Paterno (33 page)

Durability (8 points).
If you cannot practice or you cannot stay healthy, you really don’t have much of a chance to be a significant part of a great team. This is not to say that there are not legitimate injuries, but I do mean to say that some people are more prone to injuries than others.

Character (6 points).
Are you a good person, an honest person, a moral person? Are you dependable and responsible?

Strength (8 points).
Obvious.

Coachable (6 points).
We all can get better and some people are not as good as they think they are. Better techniques don’t come easily and as a result some people rationalize they don’t need to work to improve.

Experience (2 points).
I only give this 2 points because . . . we are going to play the best players on this year’s squad, not the best on last year’s.

TALIAFERRO SCORED HIGH ON EVERYTHING
except experience. He was tough, fast, coachable, and, more than anything, had a marvelous attitude. “Adam Taliaferro would have been a pro,” said Paterno. “I have no doubt in my mind.”

Then came the Ohio State game. It was a gray, rainy day. Penn State was overmatched. Taliaferro was in the game with less than two minutes left—Ohio State had a 38–6 lead at the time—and he set himself to tackle tailback Jerry Westbrooks. Taliaferro’s helmet hit Westbrooks’s knee, and Taliaferro fell. His helmet crashed to the turf. His body rolled over. He had no feeling from the neck down. Paterno
ran onto the field, looked at Taliaferro’s face, and though he had seen injured players a thousand times, he was shocked by what he saw. Trainers carried Taliaferro off the field on a stretcher. Players on both sides prayed. The look on Taliaferro’s face stayed with Joe Paterno for the rest of his life: “Seeing the fear in Adam’s eyes was the worst moment I’ve ever had on the football field.” Jay Paterno would say he saw his father cry twice, once when his mother, Florence, died in 1989, and the second time when he saw Adam paralyzed on the football field.

“I remember we had a long walk home after a game,” Jay Paterno said. “This was after Adam. And Joe told me that every player we have, someone—maybe a parent, grandparent, but someone—poured their life and soul into that young man. They are handing that young man off to us. They are giving us their treasure. And it’s our job to make sure we give them back that young man intact.

“I think he felt like he had failed to protect Adam Taliaferro. Of course, he knew that football is a dangerous game and that people get hurt; Adam wasn’t the first player to have a serious injury. But I think with Adam being a freshman and this great kid, the way the injury happened, it really hit him hard.”

Adam’s story would have a happy ending, with Paterno playing a lead role in it, but the rest of the season went badly. Penn State finished 5-7, its worst record under Paterno to that point, and he did not want to talk with me about it. “It’s in the past,” he said. His friends believed that the season had diminished him. “I think Joe looked at what happened to Adam,” said Guido D’Elia, “and he thought, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ ” But Paterno said he never once considered retiring: “No, no, no. Absolutely not. What good would walking away do? No, the only time I ever really thought about walking away was after the 1979 season. After that, whenever we had lows—and we had a lot of them—I would view it as a challenge.” He told
Sports Illustrated
’s Rick Reilly at the end of that dreadful 2000 season, “Every time I’d get to thinking, ‘Man, this isn’t worth it,’ I realized how important it is . . . . I knew they needed me. And I needed them.”

PATERNO WAS NOT THE SAME
. His energy level was visibly lower, his crankiness harsher. His relationship with the media had been deteriorating for years, but at this point it collapsed altogether. He had long thought that sportswriters had moved out of the business of writing about sports and into the business of controversy. He thought that the twenty-four-hour appetite of the Internet and talk radio made reporters sloppier and more interested in being first than being right. “I feel bad saying this, but I just don’t trust reporters,” he said.

The feeling from some reporters was mutual. Many of these, especially the younger ones who did not remember a more genial Paterno (and it seemed they were all so young), thought he had become a bully and had lost touch.

“I think it is true that he didn’t like the way many reporters were doing their jobs, and I agree with him to a point,” one of Paterno’s friends said. “But I think it’s also true that Joe changed. He became more insular. He wasn’t interested in having a relationship with reporters like he did when he was younger. He didn’t see the value in it anymore. He saw the media as a nuisance or worse. And he treated some of the reporters badly. I think that hurt him in the end.”

