In Engle’s mind and heart, every victory was luck, every loss inevitable, every opponent more frightening than the last. To entertain alumni and friends, he would tell stories not of football glory but of growing up in a town so small that the speed bump was considered a city treasure, and of the two years he spent playing football for a star-crossed team at little Blue Ridge College. Friends would call these “Rip’s Humble Talks.” Engle would say that the first football game he ever saw was the first football game he played for Blue Ridge; that’s how terrible the team was. He would invent wonderful and hilarious stories about the team’s incompetence; he said that Blue Ridge lost every game, never scored a point, and eventually closed down to become a bus company. First, though, he said they lost to Temple by more than a hundred points. Of these, only the last was true: Temple did beat Blue Ridge 110–0 in 1927.
Much of this kvetching and brooding cloaked Engle’s talents and competitive nature: he was one hell of a football coach. He was an innovator—a training game he invented called Angleball was still being played thirty years after his death—and he had a knack for getting players to work hard and play together. In his years at Penn State, his teams never had a losing record. When he retired, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
Joe Paterno sensed these coaching qualities the first time he met Engle, when he was a high school student looking for a place to go to college. Paterno had a piercing intuition about people from a young age. Over time he would sharpen the gift, harness it, and develop what seemed to other coaches an almost magical ability to see through a player in only a few minutes and tell if he had the right stuff. In this way, Paterno and his coaches found overlooked and undervalued football stars probably more often than any coaching staff in college football history. Then, like all gifts, Paterno sometimes took his for granted, especially in his later years. “Joe wasn’t always right,” one assistant coach said, “but he was always sure.”
Paterno knew when he met Engle that he wanted to go to Brown. His father had some doubts about Joe’s going to a non-Catholic school, but Joe wanted to play football for Rip Engle. “Rip just had this nice way about him,” Paterno said. “On the outside, we were very different. I was this fiery kid from Brooklyn, always sure I was right, always getting into little scraps with people. Rip was different. He was a gentleman. On the inside, we probably weren’t too different.”
Engle grew up in a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania called Elk Lick. (In later years, perhaps sensibly, the town changed its name to Salisbury.) His father left the family when Engle was a boy. His mother, Cora, was intensely religious; she worshipped in the Church of the Brethren, a religion built largely around the ideal of peace. (Its dictum: “Continuing the work of Jesus. Peacefully. Simply. Together.”) Engle worked a mule in the coal mines when he was just fourteen; the legal age for working in the mines was sixteen, but he was big for his age. When he realized that the mines were not for him, he left to play football at Western Maryland College, and that’s where the unlikely chain of events began. At Western Maryland, he played for a coach named Dick Harlow, who would become a legendary coach at Harvard. Engle started to think about a life of coaching. So, if you want to summarize the story, it might go like this: Harlow inspired Engle and convinced him (against his better judgment) to become a coach. Engle inspired Paterno and convinced him (against his better judgment) to become a coach. Pennsylvania State College became Penn State. And fifty years later, 107,000 people would regularly gather in State College to watch football games that seemed to matter more than anything.
PATERNO LOVED AND DESPISED BROWN University in somewhat equal parts. He would say that he never felt more alive than he did in college. At first, he majored in engineering on the advice of a practical uncle, but he quickly came to know his own limitations (“Joe couldn’t fix a sandwich,” his wife would say) and switched to English lit. The humanities suited him better. He was enthralled by gracefully written sentences; some of them stuck with him long after he left Brown. To the end of his life, he could recite from memory Hamlet’s soliloquy, large portions of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and the last paragraph of The Great Gatsby.
“I sometimes wonder if I could have been a writer,” he said three weeks before he died. “I tried to write some now and again. But I never really put my heart into it. Who had the time? I would scribble a few things down now and again—ideas, lines, you know. I don’t know, maybe I had some talent for it. [My son] Jay has a great talent for writing. [My youngest son] Scott does too. He does a different kind of writing, but he’s very good. Maybe now, after I get through all this, I will do some writing . . . . I hope so.”
Paterno cherished the feeling of being surrounded by knowledge and curiosity and intellectual power at Brown. He remembered with joy the late-night arguments he and his friends had about Hemingway and Socrates, the infallibility of the pope, and the government’s responsibility to help the poor. As a coach, this was the intellectual atmosphere he encouraged his players to embrace. “This is supposed to be the best time of your life,” he would tell them. “Don’t miss out.”
There was, however, another side of Brown University that Paterno also never forgot. Brown was founded before the Revolutionary War, and many of the students came from old money and prominent families. This was Paterno’s first clash with snobbery and exclusion, and such things tore at him. The name-calling in Brooklyn had been surface stuff—blatant, hot, and unmistakable—and it could be answered with fists and wit. At Brown, though, snobbery, elitism, and prejudice hid behind the eyes and was whispered under the breath. Paterno often told the story of the white sweater. When he was a freshman, he went to an Alpha Delta Phi fraternity party. He wore the nicest sweater he owned, a white sweater his mother had given him, and the moment he walked into what he called “that room filled with blue blazers and martinis” he felt every eye turn to him and his sweater. This was the Brown fraternity of steel titans Arthur B. Homer and John D. Rockefeller. He recalled hearing someone whisper, “Who invited that dago?” The looks of the young men in the room pierced him. “I still see and feel that room, those people, fingering their cocktails, studying me out of the corners of their eyes,” he wrote in his autobiography forty years after he left Brown. “No, I never forgot what it felt like to walk into that room,” he said in the hospital in his last days.
