Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  ON JUNE 22, 2012, JERRY Sandusky was convicted of forty-five counts of sexual abuse of young boys. Seven months earlier, two Penn State officials, Athletic Director Tim Curley and a university vice president, Gary Schultz, were charged with perjury and failure to report the incident that Mike McQueary and Joe Paterno had told them about in 2001.

  This book is not a defense of Joe Paterno. It was not my intention to write such a book, and it was also not Paterno’s expectation for me to write such a book. The only thing he ever asked of me was to write the truth as I found it. To help, he and Sue Paterno lent me many of his personal files and asked their family and friends and former players to be open with me. Paterno took the time to try to answer any question I asked. He intended to keep this open conversation going until the book was finished.

  He died before the book was done.

  I include this interlude to explain that what follows is the story of Joe Paterno’s life. It is about a childhood in Brooklyn, a time at war, a college life at Brown University, and sixty-one years of coaching at Penn State. It is also about the ending, how Paterno was swept away by the scandal that led to his dismissal and the ten cancer-wracked weeks he lived after that. It is how he felt about it all and how the people around him responded. This is not a story about Jerry Sandusky. It is not a story about Penn State. It is not a detective story about a small community overrun by a media blitzkrieg. And it is also not the story of what might be true or assumptions or theories made in the dark. At the time of this writing, Sandusky is in jail serving what is essentially a life sentence, Tim Curley’s and Gary Schultz’s trials are also approaching, and an investigation by former FBI director Louis Freeh concluded that Penn State officials, Paterno among them, failed to protect a child against a child predator and “exhibited a striking lack of empathy for Sandusky’s victims.”

  But Joe Paterno’s life is over. I am aware that opinions have calcified so that many people have grown deaf to other viewpoints; with such horrible crimes being committed and alleged, it could not be any other way. But I have tried to be guided by the words in Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident: “We desire justice. And justice has never been obtained in haste and strong feeling.”

  “I GOT A QUESTION FOR you,” Guido D’Elia said.

  “Shoot.”

  He sat across the table, a pained look on his face. There had to be a record. That’s what D’Elia believed. He had been a Penn State marketing man for a few years. He was Joe Paterno’s man for much longer. The first time he met Paterno, he was a long-haired kid from Altoona who had some vague notion about becoming a big-shot television producer. That sounded better to him than working on the railroad, which is more or less what everyone else in Altoona did. They first met at a Penn State football game at West Virginia, where D’Elia was coordinating the television coverage. Someone said to him, “It’s about time you met Coach Paterno.” They were at a Holiday Inn whose room doors opened to the outside, and they walked down a long hall, door after door, and at the end they pulled one open. There was Joe Paterno sitting on one of the beds. Two players were sitting on the other bed, a third player sitting on the floor. They were all looking at the small television screen; Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford were debating each other in their bid for the presidency.

  What D’Elia remembered—and what he also never forgot, which is a little bit different—was the way Paterno was pressing the young men.

  “Hey, what did you think of that argument?”

  “Why do you think he said that?”

  “How do you think that will play with the audience?”

  “Who do you believe more?”

  How long ago was that? Thirty years ago? Forty? The whole world had changed. But to D’Elia there was a part of Joe Paterno that never changed, a part of him that remained in that room, educating, challenging, questioning, making those players think. Oh, D’Elia was no lamb. Over the years he came to know Paterno in ways that few others would. He worked for Joe, he was Joe’s circus barker, his hatchet man, his crisis manager, his tackling dummy, and the friend who told the old man things he did not want to hear. D’Elia often found himself on the sharp edge of some cutting Paterno fury. In all his life, right up to the end, Paterno never once told D’Elia that he was sorry, and he never told him “Thank you.” They did not need those words. D’Elia understood that Paterno was no saint. He knew it better than anybody else.

  But he also knew that Joe Paterno was real. The whole thing was real. That’s what made it worthwhile. Paterno did not cheat in recruiting. He used every measure of threats and testing and pressure to prevent his players from using steroids. He did not sacrifice education for football victories. He did not use players and discard them. He did not lie to players. This was what made it all worthwhile, this was why D’Elia loved the man—not like a son looking through unfocused eyes but like a skeptic who had finally found one thing he could believe in.

