There were other, more personal challenges. In late September, Paterno’s son-in-law Chris Hort, husband of Mary Kay, was seriously injured in a cycling accident; for a short while it appeared he would not survive. He recovered. In November, Paterno’s son Scott lost his congressional race to incumbent Tim Holden by twenty points. Joe’s reaction: “He got licked, and he shoulda got licked—the guy he was running against was one of the better congressmen we’ve had.” The family found the constant attacks on Joe difficult to handle. “I couldn’t read [the newspapers],” said his oldest child, Diana.
Before Penn State played Northwestern, Paterno tried to relieve the tension by reminding his players that this was just a game: “We’re playing football in the fall. The leaves are out. Everything is great. It’s such a beautiful day, and you’re young. Let’s go out and play a football game, have some fun, and forget about what the media is saying.” Penn State lost again, 14–7. “[It’s] indisputable that Paterno can no longer put together a team that can contend or, for that matter, be competitive,” Mike Wilbon wrote in the Washington Post. That theme was repeated in newspapers, on talk radio shows, and in Internet chat rooms all over America. There was no need for question marks, no space left for doubt. Joe Paterno was done.
And then something peculiar happened. Penn State defensive star Tamba Hali described it as “that whole ‘To be or not to be’ thing.”
PATERNO NEVER HESITATED TO GO deep into his love of literature in his darkest moments. He built much of his own life around the Aeneid. He read and reread various classics when he wanted inspiration. Every team he ever coached heard him recite from Robert Browning’s poem about the Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?”
The week in 2004 that Penn State played Indiana—after losing six games in a row, convincing the last holdout that Paterno’s time had come and gone—Paterno invoked what he considered the greatest words ever written about taking a stand and deciding whether it is better to live or to die. That week, he gathered together his players and, mostly from memory, recited Hamlet’s soliloquy with a fury that outshone anything they had come to know about him:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
The players, many of them, would say they had no idea what he was talking about. But they were captivated, if not by the words then by the passion of the legendary coach who spoke them. “I remember the ‘Sea of wars,’ ” Tamba Hali said. “I remember when Joe read that to us, it made sense . . . . Are you going to fold up your tent, or are you going to fight the battle, fight through the tough times?”
Penn State quarterback Michael Robinson said it this way: “There aren’t many coaches who can get you fired up reading Shakespeare. But it wasn’t so much the words he was using. It was the way he said it. You could tell it was from deep in his heart. He was telling us, this was it. This was our time.”
That week, Penn State led Indiana by 6 points with time running out. But Indiana was driving, and then quarterback Matt LoVecchio threw a pass over the middle to receiver Travis Haney, who was pulled down at the Penn State 1-yard line. There were two minutes left. All Indiana had to do was punch the ball in from the 1-yard line, and the Nittany Lions certainly would lose their seventh game in a row.
On first down, Indiana’s Chris Taylor ran up the middle, but Penn State tackle Ed Johnson pushed through, grabbed him by the leg, and did not let go.
To be, or not to be: that is the question.
On second down, Taylor again ran up the middle, and this time Penn State’s sophomore linebacker Paul Posluszny stepped in front, held his ground, and stopped Taylor cold. Dan Connor, a freshman, grabbed Taylor from behind and would not let go. Taylor lost a yard.
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . .
On third down, LoVecchio sprinted right, an option play, but there was no option. Linebacker Derek Wake had pushed his blocker upfield and reached out an arm to slow down LoVecchio. Safety Calvin Lowry raced toward the ball—“Go to the ball!” Paterno had yelled countless times—and pulled LoVecchio to the ground 2 yards shy of the goal line.
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles . . .
On fourth down, Taylor ran up the middle one more time. This time there was a small opening, and he was able to get up to full speed. Four Penn State defenders converged. Taylor fell to the ground about six inches short of the touchdown.
And by opposing end them.
The Penn State celebration was intense, perhaps the most joyous victory celebration for Penn State football in a decade, which might have seemed odd since they needed a near-miracle to beat a not very good Indiana football team. But Paterno heard Shakespeare and he saw glory.
“Guys,” he told them afterward in the locker room, “I’m telling you. Next year, we’re going to be playing for the national championship.” If anyone outside that locker room had heard those words, the only possible response would have been laughter. Inside, though, there were cheers. “After Indiana,” Tamba Hali said, “we believed.”
GRAHAM SPANIER WAS NOT A typical university president. His father had escaped to South Africa from Nazi Germany in 1936, when he was just fifteen years old, just two years before Kristallnacht and the beginning of the Holocaust. Graham was born in South Africa after the war. He moved with his family to Chicago when he was just a boy, and it was there that he began his life as a tireless overachiever. He worked four jobs at once, earned enough college credits in high school to skip his freshman year of college, and became the first member of his family to graduate from college.
