Paterno (8 page)

As we leave this assembly hall tonight, let us make a solemn pledge to the thousands of American youth, white and black, Protestant, Catholic and Jew, who had made the supreme sacrifice, that we will carry on those ideals for which they paid so dearly. They died that we might live and enjoy the benefits of this great and glorious country.

In conclusion, let me urge you who are assembled here this evening to rededicate your lives to the proposition that all of the forces of intolerance must be expunged from our midst and that you will become a crusader in this most worthy cause.

On September 29, 1955, almost exactly ten years after he spoke to the Interfaith Movement, Angelo Paterno suffered a massive heart attack and died. He was fifty-eight years old and had been talking about retiring. At the time, Joe was an unknown assistant football coach barely making a living wage in State College. He was twenty-eight, unmarried, and he lived in the basement of the home of another assistant coach. His law school invitation had long since expired, and his Brown degree in English literature rusted in the morning dew of football practice. Joe never did conquer the empty feeling that he had not lived up to his father’s ideals. He never did conquer the sadness that Angelo did not live to share in his triumphs.

“My father was a great man,” Joe said. “I don’t think I’ve ever explained it well enough. He had no hatred inside him. Of all of the
things he taught me, I think maybe that was the biggest one. He believed that if you give somebody a fair chance—whatever their color, whatever their religion—that they might be able to do great things.”

At Angelo’s wake, there were about a hundred white people in the room when a black man walked in. Nobody in the room knew him. He cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention and said, “I want everybody to listen.” With that he offered a small but breathtakingly beautiful eulogy of Angelo Paterno. Joe recalled his saying, “Every day, Mr. Paterno treated me with respect. Every day.”

“I hope, if nothing else,” Joe said near the end of his own life, “I gave a few people a chance to do great things.”

D
uring the last three months of Paterno’s life, after the scandal and the firing and the cancer turned them inside out, they were funny and sublime, Sue and Joe, the way they finished each other’s sentences, the way they rolled their eyes at stories they had heard too many times, the way they corrected each other. She was outraged; he was pragmatic. She was optimistic; he was stoic. She worried about him; he worried about her even more. It was as if they had lived fifty years together in training for the last act.

Joe was an assistant coach and Sue a freshman at Penn State when they first talked in the football study hall in the library they would rebuild together decades later. Sue was dating one of the players, someone she knew from high school. Study hall was more or less the only time they could see each other. “It was nothing serious,” she said, while Joe listened and nodded. “It was just—we were freshmen.”

Joe would tell the story of that first meeting a bit differently each time, though the year stayed constant. It was 1959. He had been coaching for Engle and Penn State for nine years. He was thirty-two and making hardly any money. He had lived with Engle at first, then moved into the home of an assistant coach and onetime Penn State football star, Steve Suhey. Then he lived with the family of another assistant coach, Jim O’Hora, for almost a decade. “He lost himself to coaching,” O’Hora told a local writer and character named Ridge Riley.

Paterno spent almost no time living; it seemed like all he did was coach. To players of the day, Assistant Coach Paterno seemed to be ever present. He was there when they went to class and there when they walked out. He was there when they ate, when they joked around, when they went on dates. Milt Plum, one of Penn State’s star quarterbacks, recalled, “On Friday nights before games you would be walking around and then all of a sudden there would be Joe, out of nowhere, and he would be shouting, ‘Get off your feet!’ ”

Paterno spent his days watching films of opponents, preparing practice schedules, arguing with his fellow coaches (who followed the lead of former coach Joe Bedenk and called Paterno a “whipper-snapper”), chasing football players around to make sure they were doing the right things, and constantly trying to strike up football conversations. He was inexhaustible. At night, he wrote countless notes (all his life, he was a compulsive note-taker) about football ideas he wanted to try, plays he wanted to run, techniques he wanted to teach, improvements he wanted to make, thoughts about leadership that crossed his mind. He wrote so many notes to himself that every month
or so, Betts O’Hora, Jim’s wife, would drop him a note of her own saying, “Clean this up, or move out.”

He was such a force of will that people just bent to his way of thinking. Friends remembered him getting into furious shouting matches with Penn State’s athletic director, Ernie McCoy, blaming McCoy for holding back the football team. But McCoy seemed to take it all in stride. (He would eventually hire Paterno as head coach.) In newspaper interviews, Paterno played it small, always acquiesced to Engle and the other assistant coaches, but in the closed circle of the program everyone understood that it was Paterno’s drive and single-mindedness that powered Penn State football.

His first conversation with Suzanne Pohland had to do with football.

“He’s your boyfriend, right?” Joe asked her as she began to leave for the night.

“Yes,” Sue said.

“Well, listen, you better get him to study or he isn’t going to be here much longer.”

Joe was not sure that the conversation happened in the library. Sometimes he remembered asking Sue to meet him somewhere else to discuss her boyfriend. Sometimes his memory supplemented that brief exchange with small talk. “You remember,” Sue said, “you told me I wasn’t in love with him.”

“I didn’t say that,” Joe said.

“Yes, you did. You said, ‘You’re not in love with him,’ and I said, ‘How do you know?’ ”

Joe shook his head, with the comic timing of a Marx brother. Truth is, that first conversation, whatever it happened to be, didn’t have much of an impact on him. She was a freshman from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, hoping to become a teacher. He was a thirty-two-year-old assistant coach perpetually worried about the next game. The one thing he remembered for certain, the one thing that stuck with him through the years, was that the football player Sue dated did fail out of school. “Shame,” Joe said. “He was a talented kid.”

