Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  The play called for a handoff to Mike Guman, a fine running back who had picked up a similar short-yardage play in a crucial moment against Pittsburgh that year. Alabama’s defense swarmed him and stuffed him. No touchdown. “Alabama just guessed right,” Penn State center Chuck Correal lamented. Yes, Bear guessed right again. The photograph of Alabama’s powerful defense stopping Mike Guman would hang in sports bars all across Alabama a quarter century later.

  Penn State had one more chance, but once again Paterno played a role in the failure. The Penn State defense forced a punt, and just as Alabama’s Woody Umphrey set up to kick, Paterno had a moment of panic. He sensed that Penn State had twelve men on the field. He began to count the players with his hands and—this is where Paterno’s memory haunts him—he noticed one of the officials watching him. That’s when the official decided maybe he ought to count players too. “If I hadn’t started counting players,” Paterno said, “he would never have even seen it.”

  Penn State did have twelve men on the field. Umphrey’s shanked punt went out of bounds around the Alabama 20-yard line. Had Penn State not committed the penalty they would have had a very real chance to win. Instead the penalty gave the ball back to Alabama, and Bear’s team ran out the clock. Alabama won the Associated Press national championship, Bear Bryant’s fifth. (Southern California won the national title in the UPI coaches’ poll.)

  “I don’t know a lot about football,” Bryant told reporters in that hoarse southern voice of his, “but I know a lot about winning.”

  Paterno, meanwhile, was left telling after-dinner jokes in which he was the punch line. “My daughter had this riddle for me: What’s blue and white and has twenty-four legs? The Penn State punt team.”

  Though he joked in public, in private he wondered, in a way he never had before, if he was supposed to be coaching college football.

  Memento Mori

  One of Joe Paterno’s favorite movies was the Academy Award–winning Patton, starring George C. Scott. Paterno loved that movie because it burst with lines of dialogue that might as well have been written inside his chest. He loved it when Patton said, “Now, an army is a team—it lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap.” That spoke to Paterno’s deepest beliefs about football and about what it takes to win: togetherness, a higher calling, something larger than any one person.

  His favorite scene in Patton, however, had nothing to do with teamwork or war or togetherness. It was something personal to him. These were the last lines of the movie, narrated by George C. Scott while the camera followed an aging Patton as he walked with his dog along the countryside:

  For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: That all glory is fleeting.

  Paterno felt those words deeply. He would think about that scene more and more as the years went on. He read about those parades and thought that it was probably true that during Roman triumphs slaves would follow conquering heroes and whisper a Latin phrase. The phrase? Nobody knows for sure, but it might have been Memento mori. Remember, you are mortal.

  Paterno would repeat this story to his son Jay all the time, in an effort to impress upon him how important it was for a person never to get arrogant, never to believe that he is invulnerable or more important than anyone else. Memento mori. Remember, you are mortal.

  “I think in many ways that was the theme of my childhood,” said Jay. “You work hard. And you stay humble. I think Dad really believed if you ever started thinking you were too smart, that was when it would come up and bite you.”

  By the late 1970s, so many glorious things had been written and said about Joe Paterno that he felt ill at ease about it. The normally hard-hitting news show 60 Minutes came to State College in 1978 and ended up doing a segment on him so glowing that even Paterno would say, “Geez, my own mother wouldn’t say so many nice things about me.” Toward the end of the 1978 season, the New York Giants tried to hire Paterno as their coach, and when he again turned down the pros—this time with much less angst, even though the Giants were his hometown team—he received another wave of plaudits and applause across the nation. A book called Joe Paterno: Football My Way was written (with Paterno’s help) by Mervin Hyman of Sports Illustrated and Gordon White of the New York Times, and though it was filled with many fascinating insights into Paterno, it also had overenthusiastic sentences like these:

  Bright, intelligent and perceptive to the point of being almost clairvoyant, Paterno has a quick analytical mind that is constantly working.

  This is Paterno—a maverick in every sense of the word—and this is what makes him as refreshing as a summer breeze in a profession that is satiated with conformity and dullness.

  This, then, is Joe Paterno. Football coach, intellectual, maverick, philosopher, social worker, leader, gambler, idealist, romanticist, humanist, activist.

  Hyman and White were hardly alone in doing what sports editor Stanley Woodward had called “godding up the subject.” Paterno’s combination of football success along with his spoken ideals and his refusal to sell out for the big salary in the NFL inspired overwhelming praise that he found difficult to fend off. “I’m not nearly as good as the media would portray me,” he told student reporters after the Alabama loss. “I wish I was as good as that 60 Minutes show.”

  When I asked Paterno if there was a story written about him that he always remembered, he at first refused to name one, saying, “I don’t read that stuff.” But then he picked a surprise: the story Douglas Looney wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1980. Why was this a surprise? Because the story was fairly critical and about one of the worst years in Paterno’s coaching life. The long headline was a Paterno quote: “There Are a Lot of People Who Think I’m a Phony and Now They Think They Have the Proof.”