In some ways, those penetrating stares and hushed snubs molded his outlook on life even more than his success as a Brown football player. He was a marvelous player. The sportswriter and editor Stanley Woodward purportedly wrote, “Paterno, the Brown quarterback, can’t run. He can’t pass. All he can do is think—and win.” Woodward’s pithy line, which later seemed exactly the sort of thing someone would write about Paterno, was quoted often after Paterno became head coach at Penn State and ad nauseam after his teams won. It’s likely, however, that Woodward never wrote the line. Paterno never knew of anyone who had actually seen the quote, and though his family had clipped many of the stories written about Paterno as a player, no copy of Woodward’s quote was found.
Sometimes, though, myth has its place. Stanley Woodward certainly could have written the line. Paterno couldn’t pass, but he could run pretty well and his teams did win. Engle’s Brown teams had thirteen wins, seventeen losses, and four ties before Paterno’s junior season. That year Paterno starred on defense and as a punt returner—he set what was then the school record for most yards returned on punts—and Engle often put him in as quarterback to spark the team. Brown won seven of nine games that year. The next year, with Paterno entrenched as the starting quarterback, Brown went 8-1, its best season in decades.
“There was something particularly close about that coach-quarterback relation,” the Providence Bulletin columnist Jerry Prior wrote days after Paterno graduated in 1950, “for the latter had come close to the ideal as a coach’s player, loyal, quick-witted, inspirational and a hard worker. The last line is especially true, for Brooklyn Joe was always worki
ng to make himself deserving of the confidence Engle had in him.”
Paterno’s football career at Brown ended with perhaps his most illustrious performance, in a game against Colgate. Before that game, Joe’s brother, George—a bigger and better athlete than Joe but, by his own admission, not nearly as driven—told a reporter that he thought he still had his best game left in him. Joe overheard. When Colgate, a team that had lost seven games in a row, took a 26–7 lead early in the third quarter, an enraged Joe Paterno turned to his younger brother and said, “We’re going to have to do this.”
The Paternos led Brown on a remarkable comeback. George broke through for a 37-yard touchdown run. Joe ran for 42 yards and threw a touchdown pass. Joe intercepted a pass and raced 40 yards. George ran hard for a 15-yard touchdown. And so on. George ended up rushing for 162 yards, by far the most productive game of his career. Brown scored 34 points in the last seventeen minutes of the game for a rousing and overwhelming victory that clinched one of the best seasons in the school’s history.
And Joe? He didn’t score a touchdown. He didn’t put up impressive statistics. When the season ended, he did not get picked for the All–Ivy League team. Maybe this troubled him a bit at the time; the young Joe was not averse to seeing his name in the newspaper. But he would not remember feeling troubled. “You know what I liked best about Aeneas? He was a team player. He didn’t care for individual glory. He didn’t care about getting the credit. He simply wanted to be a part of something larger than himself. That appealed to me.”
THE STORY OF HOW JOE Paterno became a football coach was told so many times through the years that in time it lost its power and honesty. The story evolved into something of a folktale that went like this: Joe Paterno had intended to go to law school to fulfill his parents’ wishes. But then Rip Engle offered him a job as an assistant coach at a cow college called Penn State. Paterno, the Brooklyn kid through and through, reluctantly took the job to pay off some debts. He saw this as a temporary detour toward the law. At first, he despised this little hamlet in the middle of nowhere called State College (where they put celery in the spaghetti sauce), but gradually he began to appreciate its small-town charms and grew to see that he was destined to be a football coach. He stayed in State College for the rest of his life and coached football there until a terrible series of events sparked a national scandal, and then cancer killed him.
The folktale, like all folktales, oversimplifies. But that’s not the real problem. The problem is that it strips the humanity out of what really happened.
It seems likely that Paterno did not want to become a lawyer. He was almost twenty-four when he graduated from Brown. He had served in the army, he had read the classics, he had been a football star. He craved a life of excitement. He knew full well that his parents expected great things from him; this had been a persistent and overpowering theme of his young life. He had applied to law school and was accepted at Boston University. But, though he was careful not to admit it at the time, the signs pointed to a young man who was hoping for something to save him from what seemed his inevitable fate.
“It’s particularly pleasant to learn today that a young fellow named Joe Paterno will serve as an assistant backfield coach to Engle in his new post at Penn State,” Jerry Prior wrote in the Providence Bulletin in May 1950. “Joe, in order to make the move, had to shelve, temporarily, at least, a plan to enter law school. But he had hoped all along to go into coaching if he found the right opening.”
