Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  Like the Penn State players, Jay always called his father “Joe” when they were on the field or in a game. But this was a private moment. “Dad,” he asked, “what do you think I should do?”

  “Is there even a question what you should do?” Joe replied. “You have to coach the kids. That’s not even a question.”

  Tom Bradley, Paterno’s longtime assistant coach and now the interim head coach, held a press conference. He stuck tightly to his script, calling Joe “Coach Paterno,” referring four times to the “ongoing investigation,” and saying, “That’s up to the administration” three times. Bradley was a Pittsburgh guy who had played for Paterno, coached for Paterno, and liked saying that Paterno yelled at him more than anybody, even Sue. Only once did he go off script to say, “Coach Paterno will go down in history as one of the greatest men. Maybe most of you know him as a great football coach. I’ve had the privilege and honor to spend time with him. He’s had such a dynamic impact on so many, so many, and I’ll say it again, so many people and players’ lives. It’s with great respect that I speak of him, and I’m proud to say that I worked for him.”

  If Bradley had said such words even one week earlier, no one would have blinked. People had said things like this about Paterno countless times through the years. But this was not the week before; now people wondered how anyone could say anything good about Joe Paterno. As I was writing this book, the line between the Time Before and the Time After became clear: Before November 5, 2011, it was very difficult to find anyone willing to say a truly bad word about Joe Paterno. After November 5, it was far more difficult to find anyone willing to say a good word.

  ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, PATERNO MET with his coaches at his house. He sobbed uncontrollably. This was his bad day. Later, one of his former captains, Brandon Short, and his wife, Mahreen, stopped by the house. When Brandon asked, “How are you doing, Coach?” Paterno answered, “I’m okay,” but the last syllable was shaky, muffled by crying, and then he broke down and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.” Nobody knew how to handle such emotion. Joe had always been the strong one, had always seemed invulnerable. Jay claimed that the only two times he had seen his father cry were when Joe’s mother died and when Adam Taliaferro was hurt on the football field. On Thursday, though, he cried continually.

  “My name,” he told Jay, “I have spent my whole life trying to make that name mean something. And now it’s gone.”

  When Friday morning came, though, Joe was different. The crying was over. Nobody would ever see him cry again. Nobody would see him discouraged again. “It was like a transformation,” Mary Kay said. “He had one bad day. But after that, he was positive.”

  “You know what?” Joe said. “I’m not going to feel sorry for myself. Are you kidding? I’ve lived a great life. Healthy children. Healthy grandchildren. Loving wife. I look around the world and see people who have real problems, serious problems. I’m the luckiest guy.”

  The stories swirled on television and radio, the Internet and newspapers, each getting progressively darker. A couple of people from Paterno’s past, including Vicky Triponey, emerged to air their grievances. The press gave them a big stage. Anything resembling a Paterno defense was attacked mercilessly. When Franco Harris publicly defended his old coach, a Pittsburgh casino—a casino—put its relationship with Harris on hold. There was talk of canceling the rest of the Penn State football season. Paterno stayed silent. He watched the Nebraska game on television. Penn State lost 17–14.

  A few days later, it was announced that Paterno had lung cancer. He had not felt well for a few weeks, but he would not have gone to see the doctor had he still been coaching. When the doctor gave him the diagnosis, Paterno felt confident he would beat it. In their press release, the family described it as “treatable.” They always did hope for the best.

  “We had been through so much,” Sue Paterno recalled. “And I always thought, in the end, we would win.”

  Paterno walks off the field before a game against Notre Dame (Jason Sipes/Altoona Mirror)

  Finale

  There were good days and bad the last month and a half of Joe Paterno’s life. Most of them were bad. Outside, the cancer diagnosis was seen as something unreal. If Paterno’s life had been a novel, an editor would have insisted there be some time placed between Paterno’s firing and the discovery of the cancer that would end his life. But it happened all at once in real life. And while the cancer diagnosis was seen by the outside world as merely another surreal part of a surreal story, it was from Paterno’s perspective all that mattered. The chemotherapy and radiation wrecked him. When he got out of bed one evening and tried to go to the bathroom without turning on the light, he fell and broke his pelvis. He was in pain except when medicated.

  Every now and then he seemed like his old self. He loved the television show M*A*S*H. The show had gone off the air in 1983, but he was too busy to watch it then. Now he watched the show every chance he could, and he talked about it often. “Alan Alda is an Italian kid from Brooklyn, I think,” he would say. Alda was actually an Irish Italian kid (nine years younger than Paterno) from the Bronx. But close enough.

  He tried to be spirited. The family threw an eighty-fifth birthday party for him just before Christmas, and for that one day he seemed younger, not older. He told stories; he laughed at jokes. Friends called, former players showed up, and he came to life. Paterno did not party often, but when he did he was usually the most enthusiastic person in the room.

