Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  “He fractured his skull,” Joe said in a broken voice. “You have to get here fast. I don’t know how much time you have.”

  Sue blacked out.

  The next week was hell. Joe stayed in the hospital room while Penn State played Syracuse. It was the only time in his life when he did not care if his team won. It looked like David might not survive, and then it looked like he would live but would never be the same. After that the news never seemed to get better. David was in a coma. Sue and Joe took turns staying with him and talking to him, then wandering off to cry and pray. “I never thought he wasn’t going to make it,” Sue recalled. “I would not allow that thought.” Joe admitted he could not stay quite so positive. One week after the accident, David woke up. “I need your prayers,” he told them.

  “You’ve had everybody’s prayers,” Sue said.

  “I know,” David said. Behind Sue was a calendar that showed it was October 21. David said, “Today’s Jay’s birthday.”

  “Well,” Sue would say thirty-five years later with tears in her eyes, “I can cry whenever I think of that moment.”

  David would struggle but recover, and Joe would always say that the incident gave him a deeper appreciation for what really matters in life. “You know, people call me a complicated guy or whatever. I’m not really complicated. I like a challenge, the harder the better. I like to wake up every morning and think, ‘Okay, how in the heck are we going to beat Michigan? And how am I going to get Billy to put more effort into his classes? And how am I going to convince Tommy that he’s got to practice harder because he’s selling himself short?’

  “That’s what I love. You asked me if I ever thought about giving it up. Yeah, sure, many, many times. But never for very long. A few minutes here or there. ‘Ah, wouldn’t it be nice to spend more time at the beach?’ But not seriously.”

  After 1979, he thought seriously about quitting. He asked people he trusted if he should give up coaching; he’d been at it for thirty years. His brother told him that it might be a good time to try something new. Father Bermingham, the priest who had translated Virgil with him at Brooklyn Prep, advised, “Follow your heart.”

  When his visit to Brooklyn was over, Paterno had decided: he had to coach. The previous year had been a test; he had made mistakes; he had wallowed in self-pity after the Alabama loss. He had grown to dislike his players after a few of them messed up. (“We’re not as bad as you think we are,” one player told him.) He had doubted himself, ignored his instincts, perhaps taken a few too many chances. “I went to New York knowing something had to change,” he said. “And I came back thinking, ‘I’m a football coach. That’s who I am. I just have to be a better one.’ ”

  Shortly after he returned, he had an interview with sportswriter Douglas Looney for Sports Illustrated. At the end of the article, which was as balanced as anything that had been written about him, Paterno talked about a note he had gotten from another coach after one of the hundreds of articles lionizing him had been published. The note was four simple words: “You’re not that good.”

  “I’m not that good,” Paterno repeated.

  The Sports Illustrated article ended with these two rather celebratory lines: “Hear ye, then, that Joe Paterno is not a saint. But he’ll do ‘till one comes along.” That was exactly the sort of thing Paterno did not want to hear. He wished the story had ended with “You’re not that good,” the closest thing to Memento mori a football coach was likely to get.

  Paterno and his team at halftime of a game (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

  { Intermezzo }

  The plain uniforms, like so many fixtures of Penn State football, became a cherished tradition. White and blue. That’s it. No “Penn State.” No “Nittany Lions.” No players’ names, of course. No stars. No patterns. No logos. The players wore a white helmet with a single navy-blue stripe down the middle, and even that stripe was sometimes considered too showy. And black shoes. Always black shoes.

  When he was sixteen, Paterno’s high school football coach, Zev Graham, took him to the 1943 World Series and pointed out how elegant the Yankees looked in their immaculate and simple pinstriped uniforms. Then Graham pointed to the Cardinals players, who wore sloppy-looking wrinkled uniforms with two red birds sitting on a bat. “Now,” Zev said, “guess who is going to win the World Series.” The Yankees, of course. (The Cardinals had beaten the Yankees the year before, however. Paterno laughed when asked what Penn State uniforms would have looked like had Zev Graham taken him to that World Series instead.) Paterno took the message to heart. He wanted his team’s uniforms to be the plainest and simplest in college football. He thought that simple uniforms would represent class, like those Yankee pinstripes. One of the thrills of his life was when Yankee great Joe DiMaggio himself told Paterno how much he liked Penn State’s uniforms.

