Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

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  Contents

  Aria

  Overture

  ACT I: BEFORE

  Prelude

  Brooklyn

  Intermezzo

  Engle

  Requiem

  Sue

  ACT II: EXCELLENCE

  Aria

  The Other Thing

  Intermezzo

  The Grand Experiment

  Nixon

  Race

  Intermezzo

  Sainthood

  ACT III: SUCCESS

  Aria

  Bear

  Memento Mori

  Intermezzo

  Mountaintop

  Two Callings

  Evil and Good

  Rhythms

  Jay

  ACT IV: WHAT COMES AFTER

  Aria

  The Filthiest Word

  Sandusky

  Adam

  Winter

  To Be, or Not to Be

  Winning

  THE FINAL ACT

  Aria

  Fall

  Finale

  Encore

  A Note on Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  For Margo, Elizabeth, and Katherine

  We have difficulty as a nation—this is American, and it relates to our particular time—we have difficulty admiring people. We take such pride in our skepticism. But the natural antithesis of skepticism, the celebration and virtue of accomplishment, is wandering lost somewhere. It is the age of the antihero.

  —BILL JAMES

  Joe Paterno runs through the smoke and onto the field before the 2006 Orange Bowl (Jason Sipes/Altoona Mirror)

  { Aria }

  Joe Paterno

  speech to high school coaches

  February 5, 1993, Hershey, Pennsylvania

  What is a coach? We are teachers. Educators. We have the same obligations as all teachers, except we probably have more influence over young people than anybody but their families. And, in a lot of cases, more than their families.

  To teach an academic subject is certainly not easy, but compared to coaching, it is. We can say two plus two is four to every kid and be sure that we are right. But in coaching, we have to literally get to the soul of the people we are dealing with.

  We have to work with emotion, commitment, discipline, loyalty, pride.

  The things that make the difference in a person’s life.

  They look to us for examples. A boy wants to be a man. But he doesn’t know what a man is. They look to us for poise. Everybody doesn’t get a fair shake in life. They look to us for values. You must relate athletic experiences to life. You are role models.

  They look to us for consistency. We have to realize a kid will love us one day and hate us the next. That cannot change who we are and what we are about. We are there to help them reach for excellence . . . and not just win games.

  We have to be understanding but tough. Firm. Real firmness is always helpful. Bill Clinton said, “I feel for you.” Vince Lombardi said, “The pain is in your head.”

  Tom Boswell of the Washington Post wrote about the difference beween excellence and success. He wrote:

  “Many people, particularly in sports, believe that success and excellence are the same. They are not. No distinction in the realm of games is more important. Success is tricky, perishable, and often outside our control. On the other hand, excellence is dependable, lasting, and largely within our control. Let me emphasize at once that nobody is all one way or another. The desire for success and love of excellence coexist in all of us. The question is: Where does the balance lie? In a pinch, what guides us?”

  I think we all have to ask ourselves that question. In a pinch, what guides us—success or excellence? Which will give us shelter when the storm clouds gather?

  { Overture }

  This is the story of a man named Joe Paterno, who in his long life was called moral and immoral, decent and scheming, omniscient and a figurehead, hero and fraud, Saint Joe and the devil. A life, of course, cannot be reduced to a single word, but Joe Paterno had something bold and soaring in his personality that attracted extremes. That boldness compelled him to do remarkable and unprecedented things. That boldness also led people to say that, at the end, his failures destroyed whatever good he had done.

  THE OLD MAN SAT AT the kitchen table and stared at the pages scattered in front of him. He did not want to read them. He told his sons and daughters that he already knew what was written there, understood it well enough. He did not need to waste any more time on it. The old man had never been patient about such things. Digest and move on. Win or lose and then plan for the next game. “Continue to advance until you run out of ammunition,” General George S. Patton had commanded. The old man admired Patton.

  “Time is our enemy” is how the old man said it, and also “Put no effort into anything that isn’t helpful.” There was too much to do. There was no time to linger. But this was different. His sons and daughters insisted that he read every terrible word, that he stop for a moment, just stop, and let those words shock and suffocate him the way they shocked and suffocated millions. “Dad,” they told him, “you have to know what you are up against.”

  Behind him—through the living room, past the front door, beyond the lawn—three dozen television cameras pointed at the house. Men and women, many of them young, held notepads and microphones and sandwiches. They drank soda pop through straws poking out of cardboard cups, and they talked to each other, mostly about the lack of hotel accommodations to be found anywhere near this small Pennsylvania town. They stared every now and again at the corner house on McKee Street to see if anything had changed. Did the door crack open? Was a window shade pulled up? They told each other gruesome jokes to pass the time.

