Paterno (10 page)

Like Paterno, he had grown up on the streets of Flatbush, playing stickball and dreaming big dreams. He became an assistant football coach at a small military college in South Carolina called The Citadel, and there he reinvented the way colleges recruit high school players. He was, as best anyone can tell, the first college coach to send cards to high school coaches asking for information not only about the coach’s own players but about the players his teams had faced. He knew more about players than anyone else. And he recruited ferociously; Paterno first became aware of Davis the year they competed for an Italian American tight end from New Jersey. Davis won the recruiting battle. That’s the kind of salesman he was even then: he coaxed an Italian American football player from New Jersey to come south to play at a military school rather than play for Joe Paterno.

Paterno had dreamed of going west to coach at Southern California in 1957, but it was actually Davis who got the job. By 1963, Davis had become head coach of the Oakland Raiders, and he decided that Paterno had to be his offensive coordinator. He offered to triple Paterno’s salary, from roughly six thousand to eighteen thousand dollars, to get him a new car, and to put him on track to be the next Vince Lombardi in professional football.

Paterno said no. He remembered telling Davis, “ ‘Al, you know what? You and I would have a tough time getting along.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I’m smarter than you, and you would never admit it.’ ” But this was more of Paterno’s vaudeville patter; the real reason was Sue. And Al Davis knew it. Sue had a vision about their life together, a blurry vision to be sure, but one that involved family and college and being at the heart of a community. She had fallen in love with State College the first day she arrived on campus as a student, and though Joe did not know it yet, the rest of his life would be guided by her vision. Joe was cocky, ambitious, principled, smart, consumed by football, and determined to win; those qualities and others would make him a great football coach. But he would become a legend by seeing the world through Sue’s eyes.

“Sue,” Davis said, because of course he called her after Joe turned him down, “I have to tell you this, and I want you to think about it. You are holding your husband back.”

He could not have been more wrong.

I don’t belong anywhere where celebrity equals merit or money means talent or wealth proves achievement.

—
IRISH ACTOR DONAL McCANN

Joe Paterno

commencement address to Penn State’s graduating seniors June 16, 1973

I chuckle at people who blame the “system” for our problems, just as I laugh at those who claim that we should have blind faith in our government and institutions. What is this notorious “system”?

In my game, people talk about offensive formations as the cure-all. After we lost to Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl, many people asked: “Are you going to switch to the wishbone formation?” Believe me: It isn’t the plays of the offensive system which get the job done. It is the quality of the players which makes the formation effective.

And it is you who will make the organization work for you and you who will become victims of this system, if you fail to execute your responsibility to yourself and your fellow human beings. You have a part to play and if you loaf or quit, don’t sit back and complain that our method is no good.

The system, the organization, the method, the government IS you.

If each of us is easily seduced by expediency, by selfishness, by ambition regardless of cost to our principles, then the spectacle of Watergate will surely mark the end of this grand experiment in Democracy. One of the tragedies of Watergate is to see so many bright young men, barely over thirty, who have so quickly prostituted their honor and decency in order to get ahead. To be admired. To stay on the “team.” These same young men, within the short period of the last ten years, sat in on convocations such as this. They were ready to change the world. They didn’t trust the over-thirty generation.

I warn you: Don’t underestimate the world. It can corrupt quickly and completely.

And heed Walter Lippmann, who wrote several years ago: “It is a mistake to suppose that there is satisfaction and the joy of life in a self-indulgent generation, in one interested primarily in the pursuit of private wealth and private pleasure and private success. We are very rich but we are not having a good time—for our life, though it is full of things,
is empty of the kind of purpose and effort that gives to life its flavor and meaning.”

What Lippmann wants us to realize is that money alone will not make you happy. Success without honor is an unseasoned dish. It will satisfy your hunger. But it won’t taste good.

P
aterno sat in the upstairs office of his small house in State College and felt something like desperation. Scraps of graph paper blanketed the thirteen-dollar desk Sue had found at an auction, and on each scrap were pencil scribblings in feverish cursive. Paterno had been head football coach of Penn State University for one year. One disappointing year. He picked up one scrap of paper, read
it, then another, a third, pulled out a notepad, scrawled something, threw it down, picked up another piece of paper, read it, crumpled it. He stared out the window for long stretches of time.

Sue had never seen him like this. She had known him to be driven, of course, but this was something different, and a bit frightening. He woke up at 5:30 every morning, went into the room he used as an office, closed the door, and stayed in there all day. This was the spring and summer of 1967. The Paternos had three small children: Diana, the oldest, was four; Mary Kay was two; David was not even a year old. Joe did not seem to know them. He stayed in that makeshift office, often through lunch, often all afternoon, and when he emerged for dinner he had a dazed look, like a child coming out of a dark movie theater. He would look at Sue and the kids with an expression that seemed to say “Hey, what are you all doing here?” More often than not, he would take his dinner back to the office.

