Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  Dranov said McQueary’s visual description was of a naked young boy in the doorway of the shower. McQueary then said he saw an arm pull the boy back out of the way, and seconds later Sandusky walked around the corner with a towel wrapped around his waist. Dranov and the McQuearys agreed that Mike had not seen enough to go to the police, and Dranov recommended that McQueary go to Paterno on that Saturday morning. Dranov conceded all those years later that, though the incident sounded bad, Sandusky’s reputation as a community icon was still intact. He said he had never heard any rumors about Sandusky and that what McQueary had seen led to the possibility of a misunderstanding and “an innocent explanation.”

  Paterno would later say that if McQueary had told him he saw Sandusky raping a young boy, “We would have gone to the police right then and there, no questions asked.” Whatever McQueary actually said that morning, Paterno heard something vague. He clearly did not want to think too much about it. He was seventy-five years old, from another time, and he would say he simply did not comprehend the potential gravity of the situation.

  This must be said again: Paterno did not like Sandusky. Paterno had not wanted Sandusky to have access to the Lasch Building in the first place. He had pushed Sandusky out. Paterno did not feel like he should be involved for another reason: He knew that many fans and people in State College viewed Sandusky as the guy who should be coaching Penn State; he did not feel that he was in a position to get involved. He tried to make this clear to the grand jury: “Obviously, I was in a little bit of a dilemma since Mr. Sandusky was not working for me anymore.” This reticence to publicly charge his former assistant and possible rival with molesting a child based on the agitated recollections of an assistant coach was something he had trouble explaining. He had gone by the book, word for word. He reported the conversation to Curley. This was what the law required him to do, and he did it. The Freeh report—and the public—concluded that it was not nearly enough.

  THE 2001 SEASON PROVED TO be another painful one, though it began with joy. Paterno had spent every available moment with Adam Taliaferro in the hospital. He was there when they told Adam that a vertebra in his neck had burst and that his spinal cord had been bruised. He was there when doctors told Adam he had a 3 percent chance of walking again. And he was there when Adam said that he wanted to lead the team out of the tunnel to start the next season—and he would lead the team while walking.

  “He was so positive,” Taliaferro recalled. “He made me believe that I could do anything.” In time, Taliaferro would graduate from Penn State, go to law school, and become a lawyer, and Paterno was with him at every step, pushing him, inspiring him, writing letters of recommendation for him. After Paterno died, Taliaferro successfully ran for a spot on the Penn State Board of Trustees, where he intended to keep alive Joe Paterno’s vision for the school.

  And at the start of the 2001 season, Taliaferro led the team out of the tunnel. He walked, even jogged, while the crowd in Beaver Stadium, the first crowd of 100,000 in Penn State history, cheered and cried. It was a beautiful beginning.

  Then Penn State lost four games in a row, the worst start and longest losing streak of Paterno’s career. The nation was watching closely. After planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, Americans wanted something to celebrate. Paterno was supposed to lead that celebration. He started the season only two victories away from passing Bear Bryant. But the team kept losing. “As angry as I am right now, all I feel like doing is punching a wall,” Paterno said after the team was crushed by Wisconsin.

  “I don’t think I’m too old,” he told the New York Times after a 20–0 loss to Michigan.

  “It’s the late winter of Joe Paterno’s coaching career, and what a cold time it has become,” Ivan Maisel wrote in Sports Illustrated.

  Paterno read books for strength. He read Moby-Dick again, and Michael Shaara’s classic Civil War novel, The Killer Angels, and The Red Badge of Courage. He was looking for tales of triumph over adversity. In the fifth game of the season, Penn State beat Northwestern 38–35, and Paterno tied Bear Bryant’s record. A week later, the Nittany Lions beat Ohio State at home in front of more than 108,000 people for the emotional victory that pushed Paterno past Bryant to the top of the all-time victories list. The word “finally” was in the headline in most newspapers.

  “You know, every once in a while, people say ‘You ought to get out of it,’ ” he told reporters after the game, a classic bit of understated Paterno humor since that was all anyone had said to him for months. “I think about it, and I think about how much it means to me, and the great moments I’ve had. I don’t want to get out of it.”

  The team played better the rest of the season, but not a lot better. They finished with a losing record for the second year in a row.

  EVERYBODY SEEMED TO HAVE A theory about why Paterno’s team stopped winning. His age, of course, was the most prominent of these. He turned seventy-five after the 2001 season, and it was written again and again that the game had passed him by. There was talk that the move to the Big Ten prevented Penn State from ever being a national power again; the competition had grown too tough. There was talk about how Paterno’s basic football philosophy—Play great defense. Hold on to the football. Make fewer mistakes than your opponent—could not win in the new reality of college football, where television and bowl connections and the money those generated drove the game.

  But there was another prominent theory, one that would play a large role in the last decade of Paterno’s life: that Paterno was simply not the same without Jerry Sandusky as his defensive coordinator.

  “Most people don’t realize how much Jerry meant,” former star Brandon Short told Sports Illustrated. “He was just as much a part of Penn State as Joe Paterno is.”

