Paterno (22 page)

“What are you going to do?” Paterno said of his comment being published. “That should never have gotten out. Somebody betrayed the trust there, and I never did trust the media as much after that. But, I did say it. And, at least in part, I meant it.”

This incident would have a lasting impact on his life. His relationship with sportswriters was frayed. He boycotted the Friday-night gatherings for a while and threatened to stop them altogether, though he eventually relented. Even when he began showing up at the gatherings again, however, he was never as unguarded. His mistrust of the media would only grow, and perhaps nobody felt more unhappy about that than Paterno himself. “It’s a shame,” he said. “I enjoyed it more back then.”

As for the two coaches Paterno mentioned, it took him a long time to mend fences with Sherrill, who he viewed as the symbol of what was wrong with college coaching. But in a twist of fate, Sherrill became one of Paterno’s most supportive friends during the difficult years of the early 2000s.

Paterno’s relationship with Switzer was more complicated. He called Switzer immediately after the quote was printed to apologize and explain the context of what was said. (He did not call Sherrill.) Switzer forgave him, or said that he did. Paterno grew to like Switzer, so much so that he wrote the foreword to Switzer’s book
Bootlegger’s Boy
. The two would enjoy each other’s company. But in the end, after former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested for child molestation and Paterno was fired from Penn State, Switzer was more outspoken about it than any other coach. Paterno had said, and would say until his last day, that he had been fooled, that he had
not been told the complete story and did not know about Sandusky’s crimes against children. Switzer insisted, “Everyone on that staff had to know.”

TO PATERNO, THE 1979 SEASON
felt like one long, uninterrupted nightmare. Their 8-4 record was a disappointment for a team that had almost won the national championship the year before. Players kept getting in trouble, and opposing coaches who Paterno believed cheated their hearts out were now celebrating his troubles. Paterno became grumpier, less patient, less enthusiastic about everything. Sue tried to jolt him out of it: “The Alabama game is over!” she shouted at him one evening after she had grown tired of his moping. He tried to energize himself.

But this time his energy would not return; the void was bigger than the Alabama game. Paterno had stopped so rarely to think about the big things. His motto, the one his players heard him say a hundred times every season—“Take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves”—that was how Paterno lived.
Be on time. Work the problem. Concentrate on the moment. Do what you think is right.
But now he was fifty-two, and the Alabama loss and tough season prompted him to stop and look around. What had he done with his life? He saw expectations he could never meet, praise he didn’t deserve, whispered doubts that he too harbored about his abilities.

When the 1979 season ended, Paterno went home to Brooklyn. He had a hard decision to make, and he wanted to make it where he grew up. He walked around his old neighborhood for ten days. He always tended to do his best thinking when walking. It was his solitary time; when friends or family members asked if he wanted company on his walks, he almost always said no. Anyone who watched him when he was in one of his moods would see a man walking at a brisk and steady pace, his head up, eyes locked on a target far ahead. “Sometimes, it was like he went into a trance,” his daughter Mary Kay recalled.

For the first and perhaps only time in his life, Paterno thought
about giving up football. He thought about going into politics. He thought about becoming more involved in college administration. He thought about trying something completely new. Of this time he would remember feeling confusion and uncertainty, two emotions he had rarely felt before.

This had been building for a while. Two years earlier, in 1977, on the day before Penn State played Syracuse, Joe and Sue’s eleven-year-old son, David, hurt himself falling off a trampoline at school. He landed on his head. Joe rushed to the scene. The ambulance was already there, and Joe rode to the hospital with his son.

Sue was in a van with seven other mothers on Interstate 80 heading for Syracuse when a police car pulled up alongside. The officer said through a megaphone, “Follow me back to the station. I have an emergency message for one of you.” Each of the women feared the emergency was for her, but Sue had a premonition: “I thought, ‘It’s David. They want me.’ ” When the van reached the police station, her fears were confirmed. She rushed in and called the hospital. She talked to Joe.