  “Why?” D’Elia asked me.

  “Why what?”

  “Why didn’t he follow up? Why?”

  He asked this in the most furious moment, when the scandal had reached its highest pitch, when people openly charged Joe Paterno with unspeakable evil. Madness circled. Fury hovered. Nobody could hear anything but the roar. But D’Elia knew all that was just white noise. “We don’t want heroes,” he had said time and again. “We don’t want to believe anyone can be better than ourselves.”

  But now he looked at me and asked the real question, the one that pounded at him, the question that glowed red beneath all the bluster and lies and absurdities. “Why didn’t he follow up?” he asked again.

  I looked at him.

  “Find the answer to that,” he said, “and you have the story.”

  JOEY PATERNO, THE GRANDSON, COULD do a dead-perfect impression of his grandfather’s walk. They were built the same way—a low rib cage, Joey’s mother, Kelley, called the family trait—and here he was, shirt sticking out, and he strutted that sideline football strut that his grandfather made his own. Joey wore the tie Joe Paterno wore when he won his 300th game. It was his proudest possession. Joey was twelve.

  “They beat Bowling Green 48 to 3 that day,” he said.

  “How about his 324th win, the one that passed the Bear?” I asked him.

  “That was 29 to 27 over Ohio State. They came back from 27 to 9.”

  His 400th win?

  “Too easy: 35 to 21 over Northwestern.”

  His 200th win?

  “That was over Bowling Green too, right?” He smiled proudly. In another room, people lined up to touch the casket of Joe Paterno. In this room, Joey bent his head down and looked just like the old man.

  EVERY FAMILY HAS A STORY that can be told without being told. An expression will trigger it. A word. In the Paterno family, they called it the Shyster Story. At family gatherings, all anyone ever had to do was get red-faced and shout “Shyster!” Everyone else would break out laughing.

  The Shyster Story went like this: Back in the early 1970s, the Paterno family went to a restaurant, and Diana, the oldest child, ordered an all-you-can-eat salad. Late in the meal, Mary Kay, the second-oldest, reached over and took a cucumber from Diana’s plate and started to munch on it.

  “What are you doing?” Joe asked Mary Kay.

  “I, uh—”

  “What are you doing?” he asked again, this time a bit louder. He had that serious look on his face, the one they all knew meant trouble. Mary Kay looked at her father with confusion.

  “You just stole from them,” Joe said even louder.

  Mary Kay looked helplessly around at the table. No one met her eyes. She quietly said she only took a single cucumber. But Joe was off again. When he started on something, nobody could outtalk him, nobody could drown him out; he was like that all his life. “These people work hard to run a business. You are not supposed to share food. It says, very clearly, all you can eat. Not all you and your sister can eat. You stole from them.”

  Here a coup
le of family members tried, tentatively, to speak up on Mary Kay’s behalf. It was a single slice of cucumber. Diana wasn’t going to eat it anyway. It was just going to go to waste. It was nothing. But Joe could not be stopped. He pounded the table. He ranted. And finally he said, “You all are a bunch of shysters. I don’t want anything to do with you.” And he stormed out of the restaurant. By the time the kids had chased after him, he had taken the car and was gone.

  He drove around the block a few times and came back a few minutes later, just long enough to scare them into believing that he had really left them there.

  The Shyster Story. Whenever the story was brought up, Joe held his ground. “I was right,” he insisted every time.

  AT THE DINING-ROOM TABLE, PATERNO finished reading the report. He asked a few uncomfortable questions that nobody particularly wanted to answer. Then he asked, “So what are they saying about me out there?” He pointed outside, past the living room, through the window, toward the mass of reporters and their notepads and cameras. His children told him that they—not just the media, but many people all across America—were saying that Joe Paterno had covered up for a child predator. They were saying that Paterno knew exactly what Jerry Sandusky had done and what he was about, that Paterno had protected Sandusky instead of those children. They were saying that after more than a half-century of coaching football at Penn State University, Joe Paterno was willing to let children be harmed in unimaginable ways to protect his legacy.