  “Let us give credit to Jerry, not Joe, for all those wonderful years,” a fan named Donald J. Smith wrote to the Sunday News of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “No, I am afraid time has not passed by Joe Paterno. It has simply laid open before the world that Joe is an average coach who had some terrific assistants.”

  “I don’t think people understand the impact Jerry Sandusky had,” former player Mac Morrison told the Seattle Times. “He’s not just an assistant coach. He has the best defensive mindset and defensive knowledge that I’ve ever known.”

  “The retirement of Jerry Sandusky removed a crucial pillar from the program’s foundation,” was the conclusion in the Palm Beach Post.

  “The loss of longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, who retired after the 1999 season, was a bigger blow than most people realized,” argued the Philadelphia Inquirer.

  “With each Penn State loss, the picture becomes more clear: Jerry Sandusky was the head football coach for the past twenty-five years, and Joe Paterno was apparently the director of marketing,” an unnamed fan called in to the Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

  And this in the Bergen (New Jersey) Record:

  The defense, meanwhile, has not been as strong as years past, and some reason that the retirement two years ago of longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was a turning point. At the University Creamery, the school’s coffee house, Sandusky, like Paterno, has an ice cream named for him. Listed on the menu underneath the Peachy Paterno is the Sandusky Blitz, a banana and caramel swirl with chocolate-covered peanuts.

  Victor Wills, a sophomore from Bethlehem, Pa., who works at the Creamery and plays the sousaphone in the marching band, said he wishes Sandusky would return, “So our defense will be the way it used to be and we’ll be known again as ‘Linebacker U.’ ”

  These are only a few of the hundreds of things written and said about how Sandusky’s retirement had exposed Joe Paterno. It would seem remarkable years later that, within a tight-knit community like State College, word of the 1998 investigation or McQueary’s account had not leaked to someone in the media. But apparently, it had not. There was a powerful groundswell within the community to convince Paterno to retire, finally, and to bring Sa
ndusky back as head coach. The sentiment was popular nationally too. So many who had admired Paterno, even grudgingly, were concerned that he was tarnishing his legacy by stumbling around as a coach when he could no longer compete.

  Paterno refused to see it. He began to say things like “We’re just a couple of plays away” and “We just need one or two breaks and we’ll be back on top again.” To many people, it sounded like Paterno was out of touch, but he believed it. “If I wake up one morning,” he told an Atlanta Constitution reporter, “and believe the program would be better in someone else’s hands, then it’s over.”

  Paterno would live another decade after saying that. He would never believe that the program would be better in someone else’s hands.

  Joe Paterno hands the ball off to his brother, George, when they were teammates at Brown (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

  Winter

  George Paterno struggled with being Joe’s younger brother. He had grown up in the same environment as Joe, going to Brooklyn Prep, playing football at Brown, serving in the army, but unlike Joe he never could find his life’s center. “Joe is the doer,” George would tell friends, “and I’m the dreamer.” He worked as a football coach for a while. He was a police officer. He served as the radio color commentator of Penn State football, often criticizing his own brother on the air, which was a kick for everyone, including Joe. He enjoyed a drink and good company. He never married.

  The brothers clashed often, as they had when they were young. But there was a deep connection that transcended friendship. George understood, in ways that few could, what drove Joe.

  At the end of the 1992 season, for instance, Joe faced a difficult decision. He had a brilliant linebacker named Rich McKenzie on the team. McKenzie had been a star high school linebacker in Florida, the No. 1 high school linebacker in America, and he had gotten it into his head that great linebackers are supposed to go to Penn State. Paterno did not want him. McKenzie’s grades were poor, his commitment to academics suspect. But McKenzie pleaded and Paterno made him a deal, similar to the deal he had made Bob White: if McKenzie would read three books over the summer and send book reports to Sue, and also agree to be tutored by Sue while in college, Paterno would give him a chance. McKenzie did the reports, and Paterno was impressed. For four years McKenzie teetered in his classes, always seemed on the brink of failing, but he managed to pull himself together. Paterno loved the kid. The whole family did. McKenzie even offered a toast at Jay Paterno’s wedding. “This was a kid who, when he first got to Penn State, he couldn’t even look you in the eye,” Guido D’Elia said. “And by the time he left, he was a new man. He was ready to live a successful life. I don’t want to overstate it, but Rich McKenzie was exactly the reason why Joe Paterno coached football.”

  In his senior year, however, McKenzie let things slide even more than usual. He thought he had failed a class, so he stopped going to practice for a while, and he stopped putting extra effort into his other schoolwork. Paterno warned him and warned him again, but McKenzie would not straighten up. At the end of the season, Penn State was invited to play in the Blockbuster Bowl near McKenzie’s hometown of Fort Lauderdale. Paterno first decided he would not take McKenzie to the game, but Sue and Jay lobbied for him. “It’s his hometown,” Jay said. “All his friends will be there. He’s been so great for Penn State.” So Joe took him along, but he told McKenzie he would not play. “I’ve been fired,” McKenzie told the media.