He was a dynamic and curious personality. He craved attention. He performed magic tricks at parties. He played washboard regularly in a State College band called the Deacons of Dixieland. (His band biography read, “In his spare time he serves as President of Penn State University.”) He dressed in a gorilla costume when he became chancellor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and when he was Penn State’s president he sometimes dressed as the school’s mascot. He had run with the bulls in Pamplona, and he had his pilot’s license, flying whenever the opportunity arose. He would wander around campus before classes began to help students move into their dorm rooms.
He was also secretive—he fought against the release of any Penn State records, even those that seemed harmless—and numerous people who worked for him said that he was meddlesome and pushy and too concerned about getting credit. Many Penn State employees would wake up to find an email President Spanier had sent in the middle of the night, often with a picky point or a detailed request that did not seem worthy of 3 A.M. typing.
For a long time, the relationship between Paterno and Spanier was cordial but not much more. They were different types. Paterno did not seem interested in the opinions of people outside his circle; Spanier was a political animal who cared deeply about everyone’s opinion. Paterno was a believer in dignity and etiquette; whenever one of his sons wore dirty shoes or a wrinkled shirt, he raged, “Do you see the CEOs of companies dressing like that?” Spanier enjoyed being unconventional, being viewed as quirky and offbeat and even a bit goofy.
For a long time, they respected each other’s turf. Paterno appreciated that Spanier had a strong record of recruiting women and minority candidates into academia, and he admired Spanier’s great ambitions for the university. Spanier believed in Paterno’s vision of college athletics and was aware that no person had ever raised more money for the school. The two didn’t have to be close friends; they worked together. That is, until 2004.
That’s when Spanier reportedly came to believe what everybody else believed: that Joe Paterno could no longer succeed as a coach. He never publicly lost faith; he gave Paterno a four-year extension
in May 2004. But people close to both men said that the grim 2004 season was too much for Spanier. Some were calling him the puppet of a football coach who could no longer do the job. They were saying he was not the most powerful man at the school. He set up a meeting at Paterno’s home.
PATERNO’S NOTES LEADING UP TO this meeting are fascinating. They suggest that he finally realized that it was time for him to step down. First, he had some small demands. He wanted veto power on his replacement. He sketched out a plan if the next coach came from his own staff; defensive coordinator Tom Bradley was the leading candidate. If the next coach was hired from another school, he wanted guarantees that many of the current coaches would be retained. He made a list of coaches from across the country who might fit in as the next head coach. He offered to stay on and help in a fund-raising capacity.
But the more notes he wrote, the more his reluctance to leave became apparent. He believed, especially after the Indiana game, that the tide had turned and the team was coming around. “We have momentum,” he wrote to himself. “We have enthusiasm on the squad.” He remembered that several people on the Penn State Board of Trustees wanted him gone way back in 1988, and look at what he’d accomplished since then: he helped get Penn State into the Big Ten; he led another undefeated team; he continued to graduate players and win games and raise money.
Paterno wrote, “You guys relax. Bad days are behind us now.”
He scribbled down a Teddy Roosevelt quote: “Youth is a disease, but it can be cured.”
The notes grew more defiant: “Are we going to be influenced by ripped-up game tickets? Is money our goal regardless?”
“I have a staff and a squad that (with two or three more players) can win a national championship next year,” he wrote to himself.
And finally this: “There have always been anti-Paterno people (media, etc.). They said we can’t throw the ball . . . [and] in 1994 we had the best offense in the history of the Big Ten. This is the world we live in. I understand it. I can operate in that. Problem is: Can you?”
“You,” in this case, was Graham Spanier.
Joe Paterno had decided he was going to stay.
THEY SAT AROUND THE KITCHEN table, the same table where the family had talked through the years. Paterno and Spanier were joined by Tim Curley, Vice President Gary Schultz, and former Penn State football captain and chairman of the board of trustees Steve Garban. Paterno and Spanier had different ideas about what was going to happen. Spanier expected this to be a talk about who would replace Joe Paterno. Paterno expected this to be a talk about how he was going to lead the team to glory in 2005.
The talk was strained but good-natured for a while. Paterno told Spanier that the team was just a couple of plays away from being very good. He explained that the defense was already good enough to make them a national championship contender (Penn State was the only team in the country to not allow more than 21 points in a game) and that he had some exciting ideas about how to make the offense good again. Spanier responded with a bit of skepticism, but nothing too threatening. And then, Paterno recalled, Spanier cleared his throat and said that he was going to recommend to the board that 2005 be Paterno’s last year as coach.
At the end of his life, Paterno said, as if asking for forgiveness, “I have a temper. I shouldn’t have said what I said, but I was very angry. I had thought he came over to talk. But he already had made up his mind what he was going to do.”
Paterno put both hands on the table, looked Graham Spanier in the eye, and growled, “You take care of your playground, and I’ll take care of mine.”
Spanier looked at him with surprise. Paterno went on. Before the meeting, he had written notes to himself that seem to be for use in case the argument got hot:
I am NOT going to resign.
I am 77, but not old, and the arena is where I thrive.