  “I haven’t read that story in years,” Paterno said. “But I remember when it came out, I thought, ‘There. That’s an honest story.’ ”

  The story was about how bad things had gone for Paterno and Penn State in 1979. And they did go bad. The trouble began right away, before practice even began, when a player was arrested and charged with committing multiple rapes. Paterno threw him off the team. Just as fall practice began Paterno announced that he was throwing three more players off the team for academic failures, and one of them was Franco Harris’s brother Pete, a preseason All-American safety. It had been twelve years since Paterno had to cut a player for bad grades; now he had to cut three. “I’m obviously upset about our situation,” he told reporters. “But we’ve made a commitment to play with student-athletes.”

  A few days after that, Paterno had perhaps his most famous run-in with a player. Matt Millen was a spirited defensive lineman from just outside Allentown, Pennsylvania. He had grown up with ten brothers and sisters and a father, Harry, who would have them put on boxing gloves to settle their arguments. Matt was the rowdiest of the clan. When Dallas Cowboys star Randy White came to recruit Matt to play for Maryland, they got into a fight. (“I guess you’re not going to Maryland now,” White told Millen afterward.) When Colorado recruited Millen, he found that there were some perks—he told Sports Illustrated about coming back home with a couple hundred more bucks than he left with—and he decided that was the place for him. His sister was all for it; she was in love with Colorado’s favorite son, John Denver. Millen signed the Colorado letter of intent with his own blood because he thought it was a cool thing to do. He was that kind of guy.

  But Harry Millen was not. And Harry decided that what his son really needed to do was play for P
aterno at Penn State, where he might learn a little something about life. So Matt, like so many hardscrabble Pennsylvania kids, played for Paterno because his father told him to.

  Millen was a terrific player and a pain in the neck in somewhat equal parts. In one of his first practices, he lined up in a drill against Brad Benson, a starting offensive lineman who would go on to have a distinguished ten-year NFL career. Millen overpowered him. A teammate rushed over and whispered, “Do you know who that is? That’s our starting tackle.” To which Millen replied, “Uh, we’re not going to be very good this year.”

  Millen clashed with Paterno constantly. He was almost thrown off the team too many times to count. Once, after getting in a fight, he simply left the stadium in full uniform. Many times, after Millen made a good play, he would celebrate, which drove Paterno crazy. “Matt wouldn’t believe this, but I got a huge kick out of him. He’s extremely intelligent, you know. And he played football with so much energy and enthusiasm. I know people think I want choirboys who do everything right, but that’s not how I look at it. I like to spar. I like to help people grow. And Matt had a lot of growing up to do.”

  Millen was named captain of the team in 1979, but then, on one of the early days of practice, he did not finish the two half-mile runs in the necessary time, mainly because he thought it was a stupid exercise. “When am I going to chase a guy for a half mile?” he would ask more than thirty years later. Paterno responded with force, removing Millen as team captain. Millen completed the runs a couple of days later, but he was not reinstated as captain. The team’s leadership never came together. And things fell apart.

  “The Great Experiment is kind of in disrepute,” Paterno admitted in a Sports Illustrated interview. Players quit. Two were suspended for drinking on campus. Another was caught driving drunk after having a big game. Running back Leo McClelland, who was called “Hollywood” by his teammates because of his colorful bragging, quit the team because he believed he wasn’t playing enough. (McClelland was one of the few players to feel Paterno’s sarcastic wrath in his autobiography: “Leo McClelland, who had the habit of spreading the unconfirmed news that he was a Heisman candidate, was overcome by some affront or another and quit the team in a huff.”) Another player was suspended for a week after getting in a fight. Two players showed up late for a bowl game breakfast and were sent home. Another player entered a private home for reasons he never could make clear and narrowly avoided being shot.

  Paterno himself had a lapse of judgment. Every Friday night before games, especially in the early years of his coaching, he would have an off-the-record session with the media. He might offer a few state secrets about strategy; sportswriters might tell him a college football rumor they had heard. Mostly, though, the conversations had nothing to do with football. They would argue about politics, books, movies, how to raise children. “Joe probably looked forward to those meetings more than we did,” longtime Philadelphia writer Bill Lyon said. “His whole family, with his parents, they were raised on give and take. Disagree, but don’t be disagreeable.

  “He’d let his hair down. He’d have a Jack Daniel’s . . . . There was a writer, Ralph Bernstein, God rest his soul, what a crusty old curmudgeon. But we loved him. There was a presidential election, it was either just beginning or just over, and Joe was going on. And Ralph interjected and said, ‘You may know football, but you don’t know shit about politics.’ And Joe said, ‘You know what, Ralph? You may be right.’ ”

  The gatherings were like that. And, of course, it was all off the record. That was key. After Paterno got famous, he was constantly searching for places where he could be himself, where he didn’t have to watch what he said. This was why he loved going on the annual coaches’ trips put on by his friend, Nike CEO Phil Knight. On those trips, there were no autograph seekers, no photographers, and, best of all, no reporters. One year, after a tough season, Paterno decided he wasn’t going on the trip. “Okay,” Sue told him, “but I don’t know how you’ll fix your meals, because I’m going.” He went. “He needed those escapes,” Sue said. “They were so hard to find.”