  “The other team knew what they were in for when they saw those plain white uniforms,” said Bob White, captain of the 1986 Penn State team. “They knew, ‘It ain’t gonna be easy.’ . . . That’s what I liked about that. It represented what this country was built on, which is the blue-collarness, the iron workers, the steel workers, not all that fancy stuff all over your uniforms and helmets.”

  In time, Penn State’s uniforms became about as famous in college football as Script Ohio at Ohio State, Rocky Top at Tennessee, Touchdown Jesus at Notre Dame. The uniforms would be called a symbol of Penn State football: unadorned, no frills, blandness in the face of a “look at me” generation. But perhaps more than anything they were a testament to Joe Paterno’s stubbornness. He refused to change them. When he allowed a small Nike swoosh to be added to the breast, it was big news in Pennsylvania; some said it was like spray-painting the Sistine Chapel. Paterno liked consistency, liked for today to be a whole lot like yesterday. He lived in the same house, drove the same car, walked to work the same way. He never quite forgave the Catholic Church for going away from the Latin Mass, not because he knew Latin but because it was a change. “I have trouble accepting that what’s right on one day, especially in matters relating to eternity, is suddenly not right or not necessary the next day,” he wrote in his autobiography. He would teach his quarterbacks to run the same play, again and again, until the defense stopped it. Don’t change, he said, until you have to change.

  Lou Bartek, a former player, said, “When you first get there you don’t really like the uniforms . . . . But after a while you figure out something about them. They are forever. When you turn on a television, and you see those uniforms, nobody has to tell you what team you’re watching. That look is forever.”

  Everything Paterno did felt as if he meant it to last forever. Every drill, every meeting, every practice, every speech was governed by how things have always been. The players always got dressed for home games in the football building. They got on the buses that took them to the stadium on exactly the same route. The first bus would take the offense, with the starting quarterback sitting in the left front seat and Paterno sitting in the right front seat. The defense would get on the second bus. The young players who wouldn’t play much would get on the third bus. The starters would walk off the bus first. Always.

  In practice, the color of a player’s uniform depended on his place on the team. A freshman wore a white uniform if on offense, an orange one if on defense. He would find out he had moved up—or down—based on the color of the uniform hanging in his locker. Third-team offense wore gold; third-team defense wore maroon. Second-team offense wore green; second-team defense wore red. If you made it up to first team, you wore blue: light blue on offense, navy blue on defense. For many players, the moment they remembered best from college was not a certain play, not an exchange with Paterno, not anything at all on the field. It was the first time they looked into their locker and saw a blue uniform hanging there.

  For forty-six years, Paterno called them the same names when he was angry (boobs, fatheads, con artists, hotshots, hot dogs, goofballs, knuckleheads
) and offered the same guarded praise when he was pleased (“Do it like that on Saturday!” “That wasn’t the worst I’ve ever seen!”). For forty-six years, he ran some of the shortest practices in college football—almost never more than two hours—but those practices were scripted to the second, and identical from season to season. For forty-six years, he threatened to throw players off the team if they didn’t shape up in the classroom or on the field. For forty-six years, he kept the same general rules about everything big and small: no earrings, no facial hair, jackets and ties when traveling, and a bizarre rule about wearing socks to class. The marvel of Paterno’s coaching was his ability to stop time, to make 2011 feel like 1986, 1978, 1969. Players periodically came back to campus and talked about how Paterno had changed, had softened, how he didn’t yell quite as loudly and didn’t seem quite as fearsome. But if they were honest with themselves, they would have admitted that it wasn’t Paterno who had changed.

