Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  This kind of recruiting was unusual for Paterno. Throughout his career he had told high school players that he wanted them to come to Penn State, but the football team would be fine if they did not come. Always he had emphasized the team over the individual and insisted that no one was irreplaceable. Always he had insisted that winning was secondary to the life and academic lessons of college. He did not back away from those words, but he had to get Derrick Williams and Justin King. “I wouldn’t care if we didn’t get anybody but those two kids,” he said on his radio show.

  Paterno sent a couple of coaches, including his son and quarterback coach Jay, to Austin to watch how Texas coached their offense around star quarterback Vince Young. Joe helped redesign the offense; he wanted it built around a gifted but unproven senior quarterback named Michael Robinson. The man who had always believed that defense wins championships wanted an offense as new and electrifying as any in America.

  It worked. Penn State scored more than 40 points in back-to-back weeks against Cincinnati and Central Michigan. They pulled off a spectacular comeback against Northwestern—the winning touchdown a spectacular pass from Robinson to Williams—then smashed Minnesota 44–14. It was astonishing. Williams was almost impossible for defenses to cover, and Paterno said they had to find more ways to get him the ball. (Paterno, who for so long had been against freshmen even playing, called Williams the most talented freshman he’d ever coached.) Justin King was a defensive player, but Paterno used him a bit on offense as well. Two other freshmen receivers who were not as highly recruited, Deon Butler and Jordan Norwood, played major roles. When Penn State upset sixth-ranked Ohio State, people began to accept that this young Penn State team was very good.

  Penn State lost a breathtakingly close game to Michigan, another game with an officiating controversy. Late in the game, with Penn State leading, Michigan coach Lloyd Carr was able to get the referees to put a few seconds back on the clock, time the officials determined had run off incorrectly. That time was the difference. Michigan quarterback Chad Henne dropped back with six seconds left and threw an incomplete pass. But, because of the extra time, one second remained. In that one second, Henne threw a 10-yard touchdown pass to Mario Manningham that won the game. Paterno was so distraught and angry after the loss he did not allow his players to talk to the media.

  “I just wanna get them on the bus, get to the airport and go home, so we can start thinking about next week instead of having them moan about what happened,” Paterno told reporters. He would always believe that his team got cheated at Michigan. He felt so strongly about what he saw as a pattern of controversy at Michigan—and about what he viewed as an old boys’ network in the conference—that, privately, he talked again about getting Penn State out of the Big Ten.

  But this team was too good to falter after the loss. The Nittany Lions obliterated Illinois 63–10 the next week. They beat Purdue, Wisconsin, and Michigan State in succession and with relative ease to win the Big Ten and earn a place in the Orange Bowl. (The Rose Bowl, where the Big Ten champion usually went, was reserved that year for the national championship game.) Suddenly the press about Penn State and Paterno gushed. Reporters called him the miracle man. They admonished themselves for ever doubting him. “If nothing else,” Harvey Araton wrote in the New York Times, “Paterno’s resurgent season should shut people up long enough to allow him to retire on his own terms.” Araton did not have to point out that the Times was among the loudest in the crowd trying to push Paterno out.

  Penn State played Florida State in the Orange Bowl, which meant that Paterno would face Bobby Bowden, the man who had passed him on the all-time victories list. At the start of the game, Bowden had 359 victories, Paterno 353. It was at the Orange Bowl that Paterno revealed the contentious meeting he’d had with Spanier and how he emerged victorious. “[Spanier and other officials] didn’t quite understand where I was coming from or what it took to get a football program going,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “I said, ‘Relax. Get off my backside.’ ”

  “When Joe told everyone how he had told off the president, that was terrible,” one Penn State official said. “It was beneath him. He could have just stayed quiet about it and let the season speak for itself. But I guess he was so angry that President Spanier tried to force him out that he wanted to get in the final word. It was close to insubordination, really. And after that, Joe lost a lot of support around the school.”

  Penn State beat Florida State 26–23 in triple overtime, and the miracle season was complete. “Nobody believed in us,” Tamba Hali told reporters after the game, and for once that “no respect” cliché that so many teams relied on rang true.

  “I would watch Coach Paterno,” said Adam Taliaferro, who was in law school at the time, “and I would see how passionately he believed the team was going to start winning again. And I knew that nobody outside the program believed in him. Nobody . . . . But they just didn’t know the strength of Coach. They didn’t understand how deeply he believed.”

  I asked Taliaferro if he really believed the team would turn around during those hard years. He hesitated for a moment. “It was looking pretty rough. But I was at practice every day. I saw the way he was coaching . . . . You don’t underestimate Joe Paterno. I learned that when I was in the hospital. He was such strength for me. That’s how he is as a coach. Yes, I thought he would win again . . . if they would give him the chance.”

  PATERNO’S TEAMS NEVER AGAIN SUFFERED a losing record after that. They won another Big Ten title in 2008 and were again only seconds away from an undefeated season. But that did not mean that things went smoothly. Penn State fans expected more than just winning seasons and near glory; Paterno himself had taught them to expect more. “Ah, maybe we got a bit spoiled up here,” he would say.