“He fractured his skull,” Joe said in a broken voice. “You have to get here fast. I don’t know how much time you have.”

Sue blacked out.

The next week was hell. Joe stayed in the hospital room while Penn State played Syracuse. It was the only time in his life when he did not care if his team won. It looked like David might not survive, and then it looked like he would live but would never be the same. After that the news never seemed to get better. David was in a coma. Sue and Joe took turns staying with him and talking to him, then wandering off to cry and pray. “I never thought he wasn’t going to make it,” Sue recalled. “I would not allow that thought.” Joe admitted he could not stay quite so positive. One week after the accident, David woke up. “I need your prayers,” he told them.

“You’ve had everybody’s prayers,” Sue said.

“I know,” David said. Behind Sue was a calendar that showed it was October 21. David said, “Today’s Jay’s birthday.”

“Well,” Sue would say thirty-five years later with tears in her eyes, “I can cry whenever I think of that moment.”

David would struggle but recover, and Joe would always say that the incident gave him a deeper appreciation for what really matters in life. “You know, people call me a complicated guy or whatever. I’m not really complicated. I like a challenge, the harder the better. I like to wake up every morning and think, ‘Okay, how in the heck are we going to beat Michigan? And how am I going to get Billy to put more effort into his classes? And how am I going to convince Tommy that he’s got to practice harder because he’s selling himself short?’

“That’s what I love. You asked me if I ever thought about giving it up. Yeah, sure, many, many times. But never for very long. A few minutes here or there. ‘Ah, wouldn’t it be nice to spend more time at the beach?’ But not seriously.”

After 1979, he thought seriously about quitting. He asked people he trusted if he should give up coaching; he’d been at it for thirty years. His brother told him that it might be a good time to try something new. Father Bermingham, the priest who had translated Virgil with him at Brooklyn Prep, advised, “Follow your heart.”

When his visit to Brooklyn was over, Paterno had decided: he had to coach. The previous year had been a test; he had made mistakes; he had wallowed in self-pity after the Alabama loss. He had grown to dislike his players after a few of them messed up. (“We’re not as bad as you think we are,” one player told him.) He had doubted himself, ignored his instincts, perhaps taken a few too many chances. “I went to New York knowing something had to change,” he said. “And I came back thinking, ‘I’m a football coach. That’s who I am. I just have to be a better one.’ ”

Shortly after he returned, he had an interview with sportswriter Douglas Looney for
Sports Illustrated
. At the end of the article, which was as balanced as anything that had been written about him, Paterno talked about a note he had gotten from another coach after one of the hundreds of articles lionizing him had been published. The note was four simple words: “You’re not that good.”

“I’m not that good,” Paterno repeated.

The
Sports Illustrated
article ended with these two rather celebratory lines: “Hear ye, then, that Joe Paterno is not a saint. But he’ll do ‘till one comes along.” That was exactly the sort of thing Paterno did not want to hear. He wished the story had ended with “You’re not that good,” the closest thing to
Memento mori
a football coach was likely to get.

T
he plain uniforms, like so many fixtures of Penn State football, became a cherished tradition. White and blue. That’s it. No “Penn State.” No “Nittany Lions.” No players’ names, of course. No stars. No patterns. No logos. The players wore a white helmet with a single navy-blue stripe down the middle, and even that stripe was sometimes considered too showy. And black shoes. Always black shoes.

When he was sixteen, Paterno’s high school football coach, Zev Graham, took him to the 1943 World Series and pointed out how
elegant the Yankees looked in their immaculate and simple pinstriped uniforms. Then Graham pointed to the Cardinals players, who wore sloppy-looking wrinkled uniforms with two red birds sitting on a bat. “Now,” Zev said, “guess who is going to win the World Series.” The Yankees, of course. (The Cardinals had beaten the Yankees the year before, however. Paterno laughed when asked what Penn State uniforms would have looked like had Zev Graham taken him to that World Series instead.) Paterno took the message to heart. He wanted his team’s uniforms to be the plainest and simplest in college football. He thought that simple uniforms would represent class, like those Yankee pinstripes. One of the thrills of his life was when Yankee great Joe DiMaggio himself told Paterno how much he liked Penn State’s uniforms.

“The other team knew what they were in for when they saw those plain white uniforms,” said Bob White, captain of the 1986 Penn State team. “They knew, ‘It ain’t gonna be easy.’ . . . That’s what I liked about that. It represented what this country was built on, which is the blue-collarness, the iron workers, the steel workers, not all that fancy stuff all over your uniforms and helmets.”

In time, Penn State’s uniforms became about as famous in college football as Script Ohio at Ohio State, Rocky Top at Tennessee, Touchdown Jesus at Notre Dame. The uniforms would be called a symbol of Penn State football: unadorned, no frills, blandness in the face of a “look at me” generation. But perhaps more than anything they were a testament to Joe Paterno’s stubbornness. He refused to change them. When he allowed a small Nike swoosh to be added to the breast, it was big news in Pennsylvania; some said it was like spray-painting the Sistine Chapel. Paterno liked consistency, liked for today to be a whole lot like yesterday. He lived in the same house, drove the same car, walked to work the same way. He never quite forgave the Catholic Church for going away from the Latin Mass, not because he knew Latin but because it was a change. “I have trouble accepting that what’s right on one day, especially in matters relating to eternity, is suddenly not right or not necessary the next day,” he wrote in his
autobiography. He would teach his quarterbacks to run the same play, again and again, until the defense stopped it. Don’t change, he said, until you have to change.

Lou Bartek, a former player, said, “When you first get there you don’t really like the uniforms . . . . But after a while you figure out something about them. They are forever. When you turn on a television, and you see those uniforms, nobody has to tell you what team you’re watching. That look is forever.”

Everything Paterno did felt as if he meant it to last forever. Every drill, every meeting, every practice, every speech was governed by how things have always been. The players always got dressed for home games in the football building. They got on the buses that took them to the stadium on exactly the same route. The first bus would take the offense, with the starting quarterback sitting in the left front seat and Paterno sitting in the right front seat. The defense would get on the second bus. The young players who wouldn’t play much would get on the third bus. The starters would walk off the bus first. Always.

In practice, the color of a player’s uniform depended on his place on the team. A freshman wore a white uniform if on offense, an orange one if on defense. He would find out he had moved up—or down—based on the color of the uniform hanging in his locker. Third-team offense wore gold; third-team defense wore maroon. Second-team offense wore green; second-team defense wore red. If you made it up to first team, you wore blue: light blue on offense, navy blue on defense. For many players, the moment they remembered best from college was not a certain play, not an exchange with Paterno, not anything at all on the field. It was the first time they looked into their locker and saw a blue uniform hanging there.

For forty-six years, Paterno called them the same names when he was angry (boobs, fatheads, con artists, hotshots, hot dogs, goofballs, knuckleheads) and offered the same guarded praise when he was pleased (“Do it like that on Saturday!” “That wasn’t the worst I’ve ever seen!”). For forty-six years, he ran some of the shortest practices in college football—almost never more than two hours—but those practices
were scripted to the second, and identical from season to season. For forty-six years, he threatened to throw players off the team if they didn’t shape up in the classroom or on the field. For forty-six years, he kept the same general rules about everything big and small: no earrings, no facial hair, jackets and ties when traveling, and a bizarre rule about wearing socks to class. The marvel of Paterno’s coaching was his ability to stop time, to make 2011 feel like 1986, 1978, 1969. Players periodically came back to campus and talked about how Paterno had changed, had softened, how he didn’t yell quite as loudly and didn’t seem quite as fearsome. But if they were honest with themselves, they would have admitted that it wasn’t Paterno who had changed.