There is the key phrase: He had hoped all along. When the 1949 season ended, Engle asked Paterno as a favor to work with the quarterbacks who would replace him at Brown. He loved it. Here was a calling that spoke to his highest aspirations: teaching, pushing for perfection, making an impact on people’s lives. Here was also a calling that fed some of his more earthbound ambitions: winning, being in charge, having the last word. Paterno said he spent those few weeks of coaching as a diversion to fill the time before law school began. But this might be his memory playing tricks. He had read the Aeneid; it seems likely that he hoped for the Fates to step in and change the course of his life.
And the Fates came through. Rip Engle was offered the head coaching job at Penn State University. He had been offered coaching jobs at schools before, and he turned them down, but this one was different. For one, his coach and mentor Dick Harlow had played for Penn State. For another, Engle was from a small Pennsylvania town and knew the territory. But perhaps most significantly, Penn State had determined, after a long hiatus, to give full scholarships to football players. This was a chance for Engle to recruit top athletes and coach big-time football. And Engle, gloomy and modest though he might be, had ambition.
He took the job, but there was a stipulation in the offer: Engle had to keep the entire coaching staff intact. Penn State officials worried about losing the mission of college sports (which is why they had stopped giving out football scholarships in the first place). School administrators liked to think of coaches as professors, so much so that they offered their coaches tenure. They did not want coaches fired for losing games; theirs was to be a higher calling. If Engle wanted the job, and the tenure that came with it, he would have to take on the assistant coaches too.
Engle agreed but pleaded for the chance to bring in one new coach. He wanted to teach the players his own complicated version of the Winged-T offense, and none of the Penn State coaches knew it. The school granted him this request, and Engle tried to hire his first assistant coach, Gus Zitrides, but Zitrides decided to stay on as head coach at Brown. (It was a doomed move for him: Zitrides’s team lost eight of nine games, and he was promptly fired and went to work for the government.) Engle then tried to hire his second assistant, Bill Doolittle, but he decided to stay with Zitrides at Brown.
Engle was stuck. He was out of assistant coaches. (Another of his coaches, Weeb Ewbank, had become an assistant coach for Paul Brown and the Cleveland Browns; he would go on to a Hall of Fame coaching career in the National Football League.) In desperation, Engle convinced his graduating quarterback and favorite player, Joe Paterno, to come with him to Penn State and help him get the program off the ground.
Paterno would entertain countless dinner audiences, men’s clubs, and alumni gatherings with the story of his drive with Engle through the mountains on the way to State College. “Rip kept talking about how clean the barns were. I remember that’s the thing he kept saying. ‘Oh, the barns there are so clean, you could eat off the floors.’ I was a kid from Brooklyn, what the heck did I know or care about barns? And then we actually got there, and those barns stunk like you wouldn’t believe. Eat off the floors? I couldn’t eat within two miles.”
Paterno would tell interviewer after interviewer that coaching at Penn State was a fluke, a temporary thing, a holding pattern until he had made a few dollars and could go to law school and follow in his father’s footsteps. That was certainly the story he told his parents at the time. Angelo was typically kind and understanding when Joe brought up coaching, at least at first. Angelo had hoped his son might achieve great things; he had told Joe that he might be president someday. But here, in the pivotal moment, he told his son to follow his heart. “I never made a lot of money,” Joe remembered his father saying, “but I tried to do the thing I loved. If this is what you want to do, try it.”
Florence was typically skeptical. “What did we send you to college for?” she asked.
Over the years, Paterno came to believe the folktale version of his own story, came to believe that on the way to law school he lucked into a coaching gig and sort of drifted into his life as a legendary football coach. But he had to know the story did not go quite like that. Paterno was not the sort of man to float aimlessly toward his destiny. He coached his football players to “make something happen.” He taught his children to “make an impact.” He read books about Churchill and Patton and Alexander the Great—“you know,” he said, “the doers.”
If you go deep into the Brown University Archives, you can find
a 1949 Football Press Guide. This was written before the 1949 football season began, months before Penn State hired Rip Engle, months before Boston University accepted Paterno to law school. The Joe Paterno blurb did not get everything right—it called him an economics major, for instance—but it had a fascinating conclusion:
Big brother Joe Paterno is one half of Brown’s first set of co-captains since 1940. This popular leader from Brooklyn, New York is an excellent field general on offense and a tough man to go through or over on defense. Also used to run back punts and kickoffs, Joe rated with the best in the country. A halfback at Brooklyn Prep, he made the All-Metropolitan squad in 1944. He also captained the school basketball team. At Brown, he was switched to the “down-under” position. He is an economics major, a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and hopes to become a football coach after graduation.
“When they first told me that, I was surprised,” Paterno would say at the end. “I guess maybe I did want to be a football coach. I just didn’t think it would happen.”
Requiem
In October 1945, when Joe was at Fort Dix, and two months after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Angelo Paterno was director of Interfaith Movement Inc., an interracial group formed just before the war with the pledge of “allegiance to the kingdom of truth, the brotherhood of all mankind, and a world indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” He stood in front of a group of about 250 people gathered at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park to honor Colonel Clarence Eymer, who had led troops at Omaha Beach. There were other speakers. Rabbi Max Felshin of the Radio City Synagogue spoke; so did Judge Arthur Markewich, who years later would preside on the panel of judges that disbarred Richard Nixon.
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