Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

MARY KAY PATERNO NEVER LIKED it when people called her father a saint, but she was never entirely sure why it bothered her so much. She thought maybe it was because it wasn’t true; she knew her father to be opinionated and cranky and tough to be around sometimes. But she thought there was something bigger involved in her reaction.

  At the end, when people who did not know her father charged him with horrible crimes and sins, she thought she understood. To call someone a saint or a fiend is to reduce him to cardboard, to turn his life’s decisions into mere computer code, to invest him with superhuman powers—in other words, to make him unlike real people.

  One of her favorite photographs was of her father sitting on a park bench outside the Creamery in State College, eating an ice cream cone. He loved ice cream. He would chomp on pretzels when he worked. He sang off-key. He often dragged an old chair out to his back porch and would roll up his pants and design game plans in the sun.

  “He always tried,” she said. “That’s what I take from him most.”

  —

  HIS AMAZING MEMORY: THAT’S WHAT so many of them thought about after they graduated. Jim Litterelle graduated from Penn State in 1967, so Paterno was still an assistant coach under Rip Engle when he recruited Litterelle. Still, Litterelle remembered the scene of Joe at the dining-room table, talking to his mother and father, laughing.

  About twenty-five years later, Paterno was speaking at a luncheon, and there was a line of people waiting to get his autograph. As he looked up he saw Litterelle.

  “Hi, Jim!” he shouted. “I still remember the cheesecake your mom served Rip and me when we came to your home to recruit you.”

  —

  TED SEBASTIANELLI WENT INTO THE National Guard after he graduated from Penn State in 1969, and fifteen years later he visited Paterno. They talked about Ted’s sister Lisa and a Penn State cheerleader who also happened to be named Sebastianelli. Paterno asked if they were related. “No,” Ted said. “My sister is older than her.”

  “She,” Paterno said sharply. “Older than she.”

  Sebastianelli was embarrassed to have bungled the language in front of his old coach. But a year later, he was watching a Penn State game on television, and he heard the color commentator Pat Haden, a Rhodes scholar, admit that Paterno had corrected his English in their pregame meeting. And Sebastianelli felt better.

  “To this day,” he said, “whether I’m reading, writing, speaking, or listening, it’s as if I have a little voice in my head asking me, ‘Is that word used correctly?’ ”

  —

  TAMBA HALI, WHO WOULD GO on to be an NFL star, remembered Paterno yelling at him, “You are the dumbest player to ever play for me.” He remembered it as one of the cruelest things anyone had ever said to him. But more than a decade later he found the story hilarious, a story he liked to tell again and again.

  Ron Pavlechko would become a high school coach and athletic director in State College, and he recalled Paterno screaming, “Pavlechko, keep up that effort and you’ll never be anything but a journeyman!”

  “I have always relied on that comment for fuel,” Pavlechko said. “I have relied on it every day for my entire life. I did not want to be a journeyman.”

  Matt Millen, who became an NFL star, a team general manager, and a television personality, would never forget the day in 1979 when Paterno stripped him of his captaincy and told him, “Millen, you’re never going to amount to anything.” It took Millen a while to come to grips with some of the hard moments. Years later, he was at Penn State with his own children, chasing them around, trying to keep them in line. “And I look over at Joe,” Millen said. “And he was laughing his head off.”

  —

  SCOTT HETTINGER WAS NOT A highly recruited player; it took him four years to score his first touchdown. In his excitement, he left the ball on the ground and celebrated with his teammates. After the game, Paterno came over to Hettinger, who prepared himself for the coach’s congratulations. Instead Paterno shrieked, “Hettinger, next time, hand the ball to the official. Act like you’ve been there before.”

  When Hettinger served in the navy, when he became an insurance salesman, when he was with his family, he thought about that. Act with grace. Always. Years later, when his mother passed away, he found a shoebox. Inside were dozens of little notes Joe and Sue Paterno had sent his family.