  The Friday-night gatherings with sportswriters was one of those escapes. Then, suddenly, they were not. “So Joe,” one of the writers asked, “when will you leave coaching and go into politics?”

  “What, and leave coaching to the [Barry] Switzers and [Jackie] Sherrills?” Paterno asked back.

  There was laughter in the room. It was typical of the Friday-night vibe: loose, off the cuff, a little bit cutting. Oklahoma’s Barry Switzer and Pitt’s Jackie Sherrill were believed by many to be running programs that featured a variety of cheating. Paterno meant this as jocular talk in a backroom that smelled of smoke and whiskey. It took on a very different meaning when his quote appeared in the newspaper. Coaches are not supposed to publicly attack other coaches. Sherrill was so outraged that he and Paterno got into an argument on the field before the Pitt–Penn State game that ended with Sherrill promising that his team would pound Penn State. (It did). More than the individual dynamics, though, was how the comment made Paterno look. He sounded smug and sanctimonious, two bad traits he would admit fighting all his life. “Is he too pious?” his brother, George, wondered aloud in Sports Illustrated, then answered his own question: “Absolutely.”

  “What are you going to do?” Paterno said of his comment being published. “That should never have gotten out. Somebody betrayed the trust there, and I never did trust the media as much after that. But, I did say it. And, at least in part, I meant it.”

  This incident would have a lasting impact on his life. His relationship with sportswriters was frayed. He boycotted the Friday-night gatherings for a while and threatened to stop them altogether, though he eventually relented. Even when he began showing up at the gatherings again, however, he was never as unguarded. His mistrust of the media would only grow, and perhaps nobody felt more unhappy about that than Paterno himself. “It’s a shame,” he said. “I enjoyed it more back then.”

  As for the two coaches Paterno mentioned, it took him a long time to mend fences with Sherrill, who he viewed as the symbol of what was wrong with college coaching. But in a twist of fate, Sherrill became one of Paterno’s most supportive friends during the difficult years of the early 2000s.

  Paterno’s relationship with Switzer was more complicated. He called Switzer immediately after the quote was printed to apologize and explain the context of what was said. (He did not call Sherrill.) Switzer forgave him, or said that he did. Paterno grew to like Switzer, so much so that he wrote the foreword to Switzer’s book Bootlegger’s Boy. The two would enjoy each other’s company. But in the end, after former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested for child molestation and Paterno was fired from Penn State, Switzer was more outspoken about it than any other coach. Paterno had said, and would say until his last day, that he had been fooled, that he had not been told the complete story and did not know about Sandusky’s crimes against children. Switzer insisted, “Everyone on that staff had to know.”

  TO PATERNO, THE 1979 SEASON felt like one long, uninterrupted nightmare. Their 8-4 record was a disappointment for a team that had almost won the national championship the year before. Players kept getting in trouble, and opposing coaches who Paterno believed cheated their hearts out were now celebrating his troubles. Paterno became grumpier, less patient, less enthusiastic about everything. Sue tried to jolt him out of it: “The Alabama game is over!” she shouted at him one evening after she had grown tired of his moping. He tried to energize himself.

  But this time his energy would not return; the void was bigger than the Alabama game. Paterno had stopped so rarely to think about the big things. His motto, the one his players heard him say a hundred times every season—“Take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves”—that was how Paterno lived. Be on time. Work the problem. Concentrate on the moment. Do what you think is right. But now he was fifty-two, and the Alabama loss and tough season prompted him to stop
and look around. What had he done with his life? He saw expectations he could never meet, praise he didn’t deserve, whispered doubts that he too harbored about his abilities.

  When the 1979 season ended, Paterno went home to Brooklyn. He had a hard decision to make, and he wanted to make it where he grew up. He walked around his old neighborhood for ten days. He always tended to do his best thinking when walking. It was his solitary time; when friends or family members asked if he wanted company on his walks, he almost always said no. Anyone who watched him when he was in one of his moods would see a man walking at a brisk and steady pace, his head up, eyes locked on a target far ahead. “Sometimes, it was like he went into a trance,” his daughter Mary Kay recalled.

  For the first and perhaps only time in his life, Paterno thought about giving up football. He thought about going into politics. He thought about becoming more involved in college administration. He thought about trying something completely new. Of this time he would remember feeling confusion and uncertainty, two emotions he had rarely felt before.

  This had been building for a while. Two years earlier, in 1977, on the day before Penn State played Syracuse, Joe and Sue’s eleven-year-old son, David, hurt himself falling off a trampoline at school. He landed on his head. Joe rushed to the scene. The ambulance was already there, and Joe rode to the hospital with his son.

  Sue was in a van with seven other mothers on Interstate 80 heading for Syracuse when a police car pulled up alongside. The officer said through a megaphone, “Follow me back to the station. I have an emergency message for one of you.” Each of the women feared the emergency was for her, but Sue had a premonition: “I thought, ‘It’s David. They want me.’ ” When the van reached the police station, her fears were confirmed. She rushed in and called the hospital. She talked to Joe.