Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  If you come to Penn State

  JAB!

  You have to go to class

  JAB!

  And if you don’t go to class

  JAB!

  I’m going to call you in my office

  JAB!

  Where I have a bat

  JAB!

  That I’ll use

  JAB!

  To hit you over the head!

  JAB!

  And if that doesn’t work

  JAB!

  I’m going to call your mother.

  JAB!

  Blanchard made the Dean’s List in 2011. When Paterno died, he served as an honor guard for his coach’s viewing.

  —

  SOMETIMES GUIDO D’ELIA WOULD WONDER if he could have done more for his old friend. “I’m not sad about Joe himself. I’m really not. Nobody can touch him now. He got to do exactly what he wanted to do his whole life. He spent his retirement coaching, if you think about it. And that’s all he wanted to do.”

  “So why are you sad?” I asked him.

  D’Elia looked at me, then slammed his fist on the table. “It wasn’t a fraud. It was real.”

  He continued, “You know what Joe told me before he died? He said that he wasn’t worried about his legacy. He said that in time, people would see that he tried to do the right things. He said that in time, people would be able to step back and see his accomplishments as well as his mistakes and judge him for the whole life.”

  “Do you believe that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I hope so. The only thing I do know for sure is that this is the end, my friend. There will never be another one like him.”

  —

  SCOTT PATERNO REMEMBERED ONE MORE story. He was with his mother and father in a State College restaurant shortly after the Iraq War had begun. They were planning Scott’s wedding. While they were eating and discussing logistics, three Muslim women walked in. They were wearing hijab, and Scott noticed a drop in volume in the restaurant as they sat down. There was a lot of tension in America then. The Paternos continued their conversation for a short while, but Joe kept looking over at the table of women. Finally, Joe said, “Excuse me for a moment.” He walked over to the women, sat down at the table, and began a conversation with them, asking them where they were from, how they liked State College, what they were studying, and so on.

  It was, Scott said, the smallest thing. But that might be the biggest lesson he learned from his father, the same lesson hundreds of football players learned: Take care of the little things. The big things will take care of themselves.

  —

  DON ABBEY KNEW JOE PATERNO in ways others did not. They were, over the years, coach and player, enemies for a long time, and finally, fitfully, friends. They were not alike, or at least Abbey did not see the similarities for many years. At one point, the lowest point, Abbey felt on the brink of destruction. He was an alcoholic. He could not see a life worth living. In large part, he blamed Joe Paterno.

  Then Don Abbey became a billionaire. He was sitting at the head of a glorious dining-room table in his mansion overlooking Pasadena, and all around him were vases and paintings and rugs and imported stone and wood and the kinds of opulent things that both look and are obscenely expensive, things that substantiate a life powerfully lived. “Unlike Joe,” he said, “I like spending money.” Don Abbey was a billionaire, and for him this was the point. He won. When the problems of his job or his life felt too heavy, he retreated to his home a few miles above the city and soaked in the grandeur of what he had built. “I don’t come down,” he replied when I asked him how he handled the tough times. “It’s through isolation. You just don’t need to deal with all those people.”

  His fascination with Paterno had many flavors: hate, disgust, contempt, grudging respect, and then, finally, most surprising of all, fondness. Hundreds of men who played for him talked about going through these various Stages of Paterno, but it seems likely none of them reached the extremes that Abbey had. He was in Paterno’s first recruiting class. He was Penn State’s leading scorer on Paterno’s first good team, in 1967. He was at the heart of things when Paterno became Paterno, when Penn State always won, when Vietnam raged and students protested and Nixon picked Texas and so many people chose Joe Paterno as their hero. To Abbey, Paterno most certainly was not a hero. Abbey thought Paterno was a bully and a tyrant.

  “I kind of think, in retrospect, it’s like what Nietzsche said: ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger.’ Well, Joe made me really strong because he tried to kill me, and he damn near succeeded. And I don’t think he did that to make me a better guy. I think he did that because I was difficult to coach, and he’d run out of ideas.”

  Abbey was one of the few who did not go to Penn State after being dazzled by the recruiting charms of Joe Paterno. Quite the opposite. His mother, unlike almost every other mother of a Penn State player, could not stand Paterno. The Abbeys had made their money in the granite business, and when Paterno sat at the table in their home he reminded Don’s mother of those Italians who did the stonecutting in the business.

  “I never wore jeans because jeans are what the stonecutters wore,” Abbey said. “And we never ate pasta because pasta’s what the stonecutters ate. So Joe, I think, reflected some of that to my mother . . . . She didn’t like him. She still doesn’t like him.”

  Abbey went to Penn State anyway, not because he liked Paterno (“I didn’t really have an opinion of Joe”), but because he did not want to play at Boston College and “get educated by the nuns, being the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant that I am.” When he left for college, his mother warned, “You’re going to have trouble with that coach.”

  “Always listen to your mother,” Abbey advised.

  —

  THEY CLASHED REPEATEDLY. PATERNO HAD a thing about players wearing socks all the time. Well, Abbey didn’t wear socks. He came from prep school, where kids never wore socks. The two went round and round about that. It sounds simple and pointless, but they both remembered those socks. Of course, they went round and round about everything.