  To the old man’s right was a window, and through it he could see television satellite trucks in the parking lot by the small park next door. The old man had never spent much time reminiscing—nostalgia too slowed life’s advance—but lately he had found himself looking out this window and thinking about when his children played tag in that park, threw footballs to each other, spun in circles in the bright sunlight until they fell onto the grass. Those children were grown now, and they moved around him slowly, moons revolving in his gravity, and every now and again they peered in and tried to read the expression on his face. The park outside was called Sunset Park.

  The old man tried to concentrate on the pages in front of him, but the words jumped up and stung him. Penetration. Erection. Genitals. Oral. What did these words have to do with him? His life? Even as a boy, when he played quarterback on his high school football team back in Brooklyn, he would lecture his teammates in his high-pitched squeal when one of them unleashed a swear word. “Aw gee, come on, guys, let’s keep it clean!” They thought him a prude even then. He had lived a sheltered life—not by accident but by choice. The Paternos never even watched any television except The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights. The old man knew many things. He knew Latin. He knew why Aeneas pressed on. He knew where to find good ice cream, the words of the Boy Scout oath, the difference between Johannes Bach and Johann Sebastian Bach. He knew why Hemingway was greater than Fitzgerald and never hesitated to illuminate doubters. He knew the power of opera and spent much of his life working with overtures and intermezzos and arias playing in the background. Most of all, he knew ho
w to turn young men into football players and football players into a football team and football teams into winners. The old man stared at the papers in front of him and asked his children questions about sex that embarrassed everyone, and he wondered if he knew anything at all.

  THE TABLE IN JOE AND Sue Paterno’s kitchen was large and round, as if pulled from Camelot. It was sixty-two inches in diameter, made of light brown oak, and stood thirty-one inches from the floor. The table was built by August Pohland, an architect who lived in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Everyone called him Augie. He was one of those men who instinctively knew how to fix things, make things, solve problems. “My father,” said Sue Pohland Paterno, “my father could do anything.”

  Pohland built his first round kitchen table many years before, after he returned from World War II. He made it for his own large family. This table was an inch-by-inch copy of that first one. This table fit neatly into the Paterno kitchen, but only after the kitchen was expanded and renovated, after Joe Paterno had become famous and, to his enduring and vocal embarrassment, wealthy. A thirty-inch lazy Susan stood in the middle, and it turned on a ball bearing discarded from one of the factories in Latrobe.

  “Take ’em all,” the factory foreman told Augie. “What are you going to do with old ball bearings?”

  “I have an idea,” Augie told him. He was a man of ideas.

  When the house and children were small, when Joe was scraping by as the low-paid football coach of a cow college in the middle of nowhere, the table overwhelmed the room. It was pushed close to a corner, and any child seated on the wrong side of it at mealtime had no means of escape. A simple bathroom request would require a reverse game of dominoes, with every family member to the right standing in succession to allow the child to pass. When the table was used for family games of hearts, a card dealt weakly would settle in the middle and a child would have to stand on her chair and stretch simply to reach it.

  Everyone told a slightly different story about how the Paternos got the table. One day the Pohland and Paterno families were gathered together and for reasons forgotten were talking about wishes—for Christmas gifts, family heirlooms, wedding presents, nobody really remembers. After this talk swirled around for a while, Joe spoke up: “You can keep all that stuff. All I want is the kitchen table.” That was why Augie Pohland built this table, exactly like the one in his own home. He built it because it was Joe’s only wish. “I don’t know what I was thinking exactly,” Joe said. “I guess I saw that table and just wanted a family that grew up around it.”

  DON ABBEY LIMPED FROM ROOM to room in his mansion on top of a mountain overlooking Pasadena. He pointed at a bear rug and the photograph nearby of him killing that very bear. “One shot,” he said. He pointed at an enormous painting of his parents. He pointed at an award given to him for being the best blocker in America back in college. There was a time, not so long ago, when he was an athletic oddity, a speedy 240-pound Penn State fullback when some offensive linemen did not weigh that much. “I could block anybody. I didn’t fear anybody.” He paused. “I didn’t even fear Joe. I hated him. But I didn’t fear him.”

  The award for best blocker was given to him in 1969, twelve knee operations and a lifetime ago, and until recently he did not allow himself to think about it. His football years at Penn State pained him. Joe Paterno was the reason. “Penn State turned me into a functioning alcoholic,” he explained. “Penn State gave me so much hate and so much depression in a way that it just took me a lot of living to get to the point to handle that and put it aside . . . . I didn’t like Joe. He damn near killed me. He damn near destroyed me.”

  When Abbey had sunk to his lowest point, he pushed off the bottom and rushed back toward the surface. He pumped his fury into a real estate business. He never settled down. He never started a family. He worked relentlessly and made himself a billionaire. “I would always, in the early years, have two management criteria. One: Would my parents be proud of my decision? And: What would Joe do? Because I’m going to do the opposite.”

