we can to do better at caring for our children. We want to be a leader in the cause of caring for our children. If that is what it means to come out of the ashes, we are ready to lead. The desire to lead has never been so strong. We must get to the truth.”

  She said the board of trustees has no desire to belittle the achievements of Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno. Indeed she wants to trumpet the good that they stand for, even as she wrestles with the anguish that much of the child molestation allegedly took place on the Penn State campus. “All of us in our own way will be forever sorrowful it had to happen this way. We aren’t past this yet. The anger will continue. I would hope the friendships do too.”

  In early December 2011 Penn State announced it would donate $1.5 million to a partnership it had entered into with the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. In addition, the university is pledging at least $500,000 to create the Center for the Protection of Children at the Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital. It is hoped the new center will become the home of national experts on child abuse. “We have committed ourselves to being the national leader on the prevention and treatment of child abuse, so that we will have a meaningful role in fighting this horrific crime,” the university’s president Rodney Erickson said in a news release announcing the creation of the center. The money for the partnership and the center comes from the football bowl revenues Penn State receives from the Big Ten Conference.

  But however the university sought to define itself in the aftermath of the Sandusky scandal, it would have to move forward without Joe Paterno, the football coach who had become the face of Penn State.

  Chapter 17

  A Coach’s Farewell

  Many of the sidewalks in the business district and residential neighborhoods of State College were still covered with the seven inches of snow from a late January storm that blanketed the campus and the nearby landmark of Mount Nittany. A single set of boot prints led to the bronze image of an iconic coach who had been fired over the phone two and a half months earlier. The dormant stadium was eerily quiet, a stark contrast to the noise made by 106,000 fanatics on football Saturdays. Then word spread across campus and around town that Paterno, fighting for his life at Mount Nittany Medical Center, had reached the doors of death.

  His family had been summoned to the bedside of the eighty-five-year-old patriarch, who had been weakened by treatments for lung cancer as he recovered from a broken hip. Rather than holding a vigil at the hospital, friends and fans made their way to the statue. A student wielding a borrowed shovel scraped the snow away from the base.
More well-wishers, drawn like pilgrims to a shrine, lit candles. Some new arrivals brought personal items and laid them at the statue’s base. Roses, hats, pennants, pompoms, and a striped blue necktie with the Nittany Lion logo lay among the candles flickering in the winter wind. One offering was a folded T-shirt emblazoned with one of Paterno’s favorite sayings: “Believe in Your Heart You Are Destined to Do Great Things.”

  Activity increased on Sunday morning, January 22, 2012. One man made the hour-long drive from Lewisburg to leave a framed picture of the coach in rolled-up trouser cuffs showing white socks and black shoes. Another fan, his frosty breath visible, wiped a tear from his cheek as he stood quietly. A woman made the sign of the cross and caressed her rosary beads. A satellite TV truck, the vanguard of many more to come, found a parking spot along the curb.

  Shortly before ten o’clock Kim Gasper of nearby Bellefonte walked from a snow-covered parking lot toward the statue, carrying her son, Jonathan. She wore a Penn State parka but had never gone to Penn State. Her twenty-month-old toddler wore tiny sneakers adorned with the Nittany Lion logo. Standing next to the statue, she whispered into her son’s ear, and the toddler added his tribute, a tiny stuffed lion cub, to the growing collection of items. In that moment the silent gesture spoke louder than a noisy stadium crowd ever could.