  “In retrospect,” Paterno said, “I probably could have been a better coach for Don. He was headstrong, and I was headstrong. I was just starting out, and I felt like I needed to prove myself all the time. I’m sure I could have done a better job with a lot of guys, and particularly Abbey.”

  When Abbey was a sophomore, he scored three touchdowns and kicked four extra points in a big win at Boston College. This was near his hometown, so reporters surrounded him. Paterno did not like it. He did not like stars. He did not like young players getting too much attention. He did not like Abbey’s attitude. He was not comfortable or confident yet in his job; this win made his career record seven wins and seven losses.

  Here is a paragraph in the Daily Collegian’s story of the game:

  It didn’t seem like Abbey could have done too much wrong, but Paterno saw it differently. “He’s a young kid, he’s got speed, but he makes too many mistakes.” He then quipped to the Boston press, “If it weren’t for Massachusetts, we might make him first string.”

  Abbey would remember Paterno walking up to the reporters and saying, “Why don’t you get away from Abbey and talk to a real football player like Ted Kwalick.” Abbey’s father was standing behind Paterno at that moment and tried to pick a fight with him. It was tense. Abbey said that after the Boston College game, he didn’t get the ball anymore. He was told to block for star running backs like Charlie Pittman, Franco Harris, and Lydell Mitchell. “I was going to quit. Twice. I thought, ‘I don’t need this shit, I’ll go to Princeton.’ I would have been an Ivy League guy. I’d probably have gotten into the leveraged buyouts of the 1970s and just be getting out of jail now for rigging something. So I guess my life has changed.”

  Abbey became a ferocious blocker. Penn State won every game his junior and senior seasons. But he and Paterno never got along. Paterno threw him off the team for a game in his senior year. Abbey went to Joe’s h
ouse and watched that game on television with Sue.

  When Abbey left Penn State, he told himself he was never coming back. And for twenty-five years he did not. He went through terrible lows. He had a drinking problem. He had trouble finding his way in business. He felt pain from his playing days, and from his college career not being what he had hoped. “We hit on Tuesdays back then. He was maniacal. I remember I was thinking about going into the Marine Corps because I was getting sick of Joe. I had gone down to see the Marine recruiters, and they knew who I was, so they wanted to go to practice.

  “Joe let them on the field because he didn’t feel like the Marine Corps wanted to steal anything he was doing. So afterward, we go down to Herlocher’s—which was the only bar in town that served Heineken, by the way—and these were all former drill instructors. One of them was from Parris Island, and he says, ‘You know, Don, if we did half of the stuff that Joe just did to you, we’d be court-martialed.’ And this is the marines. That’s how vicious Joe was.

  “The coaches would walk around with wiffle-ball bats and hit you in the head if you lifted your head on a block . . . . And then Joe had this thing that someone invented that was this long steel pipe that had kind of a tripod on the end. And you would stand right under the tripod, and they would take this metal perpendicular pipe and put a punching bag on it. And they had a spring connected to it, stretch it, and they would hit a button and this thing would come down and you had to block it. They first had two springs on it, and it knocked out the first two guys, so they had to take one of the springs off. Who comes up with this? The Marquis de Sade?

  “I wasn’t going back. I didn’t have any good memories from that time.”

  After a long while something changed. Abbey began to get his life together, began to build his business, and he started to think that blaming Joe Paterno was not beneficial. “In all fairness to Joe, I brought a lot of this stuff on myself. Because I didn’t care.” He found himself back at Penn State one day in the early 1990s, and he and Joe met. Paterno told him, “You know, Don, if only you’d come four or five years later, things might have had a different outcome.” Abbey saw that as something close to an apology.

  Then Paterno reached out to Abbey, tried to do whatever he could to help his business. Abbey wasn’t wealthy then. “There wasn’t anything I could do for him [in return]. I hadn’t been there for twenty years. He had no dog in the hunt. Yet he was willing, for whatever reason, internally, he was willing to get out there and try to help me get my business going using his reputation.” Paterno introduced Abbey to the businesspeople he knew. He wrote letters on Abbey’s behalf. He tried to open as many doors as he could.

  “Joe’s management style was inappropriate. But his desires were very appropriate . . . . I think he has always had, to this day, if you can get him to focus, a real concern for the welfare of his players. Coat and tie. Be on time. Go to class or you don’t play. He really did that stuff.”

  “Did you forgive him?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t for me to forgive,” Abbey answered. “I just thought I understood him better.”

  —

  JERRY SANDUSKY WAS A GRADUATE assistant coach on Abbey’s first team. When the scandal blew up, Abbey felt many emotions. He had not been happy that Paterno kept coaching in those final years. “You know, he’s got a horrific ego. I’m not judging that. Great guys have horrific egos. General Patton was not a mild-mannered guy. Larry Ellison [CEO of Oracle] is not a mild-mannered guy. The Microsoft guy [Bill Gates], he’s trying to change the world, and you just don’t do that on a little ego.