  Strange, then, that as he got older he found himself thinking about Joe Paterno. His feelings were not about forgiveness, not exactly. Even all these years later, as he walked by a photograph of an old Penn State coach named Bob Higgins, he stopped. “There’s a real football coach,” he said, pointing. “I mean no disrespect, but that’s the kind of person I think of as a great football coach and a great man . . . . Joe had a shitty management style. Plain and simple.”

  No, his feelings were not about forgiveness because he was not certain that he had forgiven Paterno. His feelings were about something deeper than that, something he saw in himself. He thought about the way Paterno planned practices and games. Abbey planned like that. He thought about the way Paterno held his players to high standards—go to class, wear a tie, look people in the eye—and would not allow anyone around him to live a lazy life. Abbey did not want lazy people around him either. After more than two decades of silence, Abbey and Paterno began to talk again. And Abbey found the strangest thing: the man he had hated for much of his life, well, they shared common ground.

  “You know, the guy worked his ass off,” Abbey said. “He was a brilliant strategist, he out-prepared everybody, he had great fundamentals of what’s right and wrong—as he defined what’s right and wrong. And he actualized it. He set the goals. They were his goals. I didn’t agree with them a lot of the time, but, boy, he ran things based on his goals.”

  Abbey smiled. The city was three miles below. Under the house was a shooting gallery where Hollywood stars, Tom Cruise among them, practiced for their movies. He liked hearing the sound of gunfire cracking from below. The walls were covered with paintings and photographs of family and friends and the place where he grew up. And heroes. George Patton was there. Vince Lombardi was there. Joe Paterno was there too.

  “The key is to unravel the myth and explain his greatness. Because Joe had greatness. But the myth is not his greatness. Joe, for all his human fallacies that I love to talk about because I have a bunch too, had something else—something much harder to find.”

  PEOPLE WANDERED UP TO THE statue of Joe Paterno that stands by Beaver Stadium. Paterno disliked this statue. Not because of the craftsmanship or the dimensions or anything like that. The statue and the stone wall behind it and the words carved into the stone, it all felt like a celebration of self, a mausoleum. But even these were not the reasons for Paterno’s distaste. The reason was a single finger, the index finger, that the statue of Joe Paterno raised to the heavens. We’re No. 1. That’s what that finger said. To Paterno, that finger was proof that they never got him, never really understood what drove him.

  The people gathered at the statue now were not thinking about such subtleties. To them, the statue was something holy, the first place they thought of coming to when Paterno’s name crossed their mind. This was the night that Penn State fired Joe Paterno. The night air chilled, and boyfriends wrapped their arms around girlfriends, fraternity brothers stood shoulder to shoulder, a father walked up in a Penn State sweatshirt that had shrunk, or perhaps the father had grown.

  They stood in complete silence. This was not the conventional silence of, say, the moment before a show or the beginning of a class. This silence weighed down the air, made it heavy and stifling, the quiet you might feel at the Vietnam Memorial. Tears slid down cheeks, but no one cried out loud. Breath turned to steam, but no one breathed too loudly. A boy briefly tried to start a chant—Joe Pa! Joe Pa!—but no one followed and his words drowned in the dense autumn air. Silence returned with a vengeance.

  Young men and women sat on the stone wall behind the statue and their feet dangled over the side. Nobody kicked, and nobody moved. They seemed like statues themselves, a part of the scenery. A boy of maybe eighteen kneeled in front of the statue as if in prayer. A girl of twenty or so felt her phone vibrate but did not answer it.

  What would they say about Joe Paterno? That they grew up admiring him? That they came to Penn State because he coac
hed there? That some of their greatest memories were of sitting here at Beaver Stadium, which towers behind Paterno’s statue, watching the teams he coached? They would say that he was a man of principle, a man of education, a teacher first, a role model, a decent man above all. They would repeat some of his favorite sayings. “Go to the ball.” “Be on time.” “Good things happen when you hustle.” They would recount his most famous victories—over Missouri in ’70, over Louisiana State in ’74, over Miami in ’87, over Michigan in ’94, over Ohio State in ’05—and they would list a few of his best players. They would fill the dead spaces with trivia or plaudits or singular memories that, when spoken out loud, do not sound like very much.

  He had his players wear plain uniforms!

  He turned down millions of dollars to stay in State College!

  He built Penn State, often with his own money!

  What would they say? Joe Paterno taught life lessons. He graduated his players. He treated black and white with respect and with expectation. He stood for things—for discipline, for teamwork, for effort, focus, charity, triumph. That’s what they would say. Yes, he won. The fans would only reluctantly admit that Paterno’s long parade of victories mattered because the cynics, the angry ones, believed that they loved him only for those victories. But damn it, he did win! He made them feel like winners!

  What would they say?

  Across campus, students marched. Some threw rocks. Some turned over a television truck. Across America, people saw those rioting students, and they wept for America’s youth, for those misguided young people whose priorities needed adjusting and who could not understand what really mattered in the world.

  Here at the statue Joe Paterno never liked, they did not move, and they said nothing at all.