Osborne was well-liked by coaches and sportswriters. So, in large part, was Paterno, but he had already won two national championships. Sentiment was rooting for Osborne and Nebraska.
The third factor was that Penn State had just joined the Big Ten, which meant the Nittany Lions were now tied into the conference’s bowl agreeements. If they had still been an independent, they could have played Nebraska and settled things once and for all. But the Big Ten champion went to the Rose Bowl, and that’s where Penn State went to face a good but not great Oregon team. Nebraska went to the Orange Bowl to play a very good Miami team. As one Penn State player said, “We could have won the Rose Bowl 100–0 and it wouldn’t have mattered.”
Penn State beat Oregon convincingly but not overwhelmingly in the Rose Bowl, 38–20, and finished the year undefeated. Nebraska beat Miami and won the national championship. Paterno’s emotions were mixed. He was happy for Osborne, but he also felt sure his team would have beaten Nebraska. (For his part, Osborne felt sure his team would have beaten Penn State: “I wish we could have played that game.”) Paterno again railed against the system and again talked about a playoff. He was sixty-eight years old with a near-flawless record and was once more on top of the college football world.
“Step down then?” Paterno would ask near the end of his life. “After 1994? Are you kidding me? Why? I never even thought about it.”
Joe Paterno and his son and assistant coach, Jay, look on during a game (Jason Sipes/Altoona Mirror)
Jay
The five Paterno kids grew up with different relationships to football, but everybody understood that it was Joseph Paterno Jr., the son everyone called Jay, who lived for the game. The girls, Diana and Mary Kay, were the oldest and were raised in a time before Joe became a legend and an icon. Their lives were interwoven with the by-products of the coaching life. They prepared food for the various gatherings and cleaned up afterward and helped Sue entertain recruits and their families. They played with the young siblings of the recruits and of the biggest donors. They were taught to live frugally. Once, Mary Kay remembered, someone tried to convince her father to join a country club so the kids could use the pool. “What are they, big shots?” Joe snapped back. “They can swim in the neighborhood pool like everyone else.” And, of course, they prayed every week for the team and for their father.
David, born third, was very different from his father; from a young age his mind revolved around the physics of things, turning him inescapably into an engineer. Everyone in the family recalled David at Disney World explaining how every one of the rides worked. (“I don’t want to know! I want the magic!” Sue pleaded.) David was very different from Joe, who struggled with the mechanics of turning on a vacuum cleaner.
Scott, the youngest, had the toughest relationship with Joe. “Until I was twenty-three or twenty-four, I couldn’t stand my father,” he confessed. Perhaps it was because the two were so alike; they argued constantly. “You could expect that if the two of us were sitting at a table, it was going to end up with yelling.”
When Scott was sixteen, he was sent to the Kiski School, an all-boys boarding school in Saltsburg, about two hours from State College. Scott remembered his father driving him there and the line Joe gave him when they arrived: “One of us is moving out, and the mortgage is in my name.” It turned out that Kiski was ideal for Scott, so much so that he named a son after Jack Pidgeon, the tough-as-nails headmaster. The son-father relationship changed dramatically after Scott went to college. “My dad obviously understood college kids,” Scott said. “That was his life. So when I got to college, every trick I tried to play, every stunt I tried to pull, he’d already seen it a thousand times. After going through that phase, we just started to talk.” When he told his father he was considering law school, Joe was thrilled; finally, there would be a lawyer in the family, a tribute to Angelo. They found their connection through politics and history (especially Abraham Lincoln). Football didn’t fit into their conversations. Scott was a fanatical Penn State football fan—the family made him sit in a separate part of the stadium because he was so loud and passionate—but whenever he tried to bring up football with his father, Joe would say, “Ahhh, I already have enough people telling me what to do.”
