Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  More than anything, they played games that fit the streets where they lived: stoopball, punch ball, curb ball, parked-car football, and, of course, stickball. No Brooklyn story is told without mentioning stickball, that city game played with a rubber ball everyone called a Spaldeen. Joe did not have a knack for hitting a Spaldeen with a broomstick. He was fast and had a quick mind, which served him better in football and basketball. (He always thought basketball was his best game.) “Sure, there were kids in the neighborhood that were ten times better at stickball,” he said, and again he coughed and again he needed a moment to regain his strength. “But when the wind was blowing right, I could hit two and a half sewers.” He meant the ball would sail over two sewer openings and almost to a third. This was a great distance in the mind of a Brooklyn child.

  IN THOSE LAST WEEKS OF his life, Paterno found himself thinking often about two men from his childhood. One was his father, Angelo. Joe was one of those lucky people who lived a long life and never met a man he admired more than his father.

  Angelo Paterno also grew up in Brooklyn. Angelo’s father, Vincent, immigrated to America in 1885 from a small Italian village called Macchia Albanese, between Cosenza and the Ionian Sea. Vincent became a barber. Many people through the years have pointed out the striking connections between Joe Paterno and Vince Lombardi. They were both Italian Americans who grew up Catholic in Brooklyn. They both became football coaches against their parents’ will. They had similarly remarkable careers filled with victories and success and a near-cult following. They would even face each other when they were both still young and uncertain of their future. And they were both grandsons of barbers.

  But the barber connection was not peculiar. There weren’t many jobs an Italian immigrant could hold in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Vincent Paterno, like Lombardi’s grandfather, Anthony Izzo, cut hair because it was honest work and it was the work he could find. Both wanted much more for their sons.

  Angelo had an adventurous spirit. When he thought he was old enough, at seventeen, he dropped out of school, joined the army, and, in his son’s words, “went down to Mexico with General Pershing and chased around Pancho Villa.” He then went to Europe and fought in some important battles in World War I. When he returned home after the war, he settled down. He married Florence and they started a family. They stayed in Brooklyn. Angelo worked his way through high school, then college, and then law school at St. John’s, and throughout, he was never without a job. His oldest son, named Joseph because Angelo was too modest to name his son after himself, would hold close a sharp memory of his father, late at night, his eyelids barely open after a long day working in the courts, sitting at the kitchen table with a thick law book opened in front of him. “As a parent, you can talk about how important education is until you’re blue in the face,” Joe said. “But seeing my father struggling with those law books at three in the morning—that had a bigger impact on me than a million words.”

  Angelo got his law degree and, after a couple of stumbles, passed the New York bar exam. He worked his way up to law clerk in the New York State Supreme Court. “Angelo was one of my heroes,” said Joe Murphy, one of Joe’s childhood friends. “He was just this really solid guy. He had put himself through law school, he was a big guy in the community. And here I was, just this kid, and he was always so nice to me, always asked me how I was doing, always tried to engage me in conversation. He would say, ‘What do you think?’ Who does that? Who cares what a kid in the neighborhood thinks?”

  Murphy’s description of Angelo would sound eerily similar to hundreds of stories told when Joe Paterno died, stories about little moments when Joe reached out to a stranger, asked questions, showed he cared, and said just the right thing. Here’s just one of those stories: At Paterno’s memorial in Harrisburg, a young woman named Kait Sawyer, who had served as a football intern, stood in front of a huge crowd and talked about a cold day in State College when Joe Paterno walked into the football offices. He made sure to catch her eye and say “It’s cold out there, heh?” It was nothing profound, but it was a connection, one she would never forget. “He was the legend,” she said, sounding so much like Joe Murphy. “And he was talking to me.”

  Joe Paterno, however, never saw his father’s best traits in himself. “No, no, no. My father had an amazing sense of empathy. He always knew just what to say to make people feel better. He’d kid them, he’d listen to them, he’d make them feel better. I’m just the opposite. People give me too much credit because we’ve had a little success as a football team. No. My father was the genuine article.”

  Joe looked out the little window in the hospital as he said that. Outside, flakes of snow and ice that looked like falling mosquitoes dropped fast to the ground. He spoke softly. “I remember he used to talk so softly. I never understood that. People all around would be shouting, talking loud, you know, this was an Italian home. There were always people over at the house, always people yelling and arguing and fighting over anything—politics, sports, whatever. And my father would just sit there and listen. And then, when he did say something, he would talk so softly. Years later, I realized why he did that. When you talk softly, people lean in to listen. That’s what he wanted. He wanted people to lean in. He knew how to draw people close. I never had that talent. When I talked, I talked loud. I didn’t have my father’s confidence. I didn’t want anyone missing what I was saying.”

  Florence Paterno had little of her husband’s serenity. She, like her oldest son, talked loudly. She would tell anyone who would listen that she was the first Italian ever hired by the New York Telephone Company; whether or not this was true, she did become a telephone operator just after she graduated from high school. Her father ran a successful trucking company built up from a single horse and a buggy. Success, and the pursuit of it, circulated in the Cafieros’ blood, and Florence felt a deep pride in her maiden name. Her nephew Eugene went on to run the Chrysler Corporation.