He called the project The Other Thing. Well, he did not actually have a name for it, but he would often tell Sue, “I gotta go work on the other thing” or “I have a meeting, and then I need to get on the other thing.” Sue worried about The Other Thing. She worried about him. She worried about herself. It was a summer of worrying. She took the children to Welch Pool for four and five hours at a time, just to get them out of the house, just to get them away from the tension and strain that seemed to rise off their father like steam. Joe did not seem aware of when they were home or when they were gone. He lost weight. He walked around oblivious. He was unresponsive, even to his young children.

“We could have moved out,” Sue said, “and he wouldn’t have noticed. He might have noticed when he came out and there was no dinner there for him. But he might not even have noticed that. He was in his own world.”

“I always tell our players that you can’t be scared to lose,” Joe said. “That summer, if I’m being honest with myself, I was scared to death.”

HIS FIRST GAME AS HEAD
coach ended without a handshake. Nobody had been surprised when Penn State hired Paterno in February 1966; that had been an inevitability ever since he turned down the Yale job. But it’s also true that nobody knew him as anything other than the quirky assistant coach who yelled a lot and told funny stories and obsessed over the game.

“He wanted to be like Lombardi,” said Don Abbey, one of Paterno’s first recruits. “At that time he was all scream-y, swear-y. Later I would hear players say that Joe Paterno never swore. Well, I can tell you he grew into that. At first, he was vicious on the field. Vicious. He would get in players’ faces and yell, ‘You’re a fucking coward’ and that sort of thing. Nothing like the ‘real Joe.’ Nothing like Joe became.”

Ambition consumed him. At the end of his life, he would appreciate that there were complicated and conflicting things clashing around inside him when he was named Penn State’s head coach. He was thirty-nine; many of his friends had long before achieved their professional success. He had never come to grips with the wishes, or the death, of his father. And he was not even sure that he could be successful. He was a head football coach at a school in a remote Pennsylvania town with a football team that, though a consistent winner, had made little impact on the national college football scene. Even the hiring process felt small and insignificant. “We would like you to be Penn State’s football coach,” Athletic Director Ernie McCoy had said.

“I’d like that,” Paterno said. “I think it’s the best job in the country.”

“Good,” McCoy said. “We’ll pay you twenty thousand a year.”

They shook hands and that was it. No contract. No haggling. No promises. Four or five years later, Alabama’s legendary coach Bear Bryant, peerless among football coaches in his ability to consolidate power, was mortified to learn that Paterno still did not have a contract. “You get yourself a contract,” he ordered. “And you be sure that you get them to include two hundred tickets in there.”

“Two hundred tickets?” Paterno asked. “Why?”

Bryant smiled. Paterno would remember that smile the rest of his life. His fascination and curiosity about the great coach never faded. Bryant, the old southern politician, said plainly, “Two hundred tickets will get you a lot of favors.”

That was all much later. In that first year Paterno felt inadequate. He did not trust his future to any other coach, so he called all the plays, offensive and defensive. He did not trust his players to play their best, so he worked them harder than he ever would again. When I asked him at the end if he felt such a desperate need to achieve because his father had died young, or because of the driving personality of his mother, or because achievement had been the overpowering theme of his life, Paterno shrugged. He did not like to be analyzed. He simply said, “Yeah, sure, all of that.”

All of that. The players in that first year had conflicting memories of Paterno. The consensus sided with Abbey: that Paterno mimicked Lombardi, played the role of a tyrant who worked them beyond the point of exhaustion and demanded of them something just beyond perfection. Dave Rowe, a marvelous defensive guard who played with such joy that his teammates called him “Hap,” was thrown off the team briefly for breaking curfew. This might not be worth noting—football players get thrown off teams all the time for breaking curfew—but in Rowe’s case he was out late on the night after a game. Coaches rarely even have curfews the night after a game. And Rowe was spending that time with his new wife.

“Interestingly, I carried being thrown off the team through my thirteen years in the NFL,” Rowe said. “In the pros, I
never
broke a rule. I know that sounds unbelievable, but I remember how devastated I was when I was thrown off and realized how much football meant to me.”

Then again, not everyone remembered Paterno as a tyrant in that first year. Mike Irwin, who was co-captain of that team and later coached under Paterno, remembered that Paterno had actually gotten too loose and mellow and had lost the fire that made him such a force as an assistant coach.

Either way, the larger point remains: Paterno was not himself that
first year. His style was unformed. The assistant coach who always believed he was right turned spectacularly indecisive as a head coach. He changed the offense from Rip Engle’s Wing-T—the offense Paterno had led at Brown, the offense that had brought him to State College in the first place—to the more modern I formation, where two running backs line up behind the quarterback as if waiting in a line for coffee. He then changed back. He switched quarterbacks. One minute he seemed eager to prove that he was not at all like Engle, and when that felt wrong he tried to be more understanding and calm, and when that felt wrong he switched again.