  —

  KEITH KARPINSKI WAS ONE OF many fine linebackers to play at Penn State. For thirty years, if you were young and wanted to be a linebacker, there was a good chance you wanted to play at Penn State. Karpinski did. His father, Carl, saw it differently. He saw other coaches from other schools aggressively recruiting his son. Paterno was nowhere to be found. “You call Paterno,” Carl told Karpinski’s high school coach, “and tell him if he wants my son to play for him he should come to the house for dinner.”

  Paterno came for dinner. There were more than thirty people at the table, including the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, Karpinski’s hometown. At one point, Paterno saw Carl sitting off by himself in a lounge chair. “Hey Carl,” he said, “you look like Archie Bunker sitting there in your chair.” Archie Bunker, a character in the television show All in the Family, was famous for his ethnic insensitivities and general bigotry.

  “Hey, watch your mouth, you dumb dago,” Carl Karpinski said, doing his best Archie Bunker impression.

  Keith was mortified. He rushed over to stop his father from saying any more, but there were Joe and Carl acting out scenes from All in the Family, calling each other all sorts of names, laughing. Karpinski went to Penn State, where he was a star on the football field, and he played briefly in the NFL. He became a school principal.

  —

  PATERNO WAS FAMOUSLY BAD WITH names. Well, players’ names. Parents’ names, wives’ names, kids’ names: those he never forgot. But players’ names—even when he was talking to the media he would sometimes call players by their numbers.

  When Rob Luedeke was a senior at Penn State, he started at center. Before the game against Rutgers in 1990, while Luedeke was stretching, Paterno walked by and said, “Hey, Bob, the guys tell me it’s your birthday. What can I do for you on your birthday?”

  Luedeke responded, “Joe, I’ve been here for five years now. You could call me Rob.”

  Everybody broke up laughing. Paterno replied in that famous squeal, “Ah, Luedeke, you’re a wisecracker.”

  Luedeke became a district manager for Abbott Laboratories. “I live Joe’s lessons every day.”

  —

  DAVID PATERNO WAS ALWAYS WORKING, even as a young boy. Joe wanted it that way. David shined shoes and cut grass. He found a snow-blower at a garage sale and borrowed forty dollars from his father to buy it. (He paid the money back by shoveling the Paterno driveway for free in perpetuity.) And so on.

  After his father died, he realized that he worked all those jobs because his father had taught him that a person was not meant to sit around; a person was meant to do. That was Sue’s lesson too, of course. But there was an unspoken charge in the way Joe Paterno lived his life: that you had a duty to help people, to share your gifts with them, to leave things better than you found them.

  David loved to climb and he loved to run. This was true before his near-tragic trampoline accident, but it was true afterward as well. He felt at his best in motion. And every now and again he would challenge his father to a race.

  “I don’t think I ever beat him,” he said.

  —

  WHEN KEITH CONLIN WAS TEN, Paterno came to the house to recruit his older brother, Chris. This was in Glenside, Pennsylvania, a bedroom community of Philadelphia, and Keith saw an opportunity. He asked Paterno for fifteen autographs. He might have mentioned that he wanted one for every kid in his class. He might not have mentioned that he hoped to sell the autographs to those kids.

  In any case, Paterno smiled and signed the autographs. But on the fifteenth, he looked into Keith’s eyes and said, “Okay, this is the last one I’m signing. But in a few years I’
m going to want your autograph.” Keith smiled and nodded.

  In 1991, Paterno showed up at the Conlin home again. And this time he looked at the eighteen-year-old Keith, who was now six-foot-seven and close to three hundred pounds, and said, “I’m here for your autograph.” Keith Conlin signed with Penn State and became a dominant offensive lineman for the 1994 team that Paterno would always believe was as good an offense as there ever was in college football. Conlin got his master’s in health education from Penn State and become a businessman in State College.