  Most days, though, he felt tired. The treatments were hard on him. He refused to be somber. In many ways, he reverted back to the young man who sent cheery letters home from Korea. He talked about getting better, traveling with Sue, maybe writing down a few of his thoughts for a book. He talked about writing a book of poetry. “My poems will rhyme,” he promised. But as the days went on, it grew harder and harder for him to build up his energy even for such thought. Outside his home, outside State College, it was open season on Paterno. The Big Ten Conference took his name off their football trophy. Jim Boeheim, the Syracuse basketball coach whose team had once been banned from tournament play by the NCAA for recruiting violations, told reporters, “I’m not Joe Paterno,” when child molesting allegations were made against his longtime assistant coach. Former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer insisted that Paterno and his staff had to know about Sandusky. (An outraged Galen Hall called Switzer to say that he had been Switzer’s assistant coach for years and didn’t have any idea of some of the private stuff Switzer had been doing.) Sports Illustrated put a photo of a downtrodden Paterno on the cover under the headline “The Failure and Shame of Penn State.” As Guido D’Elia had predicted, dozens and dozens used Paterno’s own words—misquoted, even—to assert that he should have done more.

  Was Joe Paterno bitter? It is impossible, of course, to know his deepest thoughts. Again and again his formers players would call to check up on him and find, instead, that Paterno said: “Ah, don’t worry about me. How is your family?” When he was told about someone on television or in the newspaper charging Paterno with grave sins, he would say: “Ah, the truth will come out.” He had his dark moments, certainly, when he wondered how old friends could turn so suddenly on him and how people at Penn State, the school he had loved and championed for most of his life, could believe such terrible things about him. But by all accounts, he would not allow those dark moments to torment him. He read. He watched television. He talked with family and friends and former players. He talked about how the love people expressed for him overpowered the condemnation, fair and unfair.

  “[The criticism] really doesn’t matter,” said Paterno in our last conversation. “It really doesn’t. I know what I tried to do. Maybe everybody will see that in time. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they will judge me by what I tried to do. Maybe they won’t. What difference does it make? I just hope there’s justice for the victims.”

  He was spent. After we talked, I called my wife to say that Joe Paterno would not live m
uch longer. When she asked me what made me say that, I told her that Paterno had said, “If I make it through this, I think I’d like to travel to Italy again.”

  “So?” my wife asked.

  “He said ‘if.’ And Joe Paterno is not an ‘if’ kind of person.”

  THE WEEK BEFORE PATERNO DIED, he did an interview with Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, the only interview he would grant except for the conversations we had for this book. He and his team thought Jenkins was a good and brave journalist and that she would be fair. They had dinner with her at the round table in the kitchen. Her story ran in the Post on a Sunday, and the family agreed it was fair. By then, Paterno was back in the hospital.

  By Wednesday, most of the family suspected that Joe would never come out of the hospital. Sue, who had seen her oldest son, David, come back from near death, was the last holdout. She still hoped for a miracle. But reality was harsher this time. Too many organs were failing. By Saturday, everyone knew that it was a matter of hours. He was not in pain, but he was also unable to speak. People tried to read his eyes and his face as they came to say their goodbyes. Guido D’Elia leaned in close and told him, “We’ll keep that stadium filled. We’ll get the right players. We’ll graduate them.” At that point, Mary Kay said, “Look! His lips moved. He said ‘Thank you.’ ”

  “No, he didn’t, Mary Kay,” Guido said, smiling though there were tears in his eyes. “I worked with this man for forty years, and he never once said thank you.”

  They lined up, one by one, to share a final moment: his children, his wife, some of the players who were closest to him. Jay, who idolized his father probably more than anyone, wrote some football plays on a pad. There was I-Right 643, the pass to Gregg Garrity that had won the 1982 championship. There was Slot Left 62Z, a pass to Bobby Engram that won the game at Michigan in 1994. Jay leaned in close to his father and said, in his strongest coach’s voice, “Remember how you always told us that you have to keep something back, something in your back pocket, something you will use when you need it most? Well, if you held anything back in your life, now’s the time. Use it now! Use it now!”

  On Sunday morning, January 22, 2012, Jay again leaned in close to his father. This time he whispered, “You’ve done all you can do.” Moments later Joe Paterno died. The obituary in the New York Times led with a paragraph stating that he had won more games than any other major college coach, became the face of Penn State and a symbol of integrity, and had been fired during a child sexual abuse scandal. Joe Paterno was eighty-five when he died. People lined up for three days to walk by his casket. They lined the streets of State College as his hearse passed through. At the memorial, his son Jay led the gathering in a reading of Joe’s favorite prayer, the Lord’s Prayer:

  Our Father who art in heaven,

  Hallowed be thy name.

  Thy Kingdom come,

  Thy will be done

  On earth as it is in heaven.

  Give us this day our daily bread.

  And forgive us our trespasses

  As we forgive those who trespass against us;

  And lead us not into temptation,

  But deliver us from evil.

  For thine is the kingdom,

  And the power, and the glory,

  Forever and ever.

  Amen.