  People would often say that Joe Paterno was his mother’s son. His brother was more direct: George called Joe a clone of his mother. She hungered for success in every form—fame, fortune, respect—and she expected it of her children. “My mother wanted to win,” Joe said. She was the force behind the family’s continuous moves from place to place in Flatbush. She overwhelmed Joe with her expectations and demands. He would remember the heat he felt on the back of his neck whenever a teacher asked the class a question. He had to raise his hand first and fastest and always get the answer right; to do anything less was to disgrace his mother. He remembered the intense pressure he felt when there was a spelling bee or a math contest. He had to win. He remembered the arguments in the neighborhood, supposedly fun little arguments meaning nothing at all, but he could not let go, not until everyone admitted that he had won, that his view was right, that he should be the quarterback, he should dribble the basketball up the court, he should lead whatever they happened to be doing.

  That was Florence. One of Joe’s most famous quotes is this: “The will to win is important. But the will to prepare is vital.” People thought he picked up that line from Lombardi or from reading about ancient Rome or from his college coach, Rip Engle. No. He got it from Florence. Her house was immaculate, always. Every morning, long before dawn, Florence would be up washing and ironing clothes so that Joe and George and their sister, also named Florence, would look sharp for school. This was the constant, the image of her that superseded all the others: Florence preparing before sunrise so that everyone would look at the Paterno family as winners. If every family has its own little joke, a punch line that gets to the heart of things, the joke of Joe Paterno’s childhood was this: “Our mother would make us put on a tie just to take out the garbage.”

  Joe spent his life parsing the differences between excellence and success. It is the theme that emerges and reemerges, in good days and bad, in triumph and in defeat, when his teams never lost and when he was fired. What really matters: excellence or success? Angelo s
tood for many things, but one of them was quiet excellence: he studied at home, late at night when everyone was asleep; he felt no need to dominate, no need to become rich or famous or blindingly successful in the eyes of the world. And he never did. Some, including Joe himself, wondered if Angelo had enough ambition. He enjoyed a good joke and good company and a sense of family. “Make an impact” was his advice to Joe.

  Florence too stood for many things, but perhaps most of all there was her drive for success: she believed great things are accomplished only through the hunger for achievement. She told Joe again and again, in many different ways, that he was as good as anybody—no, he was better than anybody. He could do great things. No. More. He had to do great things.

  Joe admitted that those two influences often clashed inside him. “I always believed that winning wasn’t the most important thing. And yet I always wanted to win more than anybody.”

  How do you merge those two forces? He wondered about this all the time. Sometimes, when someone had given him a particularly hard time about being an Italian kid, he would go home and tell his mother. Florence would usually respond with her motto: “Every knock is a boost.” Self-pity was a crime against your own destiny. Regret was a waste of time and passion. Use their doubts, she counseled, to propel yourself.

  Then she would do something else: she would have Joe recite a list of great Italian men. Joe thought she did this for a couple of reasons, one obvious, the other a bit less so. The obvious reason was that she wanted Joe to have pride in his heritage, to understand the greatness in his heritage. But the second reason, one that Joe did not fully understand until much later, was that she was giving him a target. She did not want him just to memorize the name of Leonardo da Vinci, who was always the first person on the list. She wanted him, in his own way, following his own path, to become Leonardo da Vinci.

  “Leonardo,” Joe said as he sat at that kitchen table in his home remembering the list, “Michelangelo, Garibaldi, Galileo, Dante, Columbus, Toscanini, Vivaldi . . . ”

  JOE PATERNO WAS A NATURAL left-hander. Few people knew this about him because when he played football—on the street, on the playground, later on the fields of Brooklyn Prep and Brown University—he threw right-handed. He taught himself to throw right-handed through endless drills and an obsessive will. He taught himself to throw right-handed because he believed that quarterbacks were supposed to be right-handed. He never did know for sure how that thought got into his head. Maybe it was because in every photograph of every quarterback he admired as a child they were throwing with their right hand. Whatever the reason, he was never able to completely let go of the bias. In his first thirty-five years as a head coach at Penn State, he started only right-handed quarterbacks.

  Still, the point was not about quarterbacks being right-handed or left-handed but about Paterno’s deep ambition. His ego—or lack thereof—would be the subject of constant speculation through the years. What drove this man? “In all my life,” Don Abbey said, “I never met anyone who cared less about money . . . . He didn’t care about winning the most games either.”

  “Many people think he does care about that stuff but he just doesn’t let on,” I said.

  “No, they don’t know what the hell they’re taking about. Joe had an enormous ego. Enormous. But it’s not an ego for money or fame or any of that.”

  So what hunger drove that ego? Paterno was left-handed. He threw footballs against brick walls again and again with his right hand. When he found that he could throw the ball passably well (though he never could make the ball spiral with regularity), he gathered his friends and had them run pass patterns so he could practice his timing. He threw so many passes with his right hand that some mornings he would wake up and not be able to lift his right arm without pain.