  “How could they think that?” he asked, and no one had the heart to answer. “They really think that if I knew someone was hurting kids, I wouldn’t stop it?”

  They looked at him.

  “Don’t they know me? Don’t they know what my life has been about?”

  ACT I: BEFORE

  Every kid I knew there, the meek and the tough guys, the word to describe them when they came to mind was always the same: Innocent.

  —WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

  { Prelude }

  Bill Blatty, who later in life would achieve worldwide fame by writing The Exorcist, sat in Otto’s, a small sandwich and soda shop in Brooklyn. It was 1944. Blatty was a sophomore at Brooklyn Prep, a high school famous for its rigorous academic standards. He had just finished competing in a citywide oratorical contest and had come to Otto’s to mope. He was sure he had won. The people in the audience seemed sure he had won. As best Blatty could tell, even the competitors thought he had won. But the two judges were not so sure. They picked someone else to be the victor. Blatty was shattered.

  “I tried drowning my sorrows with a lemon coke and a minced ham sandwich,” he remembered more than sixty years later. “It didn’t work.” He started to walk out of Otto’s to sulk outside, wearing a hangdog expression usually reserved for characters in comic books, over whose heads gray clouds hover.

  Joe Paterno walked in. Blatty described him as swooping in. Joe Paterno, even then, moved in high contrast, a bright-color blur in a black-and-white movie. He was the quarterback of the football team, the captain of the basketball team, and the student council president at Brooklyn Prep. He was a straight-A student, of course. But there was something else about him, something that Blatty could see but could not yet put into words. For the rest of Paterno’s life, people would tell breathless stories about him, and the quality that connected these stories was their plainness. These would not be stories of Paterno pulling someone out of a fire or saving a cat stuck in a tree. No, the stories were about his doing the simplest things: uttering a kind word, telling a small joke, offering his seat to a near-stranger. George H. W. Bush loved to tell about the time Joe Paterno got him a drink. “He served me!” the president said, wonder in his voice. It’s hard to define that kind of magnetism, the sort that makes the simplest gestures feel extraordinary, even to U.S. presidents. It is fair to say that it’s a mixed gift.

  Whatever makes up that sort of charisma, Paterno already had it when he was eighteen years old. Blatty felt awe when Paterno walked over. He recognized Blatty from a school play.

  “What’s wrong?” Paterno asked.

  Blatty told him about the contest and how he was sure he had won. He had been robbed. He had been cheated of his destiny. He went on for a while, and Paterno listened carefully.

  “Then,” Blatty said years later, “he leaned over close to my face, took hold of my arm with one hand, and said in a tone of care and sincerity that even Doubting Thomas would have believed: ‘Bill, you know you won. What else matters?’ ”

  Brooklyn Prep quarterback Joe Paterno tries to outrun defender John Carbone of St. John’s Prep (Courtesy of Tom Carbone)

  Brooklyn

  Giuseppe,” Joe Paterno said, and he began to cough. He held up his hand in a silent request to let him finish. In his final months, the violent cough would come and go, like Pennsylvania thunderstorms. He seemed angrier at the cough’s spontaneity than its strength. He never liked surprises. He demanded order and routine; if you worked for him or played for him or simply wanted to be his friend, you set your watch by what everyone called Paterno Time. That was ten minutes early. Maybe fifteen. Possibly twenty. His former players and his family often disagreed about how much Paterno Time differed from reality.

  Paterno leaned forward and coughed into a closed fist until his eyes watered. The cough was dry, almost a wheeze. It brought him no relief; coughing was just something that had to be done. When the cough had subsided, he looked up again. “Giuseppe,” he said, because this is what he called me, “you picked a hell of a time to write about a football coach.”

  JOE PATERNO CAME OF AGE in Flatbush, in the heart of Brooklyn, during the Great Depression, when boys calculated the heights and depths of their manhood by how far they could hit a ball with a broomstick. The Brooklyn streets of the 1930s and 1940s, before war and television and highways to the suburbs, have been so glamorized and idealized. Woody Allen made them black and white in his movies; Isaac Asimov wrote dreamily about how the streets looked at night. “If there was a national pastime,” the playwright Arthur Miller wrote of his childhood in Brooklyn, “I suppose it was hanging out, simply standing there on the street corner or on the beach, waiting for something to appear around the bend.”