  —

  CHRISTIAN MARRONE HURT HIS KNEE severely, and not for the first time, during spring practice his sophomore year. Paterno sat him down and said, “Chris, we’re not going to let you play football anymore. We could probably get this knee fixed enough for you to play, but then the same thing will happen, and the next time it happens you might not be able to walk. You’re twenty years old, and you have a whole other life waiting for you. I want you in particular to think about going to law school. I know you want to try other alternatives, but I’m telling you, you can’t play anymore.”

  Marrone looked up at Paterno with tears in his eyes.

  Paterno continued, “Now, this doesn’t mean you get a free pass. I want you to be part of our coaching staff. You will be a part of this team, and you will work your rear end off. But I want you to focus on school. You have the ability to do other things in life. And I promised your parents that I would do everything I can to help you do those things.”

  Marrone hated coaching, but he did it. Then he got his master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and went to law school at Temple, all under Paterno’s watchful eye.

  Marrone had another story, though, one he liked even more. When he was a freshman and still had big ambitions to become a football star, he was sitting with the other freshmen on Christmas Eve. It was 1994, and they were in California getting ready for the Rose Bowl.

  Christmas Eve was also the time when the grades came in, and the other freshmen were nervous. They had all heard about the way Paterno raged at freshmen about their grades. Marrone, however, felt good. He had made Dean’s List. And so—he was still embarrassed to say this years later—he got a bit of perverse pleasure watching Paterno unload on his teammates. He listened to Paterno scream at these kids about how they were cheating themselves and their families and their team by not working harder in school. Marrone was sitting next to Jim Nelson, who was frantic because his grades were not good. He was right to be worried. “Nelson!” Paterno shrieked. “You’re a slacker. A nobody. A nothing. You will never play football at Penn State with these grades.” This went on for a little while. When Paterno was finished, he turned to Marrone, who waited for the praise.

  “And you, Marrone!” Paterno screamed. “You made Dean’s List. Big deal. You think that’s something? You think you’re going anywhere with the effort you put in? If you want to do something with your life, you’ve got to do a lot better than that.”

  Nelson graduated, played seven years in the NFL, and started several businesses. Marrone worked his way up to special assistant to the U.S. secretary of defense. “It was yet another lesson: Never be complacent,” Marrone would say. “You can always do better.”

  —

  SCOTT PATERNO, THE YOUNGEST SON, had a similar thing happen to him when he was in his first year at Dickinson Law School at Penn State. Up to that point, Scott had seen himself as the screwup of the family, a view he was pretty sure he shared with his father. He had been sent to boarding school to straighten up, and he fooled around in college way too much. But at law school, he decided to apply himself, and at the end of the first semester, he was seventh in his class. Seventh! He was thrilled, and he could not wait to call home to tell his father. “I call him up, ‘Hey, I’m seventh in my class,’ ” Scott recalled. There was a silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Six people are smarter than you, and you’re okay with that?’ That’s it. Not ‘Good job.’ No, it was ‘There are six people ahead of you, and you’re calling me like you won? You’re in seventh. You didn’t win.’ ”

  —

  WE WERE SITTING AT JOE PATERNO’S table—me and him, alone—and he asked me to stop questioning for a moment. This was a couple of weeks after he had been fired, when the madness was at its height. He had just been through a dreadful coughing fit, and his face was still red from the effort. He asked me: “So, what do you think of all this?”

  I told him that it was crazy, but that was not what he was asking.

  “What do you think of all this?” he asked me again.

  I had not intended to include this in the book. It was a personal moment between writer and subject. But as the story has played out, I decided it was important. I told him that I thought he should have done more when he was told about Jerry Sandusky showering with a boy. I had heard what he had said about not understanding the severity, not knowing much about child molestation, not having Sandusky as an employee. But, I said, “You are Joe Paterno. Right or wrong, people expect more from you.”

  He nodded. He did not try to defend or deflect. He simply said, “I wish I had done more,” again, and then he descended into another coughing fit.