  Joe Paterno would end every game by gathering the players and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He loved it—not so much for religious reasons but for the words. Look. The Lord’s Prayer uses the words “us” and “we” and “our.” It doesn’t use the word “I” or “me” or “mine.” Paterno understood. It’s a team prayer.

  Joe Paterno gets carried off the field after winning his first national championship (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

  { Encore }

  When Diana, Joe Paterno’s oldest child, was getting her master’s degree in business, she wrote a paper about how to motivate people without offering monetary rewards. She called to interview her father. He told her that he found he had to treat everyone differently. Some of his players responded to screaming; some did not. Some responded to praise; some did not.

  “How did you know which was which?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t always right,” he answered. “Sometimes I missed the mark. Sometimes I thought they could handle it when they couldn’t. But I think I was right most of the time.”

  Diana laughed when thinking about this. Her father was hard on her. He expected her to do well, to stand up for herself, to do the right thing even when it was hard. The expectations were always there. She was not allowed to wear jeans, and straight A’s were expected. As she said, “Dad could be very intimidating.” But she also remembered him growling, pretending to be a monster, and chasing her and the other kids around the house. She remembered him reading to her at night. And, of course, she remembered the dinner table conversations.

  Shortly after Joe died, Sue gave Diana a letter Diana had written to her father in 1981, the year she turned eighteen and headed off to college, shortly after a friend’s father had passed away.

  Dear Dad,

  Going to Chrissy’s father’s viewing tonight made me realize how much my own father, you, means to me. I never really get the chance to tell you how much I love you. I owe everything I am to you and Mom—all my values and knowledge. You’ve taught me so much about life—the importance of being yourself and doing what you feel is right, because in the end you have to live with yourself. You’ve also shown me how much honesty means, and treating everyone equally, never being snobby and accepting people for what they are while respecting their beliefs.

  You’ve taught me so many other things too, not just by word of mouth, mostly by example! I will always admire and respect your integrity and selflessness. I can only pray to be half the person you are.

  I think I’ve finally realized the meaning of growing up. It’s learning to accept and respect yourself and to always do what you know is right (“To thine own self be true!”). I think I have a pretty good idea of who and what I am.

  Your little girl always.

  “Since he died,” said Diana, “I have thought a lot, ‘What would Dad do?’ I thought about his character, the whole thing, the board of trustees, the way it ended. People talk about revenge or getting back at people or whatever. That’s not what Dad would have wanted. He would have wanted the truth to come out. That’s all.”

  —

  JOHN SKORUPAN PLAYED FOOTBALL AT Penn State and graduated in 1973. He became a salesman, and in his daily life he would think often about how Paterno had always told his players that they needed to play every down believing that they would make the big play that would turn the game around. Of course, most of the time they would not make that play or even have the chance to. But every so often, Paterno told them, the opportunity will arrive: the ball will come your way, your opponent will make a slight mistake, your anticipation will perfectly meet the moment. And the only way to make it work is to be ready for it. “There will be opportunities that will change your life,” he remembered Paterno saying. “You need to be ready.”

  —

  JIM BRADLEY—THE BROTHER OF TOM Bradley, who had replaced Jerry Sandusky as Paterno’s top defensive assistant coach, and had become the interim coach after Paterno was pushed out—also played for Paterno. He became an orthopedic physician in Pittsburgh after he finished playing at Penn State. He remembered the time he crashed into Paterno during practice. Paterno had a knack even as a young man for getting in the way in practice.

  “I thought I killed him right there and then,” Bradley said. “Amazingly, he springs up and says, ‘I didn’t hurt you, did I?’ ”

  —

  TIM JANOCKO WAS A RESERVE player in the 1970s, and when he graduated he became a high school coach. One day, late in Paterno’s life, Janocko showed up at Paterno’s office early for a gathering of the Pennsylvania Scholastic Football Coaches Association. Even in his fifties, Janocko was still living on P
aterno time.

  He arrived early enough that Paterno could give him a tour of the offices. When Janocko was playing, Paterno once asked him, “Have you ever heard about the guy who didn’t get ulcers but was a carrier?” This was the sort of thing Paterno said to players. Now, though, Paterno stopped and said, “Janocko, I’m proud of what you’ve done with your life. You’re helping kids.”

  “I’m fifty-two,” Janocko would say, “and I teared up. It meant that much to me.”

  —

  THE CHILD VICTIMS OF JERRY SANDUSKY—their names replaced by numbers as they grew older and told their stories—would see Joe Paterno as the man who should have saved them. Many could have stepped forward, of course: Sandusky was surrounded by people who were supposed to be experts at spotting and preventing child abuse. He was the most recognizable of figures in State College, almost as unmistakable as Paterno. Over the years, many people could have understood Sandusky’s crimes and stepped forward to stop him.

  But it is Paterno who stands out. Some would call him all-powerful. Some would say he was a past-his-prime coach clinging to his job. Some would argue that he led a cover-up to protect his legacy; others that he was simply one in a faltering chain of command.

  But in the end he did not stop Jerry Sandusky. “Find the truth,” he told me. This, in the storm, is the closest thing I could find.

  —