  “Has anybody told you about the Coke breaks?” former player Rodger Puz asked. Puz lived a full life after college; he was a petroleum engineer, then he went to law school, graduated cum laude, and became a prominent lawyer in Pittsburgh. He never forgot those Coke breaks. While the players practiced in the scorching heat of August, Paterno would have the team managers bring out six-ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola and put them on a bed of crushed ice, where all the players could see them. This was before coaches understood (or particularly cared about) the importance of keeping athletes hydrated. Going for a long time without water was viewed as a way to toughen up the players.

  “You would see those Cokes over there,” recalled former star wide receiver Kenny Jackson, “and, man, I can’t even tell you how much you wanted one. It was like the most important thing in the entire world. You’re hot, you’re sweaty, you’re stinking, and there were those Cokes, man. If somebody had said to you at that moment, ‘I’ll give you a million dollars or I’ll give you a Coke,’ you’d take the Coke.”

  Just when the players thought they would collapse from thirst, Paterno would blow his whistle and yell, “Okay, Coke break!” Players ran full-speed for the Coca-Cola. “It was like a commercial,” Jackson said. (Ironically, Penn State became an exclusive Pepsi school a few years later.) They drank those Cokes as fast as possible because they had only two and a half minutes before break was over.

  “He’d give you about two seconds to drink that Coke,” Jackson remembered.

  “We would chug those things down,” Puz said. “And for the rest of practice, you would hear players belching all over the field.”

  “Burping like crazy,” Jackson said.

  “You’d be running around and you could hear the Coke bubbling inside you,” Puz said.

  “I’m telling you, it was the greatest thing ever invented,” Jackson said. “Oh, Joe had his tricks, boy. You need to tell Joe to get that back. Coke breaks help you. I never wanted anything in my life more than I wanted one of those Cokes at practice.”

  When I asked Paterno about Coke breaks, he shrugged. “Guys remember that stuff?” Then he smiled and said, “I always told them, ‘You’ll be surprised, when you get older, what you remember and what you don’t.’ But Coke breaks? Geez.”

  Paterno enjoys watching his star quarterback, Todd Blackledge, answer reporters’ questions (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

  Mountaintop

  The strange part was how calm Paterno felt as he stood on the sidelines of the Penn State–Pitt game in late November 1981—strange for a couple of reasons. First, of course, Paterno never felt calm. He did not like calm; he thrived on tension. Even in the summer, when there was nothing to do, when he sat in the sun at the beach house in Avalon, New Jersey, read books, listened to waves roll on the shore, he wasn’t exactly calm. “No, it’s not easy for me to turn off my mind,” he admitted. After a few days at the beach, he would invariably be ready to go home, back to his office and back to work.

  The second reason calm seemed out of place, though, was more compelling: Penn State was losing to Pittsburgh 14–0. It was the last regular-season game of a wonderful but ultimately unsatisfying 1981 season. Penn State had been ranked No. 1 in America when they lost at Miami on Halloween Day. Two weeks later, they were beat up by Bear Bryant’s Alabama team again. (Paterno faced Bryant four times; Alabama and the Bear won all four games.)

  Now Penn State was losing at Pitt by two touchdowns. Led by future Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino, Pitt was ranked No. 1 in the country. Still, somehow, Paterno felt calm. Absurdly calm. He walked up and down the sidelines and he did not scream. Players remembered him saying, “Okay, guys. We’ll be fine. We’re better than they are. Let’s just take care of business. We’ll be okay, it’s all going to work out.”

  Things did work out for Penn State. Paterno and defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky shifted the defense into a bewildering zone that confused Marino. He had thrown two quick touchdown passes, but after that he threw four interceptions. Paterno also unleashed the offense, breaking away from the conservative style he had made famous. He allowed his promising quarterback Todd Blackledge to take chances and throw downfield to talented receivers like Kenny Jackson. The two combined on two long touchdown passes. Penn State won 48–14. Paterno was sure it was a sign.

  “When I was being recruited by Penn State,” Jackson said, “everybody told me, ‘Man, you’re a good receiver, why do you want to go there? He ain’t gonna throw you the ball, man.’ But Joe told me, he said, ‘People don’t realize it, but we’re going to throw the ball a lot.’ And he did.”