No, football talk was for Jay. When Jay was three or four, he used to draw numbers on Lincoln Logs and pretend they were football players. He would line them in up formations and design plays for them to run. He soaked himself in football. Around the neighborhood, kids would play two-on-two football, and Jay kept meticulous stats on the games. When anyone at the house asked Sue a football question, she would rustle up Jay, who would explain exactly why the pulling guard got caught up or why the linebacker was not in the right position to defend the play. From his earliest moments of consciousness, Jay could remember having only one dream: to coach football at Penn State. He had many skills, and he was smart and driven. At one point Joe wanted Jay to become a lawyer. At another, he wanted Jay to think about politics. He thought Jay could be a great writer if he put his mind to it.
But Joe recognized the same passions in his son that had marked his own life. Jay was a backup quarterback at Penn State in the late 1980s. He became a graduate assistant coach at Virginia. He was a wide receivers coach at Connecticut and then quarterbacks coach at James Madison, where he was so highly thought of that coach Rip Scherer wanted to bring him to Memphis as his offensive coordinator in 1995.
But that was the year a spot opened up for a recruiting coordinator at Penn State. Joe, who would never be too open about his thinking behind the choice, hired Jay. Did he hope that someday Jay would replace him as coach? It’s hard to imagine a father not thinking along those lines, but Joe insisted that wasn’t in his mind. “Are you kidding me?” he scoffed. “You think I would want Jay to have to deal with that?” He thought the Paterno name hurt Jay more than it helped him. “Jay’s a good coach, a darned good coach. And I think a lot of people refuse to see that because his name is Paterno. I would sometimes tell Jay, ‘You should go coach somewhere else, where people will give you a fair chance,’ because I don’t think he always got that fair chance. But Jay’s tough.”
“I didn’t want to coach anywhere else,” Jay explained. “I wanted to coach for the best coach and the best program in the country. That was Joe Paterno and Penn State.”
Jay and Joe would coach together for the better part of seventeen seasons. Jay proved to be an easy target for critics during the tough years—a simple way to get at the old man—and there would be many tough years. One of the jokes that made its way around town was that they really wanted Oe Paterno coaching—that is, “Joe” without the “Jay.” There were a lot of jokes and a lot of shots at Joe’s son.
“I’ll tell you something Joe taught me,” said Jay. He always called his father “Joe” when the subject was coaching or football. “He taught me that the critics come out when you’re losing, and they go into hiding when you’re winning. That’s because, deep down, they’re cowards.
“Joe could not stand cowards. He would say all the time, ‘Do what you think is right. And if you’re wrong, stand up and face it.’ All the people who said stuff about me, they don’t matter. I got to coach with a great man. And he happened to be my father.”
ACT IV: WHAT COMES AFTER
It’s not enough to be fair. You must appear to be fair.
—JOE PATERNO
{ Aria }
Joe Paterno
coaches’ staff meeting
May 26, 1998 (reconstructed from Paterno’s notes)
We are going to have to do everything better than we have been doing things. And I know we have to do a better job than we did last year. We are not ahead of anybody. There are people (Purdue, Michigan State, etc.) who are catching up to us. Wisconsin, Iowa, and Northwestern are even with us. And Michigan and Ohio State may be pulling away now that their coaching staffs have not only become more stable, but they are much more confident.
It’s my job as the head c
oach to see that we do a better job, and that’s what we are going to do.
We face stiffer competition, and we are making financial commitments to facilities THAT DEMAND that we GET BETTER. Plus facilities which present opportunities to MAKE GREAT THINGS HAPPEN FOR THIS PROGRAM.
And I intend to make sure that great things do happen.
And to do that I think we have to talk about a new direction, or at least guidelines that I think will make us a more focused and more productive staff. And I believe this has been a problem for me and for some of you.
Our structure cannot be static but dynamic. Things are changing all the time. Here’s what I want to talk about.
A. When someone is talking, especially me, PAY ATTENTION. That means no reading, signing letters, drawing up cards and no side conversations. We’ve been having too much “We never said that” or “I didn’t hear that.”