RIP ENGLE’S DEFINING QUALITY AS
a coach was his gentle nature. It was certainly not his only quality; he could be stern, he often raged at officials and players on the sideline, and the reporters knew him best for his entertaining gloominess and pessimism. But his gentleness stood out to his players and assistant coaches. And it was gentleness that had the largest impact on the young Joe Paterno, perhaps because Paterno himself was so ungentle.

Here’s an example: Football coaches often talk about having a player “cheat” to one side, meaning that they want the player to stand a step or two closer to that side in anticipation of a certain play. Engle refused to use the word “cheat,” and he would not allow any of his coaches to use it. He believed that the word had no place in fair competition. Instead, at Penn State, they would talk of having players “fudge” to one side.

This may sound ridiculous, but little quirks like this were the bricks of Engle’s day-to-day coaching style. There were many other examples. Football has a position called “monster back,” usually a player who stands behind the linebackers and is given the freedom to roam all over the field in pursuit of the football. Well, to Engle, “monster” was an even less suitable word than “cheat,” and so at Penn State they called the position a “hero back.”

Or this: One day they were trying to come up with a name for the linebacker who sets up on what’s called the weak side, the side where the offense has fewer blockers. Engle did not want to call the position a “weakside linebacker,” as most coaches do, because that had connotations of weakness and frailty. The coaches sat around for far too long trying to come up with a good name for this position, when finally Engle said, “Okay, enough of this. The next idea someone comes up with, we’re going with that.” To which Paterno said something like “Well, while we are waiting for that brilliant idea, can we go ahead and order some pizza from Fritz?” The man who ran Home Delivery Pizza in town was Fritz DeFluri. And so, from that day forward, the
weakside linebacker at Penn State (and numerous other copycat programs) was called the Fritz linebacker.

Engle’s compassion and kindness permeated everything he did. He constantly reminded his coaches, “It’s the players’ team, not ours,” a mantra Paterno repeated to himself when he was at his lowest points. Engle almost never swore, almost never tore down a player, almost never fought with one of his coaches. He deflected credit and entertained the media with stories in which he inevitably ended up playing the sucker.

Paterno watched Engle’s style closely. He was not like Engle. He was, in his own words, “a loudmouth.” When he first came to State College as an Ivy League–educated Brooklyn street fighter, he felt entirely out of place. “It was too quiet to sleep,” he said, repeating some vaudeville line from his memory. He got into ferocious arguments with fellow coaches, including Engle. Some of those arguments were so vicious and heated that an outsider might wonder how Paterno kept his job. “I was a pain in the neck,” he confessed. “I just knew I was right all the time.”

Of course, as Paterno readily admitted, he never lost that part of his personality. But over sixteen years as Engle’s assistant coach, he did temper it. Some of Engle’s nature penetrated him. While he trusted his own strategic football judgment over anyone else’s (that too never really changed), he saw how Engle could get his point across without screaming. He noticed the respect Engle quietly built. He learned about the power of consensus, even if he never fully embraced it. Engle had some Angelo in him. And though Paterno coached with more passion and wrath and authority and certainty than Engle, he did soften over the years. He stopped swearing. He learned how to empower others. He never took the credit. In time, he also began to see some of the beauty of State College. Well, that did take some time.

After the 1956 season, when Penn State won six of nine games, the University of Southern California’s legendary Jess Hill called Engle. Hill had played Major League Baseball, had been a star running back on USC’s 1928 national championship team, and had won two national
championships as coach of USC’s track team. He had also been the football coach at USC, but he decided to give it up. He called Engle and asked him to be the new coach. Engle was flattered, but he was not sure the school was a good fit for him. Paterno was absolutely sure. He told Engle that this was their chance to go big time. Engle decided to put it up for a vote. “And then,” Paterno said, “I started to talk to the other coaches. You know how people call me a great politician? Well, I used my political skills.” He hammered away at Engle, telling him again and again how much easier it would be to recruit great players at USC and how much better their chances would be to play in a great game like the Rose Bowl. He lobbied his fellow coaches. He begged and pleaded, threatened and cajoled, charmed and bullied. He did everything in his power to get Engle to take the whole lot of them west, where they could coach football in the sun.

When the votes were counted, all the coaches except Paterno voted to stay in State College. “It’s a good thing I didn’t go into politics,” Paterno said.

After the USC letdown, Paterno began to look at State College as home. To his surprise, he found that there were many things about the place he liked. He liked the ease of things, the comfort, the way he could focus on football without the inconveniences of daily life to distract him. He liked the routine so much that he did not leave the O’Hora home. The end of that living arrangement came only when Jim O’Hora sat Paterno down and gave him a speech that Paterno remembered for the rest of his life. In Paterno’s memory, this is what O’Hora said:

“You know, Joe, when my father came from Ireland, and my cousins would come over, they’d stay with us for three or four months. And my Dad would say, ‘You’ve been with us four months now. It’s time to get out, cut yourself from us, go and live your life.’ . . . Joe, you’ve been with us ten years. Get the hell out of here.”

To which Paterno remembered asking, “Have I been here that long?”

The continuity and regularity of the seasons comforted him. The
students stayed young and eager and were less spoiled than they had been at Brown. He liked the ice cream at the historic Creamery on campus; in time, their most popular flavor would be Peachy Paterno. He found that he loved to walk around the town; the beauty of Mount Nittany and the surrounding forests did not inspire him to write nature poems, but he could think clearly as he walked along the familiar streets, friendly people waving as he walked briskly past. The anger and commotion of the day seeped out of him. Ideas and football plays crystallized in his mind. Those walks around Happy Valley would calm and energize Paterno for the rest of his life.