Paterno (2 page)

The award for best blocker was given to him in 1969, twelve knee operations and a lifetime ago, and until recently he did not allow
himself to think about it. His football years at Penn State pained him. Joe Paterno was the reason. “Penn State turned me into a functioning alcoholic,” he explained. “Penn State gave me so much hate and so much depression in a way that it just took me a lot of living to get to the point to handle that and put it aside . . . . I didn’t like Joe. He damn near killed me. He damn near destroyed me.”

When Abbey had sunk to his lowest point, he pushed off the bottom and rushed back toward the surface. He pumped his fury into a real estate business. He never settled down. He never started a family. He worked relentlessly and made himself a billionaire. “I would always, in the early years, have two management criteria. One: Would my parents be proud of my decision? And: What would Joe do? Because I’m going to do the opposite.”

Strange, then, that as he got older he found himself thinking about Joe Paterno. His feelings were not about forgiveness, not exactly. Even all these years later, as he walked by a photograph of an old Penn State coach named Bob Higgins, he stopped. “There’s a real football coach,” he said, pointing. “I mean no disrespect, but that’s the kind of person I think of as a great football coach and a great man . . . . Joe had a shitty management style. Plain and simple.”

No, his feelings were not about forgiveness because he was not certain that he had forgiven Paterno. His feelings were about something deeper than that, something he saw in himself. He thought about the way Paterno planned practices and games. Abbey planned like that. He thought about the way Paterno held his players to high standards—go to class, wear a tie, look people in the eye—and would not allow anyone around him to live a lazy life. Abbey did not want lazy people around him either. After more than two decades of silence, Abbey and Paterno began to talk again. And Abbey found the strangest thing: the man he had hated for much of his life, well, they shared common ground.

“You know, the guy worked his ass off,” Abbey said. “He was a brilliant strategist, he out-prepared everybody, he had great fundamentals
of what’s right and wrong—as he defined what’s right and wrong. And he actualized it. He set the goals. They were his goals. I didn’t agree with them a lot of the time, but, boy, he ran things based on his goals.”

Abbey smiled. The city was three miles below. Under the house was a shooting gallery where Hollywood stars, Tom Cruise among them, practiced for their movies. He liked hearing the sound of gunfire cracking from below. The walls were covered with paintings and photographs of family and friends and the place where he grew up. And heroes. George Patton was there. Vince Lombardi was there. Joe Paterno was there too.

“The key is to unravel the myth and explain his greatness. Because Joe had greatness. But the myth is not his greatness. Joe, for all his human fallacies that I love to talk about because I have a bunch too, had something else—something much harder to find.”

PEOPLE WANDERED UP TO THE
statue of Joe Paterno that stands by Beaver Stadium. Paterno disliked this statue. Not because of the craftsmanship or the dimensions or anything like that. The statue and the stone wall behind it and the words carved into the stone, it all felt like a celebration of self, a mausoleum. But even these were not the reasons for Paterno’s distaste. The reason was a single finger, the index finger, that the statue of Joe Paterno raised to the heavens. We’re No. 1. That’s what that finger said. To Paterno, that finger was proof that they never got him, never really understood what drove him.

The people gathered at the statue now were not thinking about such subtleties. To them, the statue was something holy, the first place they thought of coming to when Paterno’s name crossed their mind. This was the night that Penn State fired Joe Paterno. The night air chilled, and boyfriends wrapped their arms around girlfriends, fraternity brothers stood shoulder to shoulder, a father walked up in a Penn State sweatshirt that had shrunk, or perhaps the father had grown.

They stood in complete silence. This was not the conventional
silence of, say, the moment before a show or the beginning of a class. This silence weighed down the air, made it heavy and stifling, the quiet you might feel at the Vietnam Memorial. Tears slid down cheeks, but no one cried out loud. Breath turned to steam, but no one breathed too loudly. A boy briefly tried to start a chant—
Joe Pa! Joe Pa!
—but no one followed and his words drowned in the dense autumn air. Silence returned with a vengeance.

Young men and women sat on the stone wall behind the statue and their feet dangled over the side. Nobody kicked, and nobody moved. They seemed like statues themselves, a part of the scenery. A boy of maybe eighteen kneeled in front of the statue as if in prayer. A girl of twenty or so felt her phone vibrate but did not answer it.

What would they say about Joe Paterno? That they grew up admiring him? That they came to Penn State because he coached there? That some of their greatest memories were of sitting here at Beaver Stadium, which towers behind Paterno’s statue, watching the teams he coached? They would say that he was a man of principle, a man of education, a teacher first, a role model, a decent man above all. They would repeat some of his favorite sayings. “Go to the ball.” “Be on time.” “Good things happen when you hustle.” They would recount his most famous victories—over Missouri in ’70, over Louisiana State in ’74, over Miami in ’87, over Michigan in ’94, over Ohio State in ’05—and they would list a few of his best players. They would fill the dead spaces with trivia or plaudits or singular memories that, when spoken out loud, do not sound like very much.