  It’s one thing, though, for writers and artists and people led by their heart to attach longing and wistfulness to those Brooklyn streets. It was quite another for Paterno. He prided himself on being clear-eyed, practical, and unromantic. His wife, Sue, was born on Valentine’s Day. Every year Joe would miss both celebrations because February 14 was in the middle of recruiting season. One year he called Sue from the road; he not only remembered her birthday but he had gotten her a wonderful gift.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Leo Wisniewski and Dan Rocco.” They were two important football recruits.

  “I like what my brother got me better,” Sue said.

  Even Paterno, though, could not help but fall into a sentimental trance when remembering Brooklyn and his childhood. “I wish you had been there,” he said as he sat straight up in his hospital bed. In his memory, those streets of Brooklyn lingered untouched by the years. They were rain-swept and bright yellow, soaked in the smell of freshly baked bread and narrated by a New York Metropolitan Opera tenor bursting through static on the radio. Mothers gossiped through open windows; fathers huddled on front stoops; children played stickball. It may have been only vaguely connected to reality, but that was how Paterno remembered Brooklyn.

  Oh, he wanted to remember. It was remembering that seemed to offer him small bursts of joy in those last months. Most of the time, he wasn’t sad in those final days, and, much to the surprise of people around him, he wasn’t angry either. He was tired. His eyelids drooped and his voice dragged. That voice was such a part of his persona. In his early years as a coach, the players not so secretly called him The Rat, at least in part because his high-pitched voice sounded like Mickey Mouse’s. That voice would rise higher and shriller the angrier he got. Every player he ever coached did
an impression of that voice, squeaking at the highest pitch they could reach.

  You all are just a bunch of bums!

  If we play like that, we’re going to get licked Saturday!

  Run to the ball! Geez, fellas, run to the ball!

  That was just terrible! Terrible!

  After he was fired as coach of Penn State, after he found out that he had lung cancer, after he broke his pelvis, after his hair started falling out and he came to understand that the end was close, his voice lost much of its life and spirit. He would speak in a soft rumble. But when the subject of Brooklyn came up, he was animated again. His hands moved as he talked, and his voice lifted and dropped like the Cyclone roller coaster on Coney Island.

  “We never owned a home,” he said, as he faded back to Brooklyn. “We moved around from place to place. Oh, I’d say we moved every year or two.” This was during the Depression. The Paternos weren’t hit as hard as most; Joe’s father, Angelo, had steady work as a court clerk. But there were family obligations and friends in need, and there was never quite enough money to go around. The family moved up and down between Eighteenth and Twenty-sixth Street in Florence Paterno’s never-ending effort to find someplace just a little bit better and higher up in the world. Sometimes they moved just to stay one step ahead of landlords who raised the rent. Joe did wonder if moving from place to place—so many places he lost count along the way—made him crave stability and shaped the life he would live. But the thought passed quickly. He was happy to remember Brooklyn, but he refused to regret.

  As they moved from apartment to apartment, Joe saw the streets of Brooklyn as his real home. On the streets there was no Great Depression; there was no unemployment. There were kids, always, dozens of them, and they argued about the Dodgers and the Yankees, they talked about the movies, they told each other fantastic lies about heroic things they had done. They called each other the worst ethnic slurs they knew—wop, sheeny, mick—and they had fistfights when the name-calling did not feel quite violent enough. They fought their own version of World War II, killing imaginary Nazi and Japanese soldiers who hid behind every fire hydrant. They got in trouble every now and again, but even that sort of trouble was coated with the innocence of the time. Once Joe’s younger brother, George, threw a chain at him. Joe was so outraged, he threw it back, missed, and broke a window of the Thom McAn store. Joe, of course, admitted it to his father—like the little George Washington that he was, his brother would say—and Angelo paid for the window. Like Bill Blatty said: they were all so innocent.