  His refusal to step down as coach evolved from questionable to controversial to outrageous and finally to unalterable fact. In 2006, at age seventy-nine, he was beaten up physically. He had to leave the sideline against Ohio State because of what he called a nasty stomach flu. At Wisconsin, he broke his leg when Wisconsin’s DeAndre Levy and Penn State’s Andrew Quarless inadvertently ran him over on the sideline. There were those who thought this might be the thing that would finally convince him he was too old to coach. He sat out the next week’s game against Temple, but he was in the press box coaching a week later against Michigan State. He turned eighty barely a month after that.

  His hearing began to go, leading to painfully awkward exchanges in the few press conferences he held. In 2010, at eighty-three, he had an allergic reaction to medication, and he looked so worn down that many observers were convinced he was near death. They were not wrong; even family members wondered if he would recover. At the bowl game that year, there were rumors that Paterno had been rushed to the hospital. This time the rumors were not true.

  Still he coached.

  He more than coached. Behind the scenes, he was as feisty as ever. He fought battles; many he lost. At the end, when it fit the narrative, there would be much talk about how Paterno ran State College and Penn State like an unopposed dictator. The truth was different. Paterno was powerful enough to fight off the president of the university and powerful enough to win some other fights. But he lost as many as he won. He did not want a new baseball stadium built adjacent to Beaver Stadium. He thought it a waste of money—“I think some Big Ten schools are going to drop baseball,” he griped to friends—and, perhaps closer to home, the stadium would cut deeply into prime parking spaces for football games. He fought against it furiously, using whatever political power he had. The stadium was built anyway. He strongly opposed the Big Ten Network, an all-sports television network the conference wanted to launch to make money for the schools. He thought it was misguided and sold the league short. The Big Ten Network launched anyway.

  “I know people think I run things around here, but I’m really just a guy with a big mouth,” Paterno would say. “I have a lot of opinions. The only ones who have to listen to them are
my players and my family. And even my family doesn’t listen to them all the time.”

  There was one behind-the-scenes battle Paterno fought with ferocity. And this one, unlike the others, he decided he could not lose.

  VICKY TRIPONEY BECAME THE VICE president for student affairs at Penn State in 2003. She would become one of the most quoted people of 2011, when, in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, she told the Wall Street Journal and others that Paterno had fought her relentlessly over football player discipline. She released some interoffice emails to and from athletic director Tim Curley and president Graham Spanier that strongly suggested Paterno wanted favorable treatment for his players. In one of the emails she submitted to the Journal she had written, “The Coach is insistent he knows best how to discipline his players . . . and their status as a student when they commit violations of our standards should NOT be our concern.”

  “Ex–Penn State Official Saw Paterno’s ‘Dark Side’ ” was the USA Today headline. Triponey’s describing Paterno’s “dark side” was galvanizing for a media hungry to find corruption in Paterno’s past. Paterno’s lawyer Wick Sollers put out a standard denial, calling her allegations “out of context, misleading and filled with inaccuracies.” Scott Paterno said, “We can’t swing at every pitch in the dirt.”

  Her story played for weeks and months, and stories and chapters written after Paterno’s death continued to be built around her quotes. One close friend of Paterno wondered, “Don’t reporters know how to use Google?” If they had, they would have found that Triponey’s time at Penn State was not without controversy, including well-publicized clashes with student government, the campus radio station, and fraternities.

  Paterno had numerous letters in his files from parents complaining about how their sons had been treated by the Office of Judicial Affairs. He believed that Triponey and the Office of Judicial Affairs targeted his football players. Maybe this was the skewed view of a football coach; maybe it was the truth. Paterno believed it until the day he died.

  The decisive battle between Paterno and Triponey was over a fight in April 2007 that involved several football players. The team’s safety Anthony Scirrotto was reportedly walking with his girlfriend when they got into an argument with three young men, who were also students at Penn State. The girlfriend may have kicked one of them, and she was pushed down. Scirrotto stepped up and was hit in the face. He would admit to following the men to their apartment complex and calling his roommate for support. One text message led to another, each sounding more serious than the last, and in time at least seventeen football players showed up at the apartment complex.

  Several of the football players forced their way into the apartment and found the men who hit Scirrotto. Punches were thrown, a table was overturned, a bar stool was thrown and may have been used to hit someone. Beyond this, the stories diverge. The story that would be reported in the newspapers and on television was of an out-of-control scene where one man was knocked unconscious with a bottle and then pummeled; another claimed to be punched and kicked in the face repeatedly. The football players involved said this was wildly exaggerated. The police arrested six Penn State players and charged them with a total of twenty-seven offenses, nine of them felonies.

  Paterno believed that Judicial Affairs, and Triponey in particular, had no business getting involved in something already being handled by the police. He believed even more strongly that Triponey would not give his players a fair hearing. He did not condone the fight, but, as is clear in his notes, he agreed with his players that the details had been overblown. He never believed the fight had been excessively violent or that anyone was hit with a bottle. Two of the men in the apartment had gone to the hospital but had been immediately released, so there were no long-lasting injuries. (One victim told ESPN that he suffered headaches for weeks afterward.) There was underage drinking going on in the apartment before the players even got there. He thought it an unfortunate incident that merited harsh punishment, but he also believed that because it was a fight involving football players, it was his responsibility as coach to handle the school discipline. He wrote in his notes:

  In my time at Penn State, no University official has ever tried to destroy a football season and a football team over a fight—especially involving a party organized by underage drinkers.