B. We have to have an open exchange, BUT we don’t need unnecessary and prolonged attempts to win a point.
C. We have to understand there will be differences and respect each other’s views.
D. Don’t sulk if your idea gets outvoted or I turn it down.
E. Don’t think that you are the only one who should or can make suggestions or be critical of your coaching area.
F. As for myself, I may present some “way-out” ideas to get some reaction or to stimulate some discussion (and to make sure we don’t have “yes men”). I may even change sides in a discussion.
G. Everybody needs to show strong interest in EVERYTHING that we do. We should be ready to learn from each other and help each other. I intend to sit in on as many meetings as possible.
I’ve talked about this before, but let me say it again. When dealing with the press be careful to emphasize, “We are young, eager, coachable, but we have a long way to go.” TRY NOT TO BE QUOTABLE.
And don’t turn your head if you see a player not abiding by our rules. I’m talking about earrings, beards, studies, appearance, attitude . . . . These things equal the “Penn State Way.” Players must believe that there are rules that make Penn State special—unique.
And remember: Team morale, team attitude, this is my concern. I want input and suggestions from you. But I have to set the tone.
Joe Paterno the year he turned eighty (Jason Sipes/Altoona Mirror)
The Filthiest Word
Deep in a file Paterno labeled “Speeches, Clippings, Etc.” was a single sheet of paper that perhaps explained the last dozen years of his coaching life better than anything else. Paterno’s files were a beautiful blend of order and chaos. He wrote countless notes on graph paper, stapled them together, and added sticky notes to them. He kept detailed notes for every major speech he gave, staff meeting he held, and big talk he gave the squad. He would sometimes go back to these notes, but more often he did not. He just liked to know that they were there, in the files, in case he faced a similar problem or challenge in the future.
Paterno loved breaking down concepts into simple and pithy expressions. To him, this was what coaching and teaching was about: simplifying things, then simplifying them some more, and then simplifying them again. This was why he loved Hemingway’s writing. Hemingway wrote declarative sentences. Punchy. He drank his coffee and it was good. Paterno enjoyed playing with words. One time he wanted to tell his team that they should not say anything bad about opponents before games. Why? It’s not classy. He wrote down the words “Be classy.” But “Be classy” would not move nineteen- and twenty-year-old men. It just wasn’t interesting or true enough. “You have to tell them why,” he thought.
Why not say anything bad about opponents? Because talk is cheap. He wrote that down: TALK IS CHEAP. But this is a cliché. What does it mean to say that talk is cheap?
TALK WILL NOT WIN GAMES.
There it was; this was closer to the point. Talk doesn’t help a team win. But was this true? Paterno was not sure. “One thing about kids,” Paterno always said. “You can’t fool them.” The truth seemed to be that sometimes a little talk could get into opponents’ heads, make them nervous, distract them. Paterno could not deny this. He had another thought.
TALK WILL NOT BEAT GOOD TEAMS.
Ah, now he had it. Talk might help beat the lousy teams. But so what? Talk won’t matter against the best teams, the teams Penn State had to beat in order to get to where the players wanted to go, to move them up to No. 1 and put them in position to win a national championship. Yes, this was the point. Finally, he wrote down the sentence that he told the team:
TALK DOESN’T BEAT GOOD TEAMS; TALK ONLY BEATS SOMEBODY YOU WERE GOING TO BEAT ANYWAY.
The files were filled with such Paternoisms, hundreds of them, thousands of them. Here are a few from just one note from around 2000:
Tradition is not a gift. It’s a challenge.
Everybody, every play, go to the ball.
Think about getting up WHILE you’re falling down.
Big plays don’t happen; you have to make them happen.
It’s all about creating an opportunity for victory.
My father always said that nobody gets carried out of the ring; one person just gets tired of getting up.