Except for coaching, Paterno began to see almost every demand on his time as a nuisance. He slowed his recruiting travel; he rarely showed up in parents’ living rooms, where he had always been one of the great recruiting closers in college football history. He mostly stopped traveling around the region to give speeches, and he mostly stopped trying to charm donors and Penn State board members. He was seventy-four years old. He wanted to be left alone to coach his football team.

ON A SATURDAY MORNING AT
the beginning of February 2001, Paterno got a phone call from a graduate assistant named Mike
McQueary. Everything surrounding this incident would become a point of contention, even the date. Originally, prosecutors—and McQueary himself—seemed convinced the call was made in March 2002. Later, based on various clues uncovered during the investigation, the date was moved back to February 10, 2001. Paterno never claimed to know the date. His memory of the entire incident was fuzzy.

If we assume the date was February 10, 2001, it was the day Paterno went to Pittsburgh to be inducted into the Pittsburgh Sports Hall of Fame. The city of Pittsburgh did not love Joe Paterno, because he had extinguished the Penn State–Pittsburgh rivalry by refusing to play the game after 2000. He was hoping to diffuse some of the tension with his speech. He was also preparing for the annual coaches’ trip sponsored by Nike, perhaps the highlight of his and Sue’s year. The trip was the following week.

Mike McQueary grew up in State College and played quarterback for Paterno. The football dream was infused in him by his father, John. The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
would tell this story: When Mike was born in 1974, John raced to the phone, called the Notre Dame football office, and told the coach, Ara Parseghian (or his secretary; John could not remember), that Notre Dame’s 1992 starting quarterback had just entered the world. John and the family were hurt when Notre Dame chose to recruit another Pennsylvania high school quarterback, Ron Powlus, instead of Mike. But then Joe Paterno came to the house, and even though John had carefully crafted a strategy for picking a school, complete with color-coded charts, Mike was so awed he couldn’t help himself. “Coach Paterno,” he said, “I’d really like to commit to Penn State.”

He was a team captain his senior year, set a school record for most passing yards in a game, and then he kicked around for a while in pro football, chasing that goal all the way to Scotland, where he played quarterback for the Scottish Claymores. When that dream fizzled out, he came back to Penn State to be a graduate assistant coach. He wanted desperately to coach full time. Later, in a letter to Paterno, he wrote, “I will someday be a head coach of a program. I
know that and believe it to be true . . . . You might say, ‘I will it to happen every day.’ ”

Mike McQueary claimed that when he called Paterno on February 10, 2001, Paterno told him, “If this is about a job, don’t bother coming over because there are no openings.” Paterno did not remember saying that, but the details do fit the date; the day before, it had been announced in the papers that receivers coach Kenny Jackson had left Penn State to take a job with the Pittsburgh Steelers. McQueary said it was not about a job. He had something important to tell him. Paterno invited him to the house.

Paterno remembered McQueary’s nervousness more vividly than anything else. He remembered telling McQueary more than once to calm down as they sat at the kitchen table. McQueary had a hard time catching his breath. Though the conversation they had that morning would become critically important in the Jerry Sandusky investigation, both Paterno and McQueary had trouble remembering what was said. So, again, it is necessary to delve into that foggy world of memory and perspective.

McQueary’s later confusion about the date is illustrative. When questioned by the police and the Pennsylvania grand jury almost a decade later, he was openly uncertain about the year. The one thing he did seem certain about was that the incident had occurred the Friday before Penn State’s spring break. However, even that memory was faulty; the date that prosecutors eventually settled on—February 9, 2001—was three weeks before spring break.

Paterno and McQueary agreed that they discussed these details: On Friday night, McQueary had gone to the Lasch Football Building to drop off a pair of sneakers in his locker and pick up a few recruiting movies to watch at home. As he walked into the building, he heard two or three disturbing slapping sounds, sounds he thought were sexual. He also thought he heard the shower running, which was odd for a Friday night in February. He went to his locker, dropped off the shoes, and then he saw Jerry Sandusky and a young boy naked in the shower together.