  • No guns.

  • No Drugs.

  • Nobody seriously hurt.

  • No robbery.

  • No Sexual Harassment.

  If somebody knocked somebody out with a beer bottle and/or a bar stool, and if somebody punched an unconscious person I WANT TO KNOW and I will handle them appropriately. They will be gone . . . . But I want to know. I don’t want to guess. The problem is people assume the worst. I won’t do that.

  BASED ON THE EMAILS SHE released, Triponey believed that Paterno would be too lax in his punishment of players; she insisted that such punishment was the purview of Judicial Affairs. Paterno believed Triponey wanted to make headlines punishing football players. Maybe one was right and the other wrong. Maybe there was something to both of their arguments. “It’s not a fight I want—it would be a Pyrrhic victory,” Paterno wrote in a note to himself. “But if I fight, I cannot afford to lose.” He announced that every member of the team would perform ten hours of community service and spend two hours cleaning up the stadium on Sundays after home games. And then, in quick succession:

  • Four players had their charges dropped, leaving Anthony Scirrotto and Chris Baker.

  • Scirrotto had five of his charges dismissed and pled to a lower charge on the sixth; the judge said there was no evidence to suggest he had assaulted anyone or tried to incite his teammates.

  • Baker allegedly got into another fight in October and was thrown off the team the following summer.

  In the middle of it all, Vicky Triponey announced her resignation. Four years later, after the Sandusky revelations, she came forward with the emails accusing Paterno of favoritism and meddling. At the time, nobody would publicly stand up for Paterno, but one player who was involved in the fight said this on the condition that he would stay anonymous: “If it was up to that woman, they would have thrown me out of school and let me rot. That’s how she was. They only cared about me on Saturdays. Some of them didn’t even care about me then. But now I’m a father, and I have a child, and I have a good job. I owe that to Joe Paterno. He wasn’t perfect. But he believed in me. When nobody else did, he believed in me.”

  THE FINAL ACT

  Prince Richard: He’ll get no satisfaction out of me.

  Prince Geoffrey: My, you chivalric fool, as if the way one fell down mattered.

  Prince Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

  —THE LION IN WINTER

  { Aria }

  Joe Paterno, Guido D’Elia, Scott Paterno, and Dan McGinn

  In Joe Paterno’s kitchen

  November 9, 2011 (reconstructed from interviews)

  Dan McGinn (crisis manager): Okay, I’m going to read the statement out loud here, so all of us can hear it. We’ve been over this a lot, so let’s go from the beginning to the end. Okay, here we go.

  I am absolutely devastated by the developments in this case. I grieve for the children and their families and I pray for their comfort and relief.

  I have come to work every day for the last sixty-one years with one clear goal in mind: To serve the best interests of this university and the young men who have been entrusted to my care. I have the same goal today.

  That’s why I decided to announce my retirement effective at the end of the season. At this moment, the Board of Trustees should not spend a single moment discussing my status. They have far more important matters to address. I want to make this as easy for them as I possibly can.

  This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more. My goals now are to keep my commitment to my players and staff and finish the season with dignity and determination
. And then I will spend the rest of my life doing everything I can to help this University.

  Okay, thoughts?

  Scott Paterno: I think it’s the best we can do.

  Guido D’Elia: I’m still a little worried about the part about Joe saying with the benefit of hindsight he wished he would have done more.

  Joe Paterno: Guido . . .

  Guido: I just think that people are going to misquote that. They’re going to try to use it as an admission of guilt.

  Joe: Guido, it’s how I feel. I do wish I had done more. I thought I did what I was supposed to do, but you look at it now, everything that’s happened—I do wish.

  Scott: I don’t think it’s an admission of guilt. I think we’re making it clear that if Dad had known what really happened, he would have done more. But he didn’t know, and he’s just saying he wished he had known.

  Dan: I think, under the circumstances, this is probably the best we can do.

  Joe: There’s one thing that bothers me about this statement.

  (Everybody looks at him.)

  Joe: This part here that says, “I have come to work every day for the last sixty-one years with one clear goal in mind.”

  (Everybody continues to look at him.)

  Joe: Well, I didn’t come to work every day for sixty-one years. I was sick a couple of days, and there were other things, like when David got hurt. I don’t know if I’d say that’s completely honest.

  Fall

  Joe Paterno began the last football preseason of his life feeling great. Anyway, that’s what he told himself. During the previous two seasons he had been ill and he looked gaunt; now he had the strength to walk again, and he walked all over State College. People spotted him miles from his home. “You need a ride, Joe?” they would shout through the car window, and he would wave his hand, smile, and keep walking, as he had as a young man, focusing on the road ahead. He was eighty-four years old, but he announced to anyone who would listen that he had not felt this good in years. And he had a good feeling about his team.