  “You look at Joe, and Joe was a very interesting guy, and I don’t understand it because I came from the exact opposite thing. Joe had no liking for money. Joe lived in that austere house, and I know how much money he was making with Pepsi and Nike and Burger King. He was doing really, really well . . . . He didn’t care about money, and he didn’t care about fame, and he didn’t care about the damned wins record. He didn’t care about any of those things.”

  “So, if it wasn’t money, and it wasn’t fame, and it wasn’t the wins, then . . . ”

  “To me, his ego was driving him because it was all about Joe Paterno. He just got buzzed at those press conferences; he loved telling [reporters] to piss off . . . . I just think he liked being the boss. He liked being in charge. That drug of being in charge was what drove him . . . . He defined himself by what he did. I can talk about that because I define myself the same way.”

  Abbey wondered just how much Paterno knew about Sandusky. He could not help but wonder. There were so many stories buzzing around, and one contradicted another. I asked Abbey what it all came down to, and this is what he said: “You have to throw all your personal observations and opinions out of the discussion to really understand or appreciate what Joe did. Could he have done it a different way? Yes. But that wasn’t in his DNA, so he couldn’t have done it a different way. So the result is, he got this phenomenal won-lost record, and he’s got this phenomenal graduation rate, and he’s got a lot of guys that went through his system that have become extremely successful. And that’s his accomplishment. That’s what made him great. Not a bad decision, if it was a bad decision, at seventy-five. Not the fact that he stayed too long.

  “Joe has all these human flaws that I love to talk about because I have a bunch too . . . . But still you’ve got to look at the scales, and balance accomplishments versus the negatives. And boy, the accomplishments, no matter how he did them, overwhelm the negatives. And if that’s not the definition of a positive, productive life, I don’t know what is.”

  —

  IN THE END, JOE PATERNO will not have one legacy. No one does. Perhaps a life is too large to measure by its best day, or its worst. Maybe Don Abbey is right; maybe you measure life with a scale, good on one side and bad on the other. Then again, maybe life is measured by what is left behind. Paterno’s teams won 409 games, a record; five times his teams went undefeated; twenty-four times they won their bowl games. His teams graduated between 80 and 90 percent of their players, and there was almost no gap between the graduation rates of white and black players. Paterno gave millions of his own dollars to build the Penn State library, the spiritual center, the Paterno Fellows Program for Liberal Arts, and he raised many millions more for charities and every aspect of campus life. He also died less than two months after he was pushed out of his job for what a Penn State board member called a “lack of leadership.”

  Maybe a life is best measured by what people remember; with Paterno, the players and his family mostly remembered the words he shouted at them, again and again, autumn after autumn:

  Take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves. Always run to the ball. Hope for your opponent to play well. If you want to be a good person, hang out with good people. Winning is a habit, but losing is also a habit. On your way down, think about getting up. You have to believe you’re destined to do great things. Publicity is like poison: it can only hurt you if you swallow it. The will to win is important, but the will to prepare is vital. You cannot be afraid to lose. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp. If you’re not early, you’re not on time. You have to find a way to make big plays. You either get better or you get worse, but you never stay the same. If you keep hustling something good will happen. Don’t do anything that would embarrass yourself, your family, or your team. The team that makes fewer mistakes wins.

  Maybe the last of these sentences is the truest. Maybe the team that makes fewer mistakes wins.

  —

  “SO TELL ME SOMETHING, GIUSEPPE, how are you going to get my whole life into one book?” Paterno asked me on our last visit.

  “I have no idea,” I told him. “It’s a big life.”

  “Yeah, it’s not bad,” Joe Paterno said. “Not bad at all.”

  A Note on Sources

  The vast majority of material in this book was obtained through several hundred interviews and email exchanges, along with access to J
oe Paterno’s personal files and letters, granted by Paterno and his family. In cases where previously reported information was used, I have tried to acknowledge the sources directly. When quotes were given in a public setting, such as a press conference, and were reported in more than one publication, I was more general (for example, “Paterno told reporters”).

  I wish to express special gratitude to all the Paterno family—especially Joe and Sue Paterno—for their openness. Every member of Joe Paterno’s immediate family was generous, both in their participation and their patience, but I would particularly like to thank Mary Kay Hort, Jay Paterno, and Scott and Heather Paterno. In addition, I thank the Paterno Library, the Nixon Library, the Brown University archives, Guido D’Elia, Penn State’s sports information director, Jeff Nelson, Dan McGinn, Mara Vandik, Paul Levine, John Schulian, Bill Blatty, Rich Scarcella, David Jones, Tom Donchez and the many people involved with the documentary The Joe We Know, and the good people at the Mid-Continent Public Library in Kansas City. I also want to make special mention of Don Abbey; the long interview he gave me in his home was thoroughly enlightening.

  A selected bibliography follows, but I would like to make note of three books that were particularly helpful. First there was Joe Paterno’s autobiography, Paterno: By the Book, written with Bernard Asbell. Second was the well-researched No Ordinary Joe by Michael O’Brien. And finally there was Lou Prato’s Penn State Football Encyclopedia. No one knows more about Penn State football than Lou Prato, and he was kind and helpful throughout.