  Paterno seemed to understand, in that moment on the sideline, that his team was on the brink of being something special. Even after returning from his visit to Brooklyn, his attention had been drifting. Penn State asked him to become athletic director as well as head coach, apparently to take advantage of his fund-raising talents, and to the surprise of family and friends he took the job. “I know people think I took it because I was power-hungry. But it really wasn’t that. I thought I could help.”

  He kept the job for two years, and mostly disliked it. He thought the best thing the job did was give him a new appreciation for women’s sports. He had come into the job with a primitive view of women’s sports (and, perhaps, women in general): “I honestly didn’t think women really wanted to compete.” Over time he grew to feel differently. “I was kind of a Neanderthal about all that—at least that’s what my daughters told me. But then I watched some of our women’s teams play, and I thought, ‘These young women are great athletes and they play with great passion.’ They made me a better person, I think.”

  It is paradoxical, perhaps, that the most far-reaching move Paterno made as athletic director was to hire women’s basketball coach Rene Portland. She had been a star player at Immaculata College just after Title IX had changed the landscape for women’s athletics, and Paterno was impressed with her intensity and sense of purpose. She reminded him a bit of himself. Portland was a hugely successful coach for Penn State; she won more than six hundred games and took Penn State to twenty-one NCAA tournaments.

  But she was also staunchly and publicly antihomosexual. She was quoted in a Chicago Sun Times newspaper story saying, “I will not have it [homosexuality] in my program.” In 2005, a player named Jennifer Harris filed a federal lawsuit accusing Portland of cutting her from the team because of her perceived sexual orientation. The lawsuit was eventually settled, and Portland resigned. This, of course, was decades after Paterno had given up the athletic director’s job, but there were those, especially at the end of his life, who said that he should have used his power to put a stop to any discrimination happening on the women’s basketball team.

  “What power are these people talking about?” Paterno asked. “I didn’t stick my nose in other people’s programs.” His son Jay recalled a conversation he’d had with his father about Portland just after her resignation. Joe told him, “I really don’t know anything about it. I don’t want anyo
ne telling me how to run my program, why should I tell anyone else how to run theirs?” When Jay said he would not want one of his own daughters discriminated against or treated badly, he remembered Joe agreeing: “You’re right. Everybody deserves a chance. If that was happening, that was wrong.”

  But what Paterno really learned from his time as athletic director was that he didn’t want to be athletic director. He liked to coach. He was good at other things when inspired: charming the media, energizing the alumni, giving speeches, building business plans, seeing widespread possibilities, and nobody was better at raising money for Penn State. Those things did not bring him joy the way coaching did. There were several attempts to get him to jump into politics, but he would always say that he did not feel qualified. His reluctance probably had little to do with qualifications; it was all about desire. Coaching was the thing that jolted him out of bed in the middle of the night to scribble notes. Coaching was what woke him up in the morning, always before the alarm, and inspired him throughout the day. He loved it, all of it, the preparation, the game plans, the teaching, the sense of purpose, the competition, and, at the end, the confirmation of a job well done.

  “It might sound like a cliché, but I think Dad always saw coaching as four-dimensional chess,” Scott Paterno said. “That’s chess where the pieces constantly change in strength. So one year, he would think, ‘Okay, we have a weak left tackle, how can we work around that?’ And the next year he would think, ‘Okay, our linebackers are good, but our defensive line is young, how can we build a great defense?’ And then he could take his plan, put it into action, and change young men’s lives along the way. That’s what drove him.”

  As he calmly stood on the sideline of that Pitt game knowing, absolutely knowing, that his team was going to win, a lot of things clicked for him. He quit the athletic director job within a couple of months and passed it to his longtime friend Jim Tarman. He reworked his offense away from a stale and conservative power game into a modern, fast-paced passing attack built around players’ speed. And he thought, “You know what? Next year, we’re going to win the national championship.”