  —

  BRANDON PARMER WAS A WALK-ON at Penn State with a specialty for long-snapping back to punters. He was, in other words, a player Paterno had no reason to pay attention to. But one day, when Parmer was a freshman, Paterno was watching special teams practice when he suddenly barked out, “Hey! Where is that red-headed kid from Cincinnati? Get him in there!”

  Parmer was from Columbus, not Cincinnati. His hair was blond, not red. But he went in there. He would start for three years, long enough for Paterno to learn his name. One day, Parmer went into Paterno’s office to ask for a scholarship. He pleaded his case by saying that if he blew a long snap, it could cost the university millions of dollars, perhaps by costing them a major bowl bid. Paterno gave him the scholarship. And from that day forward, Paterno had it in his mind that Brandon Parmer should go to law school. He did, and he became a tax analyst in Columbus.

  “Very few players understand the why behind Coach’s methods,” Parmer said. “Coach Paterno’s lessons made very little sense until after graduation and, with the benefit of hindsight, when we are thrust into the real world.”

  —

  IN THE EARLY YEARS, PATERNO relied on his passion and forcefulness to impose his will on his younger players. But by the end, much of that was no longer necessary. He was a legend. He had won all those big games, coached all those great players. When John Bronson was a freshman, he was in awe of Paterno. Bronson was from Kent, Washington, one of the rare players who traveled across the country to play for Paterno, and it was all for this moment.

  “Here! Here! And here!” Paterno shouted. As he said each “here” he pointed, first to his head, then to his heart, then to his legs.

  “Here!” he said again, pointing again to his head. “Here!” he said again, and he banged on his chest so hard that his glasses fell off. He did not even reach down for them. “And here!” he said again, and he pointed to his legs. “You got that, Bronson?” And he went on: If you don’t have it in the head and you don’t have in the heart, you can’t have it in the legs. It all goes together. Mental. Spiritual. Physical. That’s how it works on the football field, Paterno said. And that’s how it works in life too. You have to think. You have to believe. And only then can you do.

  Bronson knew, even then, that this was the lesson he would remember. He would be a starter at Penn State, graduate, play for a little while in the NFL, and then become a multifaceted businessman in Phoenix. “His words have been in my head every day, guiding me through my life.”

  —

  CHRIS HARRELL WAS A GOOD player at Penn State. He was a cornerback and safety, and he could hit and cover and do everything else. When he was a sophomore, he went to talk to Joe Paterno about his future. He remembered the conversation li
ke so:

  Harrell: Coach, I’d like to play in the NFL. What do you think my chances are?

  Paterno: I think you will be a governor or a senator before it’s all said and done. That’s how much I believe in your future. And I will do what I can to be at your first fund-raiser.

  Harrell: But what about my future in the NFL?

  Paterno: Chris, the scope of your future is much bigger than football. I believe you could run an entire state. There will come a point in life where you will have to choose what’s more important: three new cars or a house with a three-car garage.

  Harrell left the office furious. He believed the old man was trying to keep him down. He felt sure Paterno did not see his full potential. A few months later, Harrell broke two vertebrae in his neck; he had to miss the entire 2004 season. He played, and played pretty well, in 2005, but he had a different outlook on life by then.

  Harrell became a technology risk consultant at a big Washington firm. He would call it one step closer to public office. “There’s no question I would be poor, disgruntled, and discouraged, if I had not had Joe’s words to rely on.”

  —

  KEVIN BLANCHARD TURNED DOWN SEVERAL scholarship offers and moved across the country from Texas to walk on for Joe Paterno. He would never forget the first time he met Paterno; he and his family had come to Penn State in the springtime on an unofficial visit. Paterno walked over to talk to them: “I would invite you to the house for dinner, but since this is an unofficial visit, the NCAA won’t allow it.”

  Then he turned to Blanchard, who stood six-foot-six and weighed about 280 pounds. Paterno pulled out his index finger and began jabbing Blanchard in the chest as he explained what would be expected. Blanchard wrote it down from memory, and it reads like slam poetry: