Paterno (30 page)

Big plays don’t happen; you have to make them happen.

It’s all about creating an opportunity for victory.

My father always said that nobody gets carried out of the ring; one person just gets tired of getting up.

The files, though, were much more than just Paterno’s musings. He obsessively clipped things he read and liked. He underlined his favorite parts. Here is a line from the poet Robert Frost that he liked: “I never feel more at home in America than at a ballgame, be it in park or in sandlot. Beyond this I know not. And dare not.” He wrote down this quote from Albert Einstein: “Great minds have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” There was a story in
Reader’s Digest
about lessons to be learned from Christopher Columbus: Never give up; be a lifelong learner; do your homework; believe in your own destiny. There was basketball coach John Wooden’s pyramid of success (personalized for Paterno by Wooden himself), with this quote at the top: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” Paterno seemed to constantly be looking for inspiration, for something that could get him to see football and competition and life from a slightly different angle.

Paterno had been talking publicly about retiring from coaching since the early 1970s. For a time, he seemed interested in politics. At one time, he considered playing a larger role in cleaning up college athletics. Maybe these were serious considerations, maybe they were not, but he talked about them a lot.

“Four more years,” he said when he was in his fifties.

“Five more years,” he said when he was in his sixties.

For a while, the writers and fans took such talk seriously. He seemed like the kind of well-rounded person who would let go of
coaching at some point and spend the later years of his life traveling with Sue, reading on the beach, perhaps writing books and enjoying life as a grandfather and elder statesman. Paterno liked to think of himself that way too, at least at first. When he told writers in the mid-1970s that he wasn’t going to be an old coach, they believed him. In the mid-1980s, he again said he wouldn’t coach much longer. Some people still believed him. By the mid-1990s, he said that he would leave soon. “I don’t think I want to go over 75,” he told the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
in a question-and-answer session. “I think that would be a mistake.” By then, nobody believed him, least of all Paterno himself.

It became clear to him, and to those around him, that being a football coach was more than just what Paterno did. He
was
a football coach. The man who always said that football was only a small part of life began to tell people that he did not have any other interests. “What am I going to do in retirement? I don’t golf. I don’t fish. I don’t garden. What am I going to do?”

He began to tell reporters the ominous story of Bear Bryant, who had died so soon after he retired from coaching. Paterno made it sound like he feared the same fate. He got touchy whenever anyone asked him about it. His former star player and sometime nemesis Matt Millen would always remember an exchange he had with Paterno.

“Joe, it isn’t any of my business,” Millen said. “But maybe it’s time you thought about grooming a successor and maybe easing out of coaching.”

“You’re right, Millen,” Paterno snapped. “It isn’t any of your business.”

Some of the people who knew Paterno best thought his refusal to retire spoke to some of his greatest attributes (fearlessness, certainty, relentlessness), others to some of his greatest flaws (stubbornness, unwillingness to face reality, the need to be in charge). Maybe it was both. Paterno turned seventy in 1996, and he kept on going. PBS did a special on ageless wonders in 1998, and Paterno was a big part of it. At the end of the decade, he signed on for five more years. When the Penn State president made it clear that it was time to move on,
he fought back and stayed on even longer. He coached through pain, through terrible seasons, and through controversy. He coached until he was eighty, and he kept on going. His hearing went. His mobility went. His energy went. But his mind stayed sharp, his memory too, and he kept on going even when his age had become a national punch line. He coached right up to the scandal that led to his firing and the cancer that led to his death.

Why did he keep coaching? There are no shortage of theories. Ego? A loss of perspective? Or was it simply that he was human? “Joe refused to admit he was getting old,” one friend said. “Isn’t that the most human thing of all?”

In Paterno’s files, among all the letters, outlines, charts, photographs, quotes, regulations, theories, apologies, and regrets, there was one piece of paper that stood out, a poorly copied page of a book. Across the top was written the name “Hemingway.” Paterno’s literary hero. The name was underlined twice. Below was a series of paragraphs from the book A. E. Hotchner wrote about his friend Ernest Hemingway. In the middle of the page were three sentences Paterno had underlined:

I remembered Ernest once telling me, “The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do—and what you do makes you what you are—is to back up into the grave.”

T
he two men despised each other from the start. This was well-known among those who knew Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky, but at the end it seemed like nobody wanted to mention it. The news reports would assume they were the best of friends or, at the very least, colleagues who respected each other. The truth was more complicated. Paterno thought Sandusky was a glory-hound who had stopped coaching with any zeal years before he finally retired. And Sandusky, according to people who knew him well, thought Paterno a stick in the mud and deeply resented him for blocking his path to be Penn State’s head coach.

These bitter feelings had built to a crescendo over the years, as they sometimes do with longtime colleagues. But the two men were never close; their personalities would not allow it. Sandusky despised meetings, was not especially interested in details, and had no enthusiasm at the end of his career for recruiting or the detailed organizational parts of the job—which, of course, made him Paterno’s polar opposite. Sandusky and his wife, Dottie, were severe teetotalers, and the Paternos drank socially; this alone was enough to keep Sandusky from coming to the Paternos’ house, even for recruiting functions. But more than that, the two men had so little in common. Paterno was,
of course, buttoned up, high-strung, and ordered. Sandusky, in the words of Penn State’s marketing guru Guido D’Elia and many others, was “a knucklehead.” He liked practical jokes and messing around, knocking a guy’s hat off his head, making prank calls, sneaking up behind people to startle them. When President George H. W. Bush named Sandusky’s charity, The Second Mile, one of his Thousand Points of Light, Sandusky grabbed the microphone during the press conference and shouted, “It’s about time, George!”

The two men clashed for many years. Sandusky played football at Penn State, and Paterno hired him as a full-time assistant coach in 1969, when Sandusky was just twenty-five. At one of the first practices before the season, Sandusky was supposed to be on the field but was instead joking around with some players. Paterno screamed at him to get on the field and did not think more about it in the moment. Later, when Paterno watched film of the practice, he saw Sandusky running onto the field waving his arms like a bird and shouting, “The breakdown coach is on his way! The breakdown coach is on his way!” It was ridiculous. Paterno called in Sandusky, screamed at him at length, called him a complete goofball. But he did not fire him. He still thought the young man might develop into a good coach.

Over time, for all of their personal differences, Paterno did come to admire Sandusky’s coaching on the field. He coached the defensive line for a year, linebackers for a few more, then Paterno promoted him to defensive coordinator in 1977. When he was focused, Sandusky was a force of nature around the players; he connected to them in ways Paterno never could. He joked with them, hugged them, taunted them, and often inspired them. The players, most of them, loved him for that. Paterno was, in so many ways, a stern father figure: brilliant but distant, caring but judgmental, loving but cold. He was the piercing voice of conscience that squealed whenever they made a mistake or got too comfortable.
“You are the worst player we’ve ever had at Penn State!”

Player after player would talk about how they came to appreciate Paterno only after they left school, when they could see things from a
distance. But Sandusky’s coaching was something the players understood and felt in the moment. He was like a big brother teasing them, pushing them, grabbing them, reminding them that they could be great. He often sympathized with them after Paterno had been especially cruel. “Hey,” he would tell the players, “nobody’s taken more abuse than I have.”

Paterno and Sandusky understood that, in tandem, they could lift each other up professionally. That didn’t change the personal chemistry. They did not talk outside of the office. They complained about each other incessantly. Paterno tried to hide his distaste for Sandusky publicly but was not always successful. He referred to Sandusky specifically only once in his autobiography, the same number of times he talked about the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax. Sandusky, meanwhile, offered reporters funny but biting quotes about Paterno, like the time he mocked Paterno for always griping that defensive players need to have their hands up when running after the quarterback: “What else would they do? Have their hands down?” Looking back, many of the stories published about Paterno, even the most glowing, contain a slightly caustic quote from Sandusky. After a while, whenever an anonymous source took a shot at Paterno, well, Paterno just assumed it was Sandusky. There were a lot of signs like that. Most of them were written off publicly as the trivial conflicts between men who have worked together for a very long time.

Behind the scenes, though, their dislike for each other was not hidden or insignificant. “I would be in meetings,” said Christian Marrone, who came to Penn State as a player, got hurt, and then served on the coaching staff, “and they were openly hostile toward each other the entire time. Joe would say something, Jerry would roll his eyes, Joe would scream something, it was crazy.” Player after player told similar stories of near fights they saw on the sidelines between the two coaches. Reporters closest to the program noticed the tension too. “You know, they really didn’t like each other,” said Rich Scarcella of the
Reading (Pennsylvania) Eagle
, the dean of Penn State reporters, at the end of Paterno’s life. “I was shocked by that at first, when I was on
the beat. I knew that Joe and Jerry had masterminded that 1986 championship game, knew that they had worked together for a long time. But it was clear that even though those guys had a healthy respect for each other, they could not really stand each other.”

As the years went on, that thin line of respect that had kept their relationship operating began to fade. Paterno thought Sandusky’s energy for coaching decreased considerably after the 1987 triumph over Miami. He grumbled to people that Sandusky was getting too full of himself. In Paterno’s mind, an earlier coach, Dan Radakovich, was the real coaching genius who made Penn State into “Linebacker U,” the ideal place for linebackers to play. He thought Sandusky was taking way too much credit. More to the point, Sandusky’s defense wasn’t stopping anybody. Even during the undefeated 1994 season, Paterno thought the defense was way too soft. The Nittany Lions gave up 21 points a game on average—too many, in Paterno’s book—and had gone undefeated only because the offense was so great. The defense was worse the next year. Paterno’s frustrations bubbled. He complained to friends that he did not know what to do about Sandusky. He began writing little notes to himself, things he wanted to say to Sandusky in meetings:

• Why is it you are the only one who, when a meeting starts, wants to know when it will end?

• Jerry, we ARE going to tighten up the ship.

• I knew I should have been worried when Jerry said Wisconsin got impatient running the ball against us. We have to stop people.

There was something else: The Second Mile. Sandusky had started The Second Mile charity for children in 1977. He was forceful about his Christian faith; the name of the charity was inspired by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to
him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.”

The charity’s stated purpose was to help troubled children, a worthy cause that seemed to obsess Sandusky and his wife. Unable to have children of their own, they adopted six children. In 2002 Jerry and Dottie Sandusky received the Angels in Adoption award (later rescinded) from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption. They took in so many foster children that even their closest friends could not keep track of them all. Children constantly surrounded Sandusky, so much so that they became part of his persona. Nobody at Penn State, and certainly not Paterno, knew who these children were. They could be Second Mile kids; they could be foster kids; they could be adopted kids. This would seem much more sinister later, when a Pennsylvania grand jury indicted Sandusky for child molestation and released a presentment with details so graphic and grotesque that they would shock a nation. But at the time, people saw only Sandusky’s charity. “He would bring around new kids, and you would just say, ‘I guess those are his new foster kids,’ ” D’Elia explained, and his words were echoed by dozens of people I interviewed. “And—this is terrible to say now, but it’s true—you just didn’t think anything more about it. Everybody just thought Jerry was this great guy.”