Paterno remembered that even to extract this much information from McQueary that day was difficult. What struck Paterno most was just how edgy and uncomfortable McQueary was.

Here was what Paterno said about that conversation when I interviewed him in late November 2011:

Q:
Did Mike say that he saw anything?

Paterno:
I think he said he didn’t really see anything. He said he might have seen something in a mirror.

Q:
A mirror?

Paterno:
Yeah, like the bathroom mirror. But he told me he wasn’t sure he saw anything. He just said the whole thing made him uncomfortable.

Q:
What did you think he saw?

Paterno:
I didn’t know. I thought he saw them horsing around. Maybe he thought he saw some fondling. I don’t know about any of this stuff. But I could tell it made Mike very upset.

Q:
What did you say to him?

Paterno:
I told him he didn’t have to tell me anything else. I told him he did the right thing bringing it to me, and that now it was my job to get him together with the right people for him to report it.

Q:
Did you consider calling the police?

Paterno:
To be honest with you, I didn’t. This isn’t my field. I didn’t know what to do. I had not seen anything. Jerry didn’t work for me anymore. I didn’t have anything to do with him. I tried to look through the Penn State guidelines to see what I was supposed to do. It said that I was supposed to call Tim [Curley]. So I called him.

Q:
That day?

Paterno:
I’m pretty sure I called him that day. I know it was a
weekend, so I can’t be a hundred percent sure, but I do think I called him that day.

Q:
And what did you say?

Paterno:
I said, “I think there may be a problem here. You need to get to the bottom of this.”

This was nearly the same story Paterno told on several separate occasions, including in a short appearance to the Pennsylvania grand jury. There were times he was not as sure about when he called Curley—he could not recall for the grand jury if he had called at all over the weekend—and his memory of the actual conversation with McQueary was always blurry.

Q:
Were you shocked?

Paterno:
I wasn’t really even sure what it was. Mike didn’t give me any details. I could just tell he was upset.

Q:
Had you heard any rumors at all about Jerry Sandusky [showering with boys]?

Paterno:
Absolutely not. Maybe people talked about it, I don’t know. But I didn’t hear anything.

Q:
Did you think about investigating yourself?

Paterno:
I wouldn’t know how to investigate something like this. I don’t know anything about it. [Jerry] didn’t work for me. I had a meeting with Tim, and Gary [Schultz] might have been there, and I told them what Mike had told me. And they said they would get to the bottom of it. I trusted Tim would take care of it. He’s a good administrator. He had negotiated the retirement deal with Jerry, and he was still in contact with Jerry. Tim’s a good person. I expected him to handle it right.

Q:
Did you ever follow up?

Paterno:
No. I trusted Tim.

Q:
Do you regret that?

Paterno:
I did what I thought was the right thing . . . . If what
they’re saying about Jerry is true, I think we all wish we would have done more.

Paterno was almost eighty-five years old when I conducted this interview. He was going through both radiation and chemotherapy for lung cancer, and he was exhausted. It was more than ten years after the McQueary conversation. This is not to excuse or explain any contradictions or failures of memory, but to fairly set the stage. He never wavered from saying he wanted the truth to come out. After Paterno died, numerous Penn State interoffice emails were uncovered during the Sandusky investigation. None of the emails were written by or to Paterno—he did not have an email account—but at least three of the emails suggested that Paterno had missed key details.

First, the emails indicated he was told something about the 1998 incident. Two emails—both written by Athletic Director Tim Curley to school vice president Gary Schultz—suggest that Curley himself alerted Paterno to the investigation. On May 5, 1998, Curley wrote: “I have touched base with the Coach. Keep us posted. Thanks.” And in a follow-up email, Curley wrote: “Coach is anxious to know where it stands.” Neither of these emails say what Paterno was told about the investigation itself. Paterno was told that the investigation was closed by the State College District Attorney.