Loyalty—Commitment to Education—more than wins + losses.
I’ve raised millions of dollars at this very table for the University.
Realizing that graduation rate, etc., are what Penn State athletics are all about.
I can rally the alumni. People in the country. We are special. We are Penn State.
All this and other scribbles were written in pencil. In blue pen, at the bottom of the yellow graph paper, he wrote what appears to be his final bid: “If I fail (7–4, 8–4), I retire.”
Paterno was not going to surrender. He was not going to allow Spanier or anyone else to make him step down. “Dad basically dared Spanier to try and fire him,” Scott Paterno recalled. “And Spanier backed down. But he obviously wasn’t happy about it.” The next year, after things turned around for Penn State football, Paterno told the story in public about how he had rebuffed the president. “That was another mistake,” Paterno admitted.
Over the next few years, Spanier and Paterno clashed, and the board of trustees began to move away from Paterno. At the end, the very end, Paterno would look to the board and look again, but he could not find a friend.
But that was at the end. First, there would be one more Paterno miracle.
Paterno leads his team onto the field (Jason Sipes/Altoona Mirror)
Winning
Paterno often admitted that his feelings about winning were contradictory and conflicted. He said that winning wasn’t the most important thing. The quest was what mattered. The journey was what mattered. Transcendence was what mattered. He longed for opponents to play their best game because only then could his own team reach its highest standard. He looked for talented football players who wanted to be a part of something larger, and he worked his whole career to create that something. He cherished those players who played football with intensity but lived with an even deeper and greater passion. When he looked in the mirror, he liked seeing an Ivy League–educated man who listened to Puccini, read Shakespeare, pondered poetry, devised disarming football strategies, and believed that winning and losing football games was a frenzied and heart-pumping but ultimately meaningless element of a life spent teaching.
Ah, but Joe Paterno loved to win.
“Yes, I know, I preach a lot about being willing to lose, that there can be valor in losing to a better opponent,” Paterno wrote in his autobiography. “Yes, I know it seems contradictory, inconsistent, maybe even hypocritical. I’m sorry about that. The world is a more complicated and ambiguous place than I wish it were.”
After the meeting with Spanier, after the “To be or not to be” goal-line stand, after the five toughest years of his coaching life, Joe Paterno rededicated himself to winning. He was seventy-eight years old, written off, but he believed that he could still lead Penn State to victory without cheating, without compromising on academics, without resorting to shortcuts.
But there would be concessions. There had to be concessions. The media requests, some of which had already been weeded out, would be cut off almost entirely. The speaking engagements, the appearances, the dinners with sponsors that had become rarities were stopped entirely. The radio show, which was done live with callers, became a few minutes of talking into broadcaster Steve Jones’s tape recorder sometime during the week. The engagement with the board of trustees and other power brokers at the school would be reduced to a minimum. Paterno would concentrate on coaching football. “Let me coach my football team!” he screamed repeatedly at Guido D’Elia. Everything else—everything that didn’t directly involve the football team and its success—faded into the distant background.
Paterno attacked the recruiting process with an energy he had not shown in years. There were two players he desperately wanted: a wonderful athlete from a suburb of Pittsburgh named Justin King, and Derrick Williams, a wide receiver almost unanimously viewed as the top high school prospect in America. Paterno personally went to King’s home, went to see his cousin play basketball, tried to impress upon King that Penn State football still meant something special. With King, Paterno had a slight advantage because King’s stepfather, Terry Smith, had played at Penn State for him.
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Derrick Williams was trickier. He was from Greenbelt, Maryland, which did not put him in the usual sphere of Penn State recruiting dominance. Every major college team in America wanted him. The odds of his choosing Penn State, which had suffered four losing seasons in five years and was coached by an aging legend who had lost much of his fan base, seemed the longest of long shots. But Paterno saw something in Williams that others didn’t see. He saw a young man who longed for a deep challenge and the possibility of greatness.
He wrote in one of his handwritten letters to Williams:
Derrick, we are one or two “big play” skill people away from a team that can compete for the national championship in 2005 . . .
Everybody on our staff believes you are the wide receiver who can immediately fill that need . . .
Derrick, ordinarily I don’t recruit in the spring, but this year—but this year—the first day we are allowed on the road I’m going to be in Eleanor Roosevelt High School. I want to make sure you know how much we want you and how important you are in our future plans.
Before I retire, I want to have one more great team that can win a National Championship. We have been fortunate enough to have Undefeated-Untied National Championship Contenders in four different decades.
The rest did not need to be said. Paterno wanted Williams to know, to believe that he could play the starring role in bringing Penn State back to glory. Yes, of course, he could go to thriving programs at Oklahoma or Ohio State or Florida and be a part of something there. But at Penn State, he could achieve unimaginable heights. Williams bought in. “Penn State is missing a piece of the puzzle,” he told reporters after choosing to go to State College. “Maybe it’s cocky or whatever, but I think I’m that piece.”
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