The files, though, were much more than just Paterno’s musings. He obsessively clipped things he read and liked. He underlined his favorite parts. Here is a line from the poet Robert Frost that he liked: “I never feel more at home in America than at a ballgame, be it in park or in sandlot. Beyond this I know not. And dare not.” He wrote down this quote from Albert Einstein: “Great minds have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” There was a story in Reader’s Digest about lessons to be learned from Christopher Columbus: Never give up; be a lifelong learner; do your homework; believe in your own destiny. There was basketball coach John Wooden’s pyramid of success (personalized for Paterno by Wooden himself), with this quote at the top: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” Paterno seemed to constantly be looking for inspiration, for something that could get him to see football and competition and life from a slightly different angle.
Paterno had been talking publicly about retiring from coaching since the early 1970s. For a time, he seemed interested in politics. At one time, he considered playing a larger role in cleaning up college athletics. Maybe these were serious considerations, maybe they were not, but he talked about them a lot.
“Four more years,” he said when he was in his fifties.
“Five more years,” he said when he was in his sixties.
For a while, the writers and fans took such talk seriously. He seemed like the kind of well-rounded person who would let go of coaching at some point and spend the later years of his life traveling with Sue, reading on the beach, perhaps writing books and enjoying life as a grandfather and elder statesman. Paterno liked to think of himself that way too, at least at first. When he told writers in the mid-1970s that he wasn’t going to be an old coach, they believed him. In the mid-1980s, he again said he wouldn’t coach much longer. Some people still believed him. By the mid-1990s, he said that he would leave soon. “I don’t think I want to go over 75,” he told the St. Louis Post Dispatch in a question-and-answer session. “I think that would be a mistake.” By then, nobody believed him, least of all Paterno himself.
It became clear to him, and to those around him, that being a football coach was more than just what Paterno did. He was a football coach. The man who always said that football was only a small part of life began to tell people that he did not have any other interests. “What am I going to do in retirement? I don’t golf. I don’t fish. I don’t garden. What am I going to do?”
He began to tell reporters the ominous story of Bear Bryant, who had died so soon after he retired from coaching. Paterno made it sound like he feared the same fate. He got touchy whenever anyone asked him about it. His former star player and sometime nemesis Matt Millen would always remember an exch
ange he had with Paterno.
“Joe, it isn’t any of my business,” Millen said. “But maybe it’s time you thought about grooming a successor and maybe easing out of coaching.”
“You’re right, Millen,” Paterno snapped. “It isn’t any of your business.”
Some of the people who knew Paterno best thought his refusal to retire spoke to some of his greatest attributes (fearlessness, certainty, relentlessness), others to some of his greatest flaws (stubbornness, unwillingness to face reality, the need to be in charge). Maybe it was both. Paterno turned seventy in 1996, and he kept on going. PBS did a special on ageless wonders in 1998, and Paterno was a big part of it. At the end of the decade, he signed on for five more years. When the Penn State president made it clear that it was time to move on, he fought back and stayed on even longer. He coached through pain, through terrible seasons, and through controversy. He coached until he was eighty, and he kept on going. His hearing went. His mobility went. His energy went. But his mind stayed sharp, his memory too, and he kept on going even when his age had become a national punch line. He coached right up to the scandal that led to his firing and the cancer that led to his death.
Why did he keep coaching? There are no shortage of theories. Ego? A loss of perspective? Or was it simply that he was human? “Joe refused to admit he was getting old,” one friend said. “Isn’t that the most human thing of all?”
In Paterno’s files, among all the letters, outlines, charts, photographs, quotes, regulations, theories, apologies, and regrets, there was one piece of paper that stood out, a poorly copied page of a book. Across the top was written the name “Hemingway.” Paterno’s literary hero. The name was underlined twice. Below was a series of paragraphs from the book A. E. Hotchner wrote about his friend Ernest Hemingway. In the middle of the page were three sentences Paterno had underlined:
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