  Why? Paterno was better suited for other positions as a football player. He had marvelous instincts that allowed him to predict how a play would develop. That made him a spectacular defensive back. Sixty years after he graduated from Brown he still held the school record for most interceptions by a player. He was also a fast and shifty runner. “I remember many times watching him make a move that made a tackler fall down,” said the sportswriter Bill Conlin, who grew up in Brooklyn and watched Paterno play at Brooklyn Prep. Those moves and that speed could have made him a wonderful running back.

  But Joe had to be the quarterback. This wasn’t a choice. It was all well and good to run fast and intercept passes and score touchdowns, but he could not imagine being anything but the quarterback. He needed the ball in his hands. He moved to the center of everything, making all the important decisions, sometimes without even realizing it.

  “I’ll give you an example of what Joe was like in those days,” Joe Murphy said. “In our junior year at Brooklyn Prep, we had a bumpy year. We got knocked around a little bit. We had a lot of guys talking all the time; there wasn’t a real leader.

  “So Zev Graham, who was our coach, decided that in our senior year we wouldn’t have a huddle. And we didn’t. We didn’t have a single huddle all year. He said, ‘Joe will call the plays and that will be that.’ We’d have a key number which would change every week. Joe could call, ‘Twenty-three, seventy-three, sixty-two,’ or whatever, and if the key number was three, then that third number was the play we would run. We did that the whole season. Joe called every play. And we lost just one game.”

  That one loss deserves a few extra words. It was 1944, Paterno’s senior year at Brooklyn Prep. His team had dominated opponents all season. Paterno scored four touchdowns in a game against Cardinal Hayes, and his more powerful brother starred as a runner. (“George really was a better athlete than I was,” Paterno would say.) The team was undefeated when it faced St. Cecilia High School from Englewood, New Jersey. St. Cecilia was coached by Vince Lombardi and had not lost a game since 1942. More than eight thousand people attended.

  The week before, Paterno had badly hurt his arm. He still played against St. Cecilia, of course. Physical pain embarrassed him; it was to be ignored and overcome. For the rest of his life, sometimes to his detriment, he would have difficulty understanding how injuries, mere pain, could stop young football players. But this time willpower was not enough. The injury rendered his right arm almost useless. He couldn’t throw the ball. He couldn’t run the ball either.

  St. Cecilia played inspired football. Paterno remembered that late in the game, a St. Cecilia player ran over him to score the game-winning touchdown. “I don’t know that I ever lived it down,” he said.

  There was another twist to the story. Years later, Paterno was reminiscing with Lombardi, and Lombardi admitted that before the game he had told his players that people in Brooklyn had been sending him taunting and vicious letters. He read a few of those letters to the players, read how people were calling Lombardi a traitor and his players hoodlums. The players, so outraged by these letters, raced onto the field and played with fury.

  “And you know what Lombardi told me?” Paterno asked. “He told me that he had made the whole thing up. There were no letters.” At this Paterno laughed and laughed. That was one hell of a motivational trick. Yes, one hell of a trick.

  THE OTHER MAN PATERNO FOUND himself thinking about at the end was the Trojan hero Aeneas, son of the goddess Aphrodite and the mortal Anchises. Paterno never tired of saying how strongly he connected with the story of Aeneas founding Rome, a story told by Virgil in the Aeneid a couple of decades before the birth of Christ. In Paterno’s autobiography, Paterno: By the Book, he wrote, “I don’t think anybody can get a handle on what makes me tick as a person, and certainly can’t get at the roots of how I coach football, without understanding what I learned from the deep relationship I formed with Virgil.”

  “If anything,” he said twenty years later, “I feel that connection even more deeply now.”

  He formed that relationship with Virgil at Brooklyn Prep, his Catholic school in Crown Heights. To get to The Prep, as students called it, he would walk ten blocks and take a fift
een-minute trolley ride. He had to leave before seven every morning to get to school on time. A public high school, James Madison, was only a block away from where the Paternos lived. It was no ordinary public school. Gary Becker and Robert Solow, who would both win the Nobel Prize for Economics, went there. Martin Perl, who would win the Nobel Prize for Physics, went there. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and Martin Landau, who would win an Academy Award, all went to James Madison.

  But James Madison did not fit into Angelo and Florence’s plan for Joe. Angelo wanted his oldest son to go to a Catholic high school; Florence wanted her oldest son to go to the best school money could buy. It cost the family twenty dollars a month at a time when Angelo was pulling in maybe five or six thousand dollars a year. “We couldn’t really afford it,” Joe said. “But there was never a question about it. Nothing mattered more than education. You understand? We couldn’t afford a washing machine. We couldn’t afford any of the luxuries. None of that mattered. I was going to Brooklyn Prep, and that was it. When my brother, George, was ready, he was going to Brooklyn Prep too. My father worked out a package deal, thirty bucks a month for the both of us.”