  For all his bravado, Paterno was not sure benching McKenzie was the right thing to do. Yes, McKenzie had broken the rules and had to be punished; Paterno had always leaned to the side of the rules. But Paterno also understood that McKenzie had worked much harder than some of the other players to achieve as much as he had in school. None of it had been easy for him, and he had come so far. This game was in his hometown. Paterno wondered if benching the player was really fair.

  Joe asked George to take a walk with him. Together they walked around Joe Robbie Stadium near Fort Lauderdale and talked about what to do. George told Joe he should play the kid. For one thing, the other players on the team were watching closely and would not think it fair if he didn’t play McKenzie in his hometown in the last game of his college career. More to the point, though, George thought Penn State had no chance of winning without McKenzie. This bowl game was against Stanford and its brilliant coach, Bill Walsh. CBS was promoting the game as “the Genius versus the Legend.” “I’m not sure which one I am,” Paterno joked before the game. But to George it was no joke. He did not want to see his brother beaten by Walsh, leaving everyone to think he had been outcoached.

  Joe listened carefully and finally said, “Ahhh, mind your own business.”

  He did not start McKenzie. He did allow him to play in a handful of plays in the second half, but that was after the game had been decided. Penn State lost 24–3, fulfilling George’s fears. But the larger point was that Joe would listen to George, even when they disagreed. And there were not many people Joe Paterno listened to at the end. George wrote Joe a letter once about how his head was getting too big, and Joe took it to heart.

  Paterno needed such balance. He feared getting too comfortable, being surrounded by yes men, being treated like some sort of icon rather than a real flesh-and-blood person. But even as he feared those things, they were happening. He had few close friends even in his younger days; it was not in his nature to open up. During the 2000 and 2001 seasons, when Penn State was losing and people were questioning his very ability as a coach, he would get encouraging calls from people all the time—and these calls made him crazy. He didn’t need anybody to tell him that everything would work out. He didn’t want anyone to tell him that. George was one of the few to understand this.

  In 1997, George published a book, Joe Paterno: The Coach from Byzantium. It included some criticisms of Joe, and it created family friction. Joe insisted he did not care. Heck, he offered a quote for the back cover: “My brother tells me that the book is 80% good, 10% bad, and 10% his own personal observations. That’s fine with me.” Joe would always say he never read the book.

  But Sue read the book, as did other family members. Most of the book was proud and supportive and admiring, but the negative stuff was what was played in the press. George seemed to buy into the idea that Sandusky’s coaching genius was at the heart of Paterno’s success. He made some unflattering remarks about Sue and her role in Paterno’s coaching life, and at different times in the book, he called Joe sanctimonious, egotistical, self-centered, and forgetful of the virtues that made him successful in the first place. Everyone in the Paterno family found it appalling that George would write such a book while Joe was going through tough times. Some family members never could forgive him. “George was not in a very good place when he wrote that book,” one close friend said. “He was very sick. He was in a lot of pain. And I think he lashed out. It caused a lot of pain, most of it to him.”

  “I don’t mean this to sound negative,” Scott Paterno said near the end of Joe’s life, “but Uncle George was tough. He was tough. He was tough on my mom. He grew up in Brooklyn and had a different style from everyone else. He liked to have a couple of pops, and he had a drinking problem. He wasn’t a mean drunk or anything like that . . . . He was the guy that would call Joe up and tell him off. There’s nobody that does that anymore.”

  Joe felt deep regret about how George’s life had turned out. Close to the end, George lived alone in New York. He was ill, and he was suffering. “I think he felt disappointed,” Joe said. One of the thrills of George’s late life was appearing in a 1996 Sports Illustrated story titled “One Big Happy Valley Family.” The story was positive and told of the fascinating relationship between the two brothers. But even this George wrote about with some sadness in his book:

  The author kept implying that Joe and I are very different people. I convinced him we had the same ideals but used different methods in postulating and sharing them. Joe was a pragmati
c idealist operating within the establishment, and I was the romantic idealist and dreamer operating out of the loop. The author decided I was an eccentric independent with a free spirit. I guess he’s right. The article was well received and many people told me they identified with me and even though they were not famous either, they had productive and good lives. We all can’t be heroes.

  At the beginning of 2002, Joe moved George back to State College and checked him into a hospital. He tried to bridge the gap. Some of Joe’s children and grandchildren came to visit. George died in June of that year, and his death took a terrible toll on Joe, one he would not talk about publicly. “Their relationship was complicated,” one friend said. “But when George died, I really believe, there was a void in Joe’s life that nobody else could fill.”

  WHEN THE 2002 SEASON BEGAN, Paterno was surrounded by doubts. Reporters, alumni, and even longtime fans had come to believe that Paterno’s time as a successful football coach had expired.

  “I really don’t care what people say,” he told the New York Times. “I try to tell young coaches, the minute you start reacting to criticism, forget it. It affects your judgment and ability to make tough decisions. You lose your courage.”