He had his players wear plain uniforms!

He turned down millions of dollars to stay in State College!

He built Penn State, often with his own money!

What would they say? Joe Paterno taught life lessons. He graduated his players. He treated black and white with respect and with expectation. He stood for things—for discipline, for teamwork, for effort, focus, charity, triumph. That’s what they would say. Yes, he won. The fans would only reluctantly admit that Paterno’s long parade of victories mattered because the cynics, the angry ones, believed that
they loved him only for those victories. But damn it, he did win! He made them feel like winners!

What would they say?

Across campus, students marched. Some threw rocks. Some turned over a television truck. Across America, people saw those rioting students, and they wept for America’s youth, for those misguided young people whose priorities needed adjusting and who could not understand what really mattered in the world.

Here at the statue Joe Paterno never liked, they did not move, and they said nothing at all.

ON JUNE 22, 2012, JERRY
Sandusky was convicted of forty-five counts of sexual abuse of young boys. Seven months earlier, two Penn State officials, Athletic Director Tim Curley and a university vice president, Gary Schultz, were charged with perjury and failure to report the incident that Mike McQueary and Joe Paterno had told them about in 2001.

This book is not a defense of Joe Paterno. It was not my intention to write such a book, and it was also not Paterno’s expectation for me to write such a book. The only thing he ever asked of me was to write the truth as I found it. To help, he and Sue Paterno lent me many of his personal files and asked their family and friends and former players to be open with me. Paterno took the time to try to answer any question I asked. He intended to keep this open conversation going until the book was finished.

He died before the book was done.

I include this interlude to explain that what follows is the story of Joe Paterno’s life. It is about a childhood in Brooklyn, a time at war, a college life at Brown University, and sixty-one years of coaching at Penn State. It is also about the ending, how Paterno was swept away by the scandal that led to his dismissal and the ten cancer-wracked weeks he lived after that. It is how he felt about it all and how the people
around him responded. This is not a story about Jerry Sandusky. It is not a story about Penn State. It is not a detective story about a small community overrun by a media blitzkrieg. And it is also not the story of what might be true or assumptions or theories made in the dark. At the time of this writing, Sandusky is in jail serving what is essentially a life sentence, Tim Curley’s and Gary Schultz’s trials are also approaching, and an investigation by former FBI director Louis Freeh concluded that Penn State officials, Paterno among them, failed to protect a child against a child predator and “exhibited a striking lack of empathy for Sandusky’s victims.”

But Joe Paterno’s life is over. I am aware that opinions have calcified so that many people have grown deaf to other viewpoints; with such horrible crimes being committed and alleged, it could not be any other way. But I have tried to be guided by the words in Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s
The Ox-Bow Incident
: “We desire justice. And justice has never been obtained in haste and strong feeling.”

“I GOT A QUESTION FOR
you,” Guido D’Elia said.

“Shoot.”

He sat across the table, a pained look on his face. There had to be a record. That’s what D’Elia believed. He had been a Penn State marketing man for a few years. He was Joe Paterno’s man for much longer. The first time he met Paterno, he was a long-haired kid from Altoona who had some vague notion about becoming a big-shot television producer. That sounded better to him than working on the railroad, which is more or less what everyone else in Altoona did. They first met at a Penn State football game at West Virginia, where D’Elia was coordinating the television coverage. Someone said to him, “It’s about time you met Coach Paterno.” They were at a Holiday Inn whose room doors opened to the outside, and they walked down a long hall, door after door, and at the end they pulled one open. There was Joe Paterno sitting on one of the beds. Two players were sitting on
the other bed, a third player sitting on the floor. They were all looking at the small television screen; Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford were debating each other in their bid for the presidency.

What D’Elia remembered—and what he also never forgot, which is a little bit different—was the way Paterno was pressing the young men.

“Hey, what did you think of that argument?”

“Why do you think he said that?”

“How do you think that will play with the audience?”

“Who do you believe more?”

How long ago was that? Thirty years ago? Forty? The whole world had changed. But to D’Elia there was a part of Joe Paterno that never changed, a part of him that remained in that room, educating, challenging, questioning, making those players think. Oh, D’Elia was no lamb. Over the years he came to know Paterno in ways that few others would. He worked for Joe, he was Joe’s circus barker, his hatchet man, his crisis manager, his tackling dummy, and the friend who told the old man things he did not want to hear. D’Elia often found himself on the sharp edge of some cutting Paterno fury. In all his life, right up to the end, Paterno never once told D’Elia that he was sorry, and he never told him “Thank you.” They did not need those words. D’Elia understood that Paterno was no saint. He knew it better than anybody else.

But he also knew that Joe Paterno was real. The whole thing was real. That’s what made it worthwhile. Paterno did not cheat in recruiting. He used every measure of threats and testing and pressure to prevent his players from using steroids. He did not sacrifice education for football victories. He did not use players and discard them. He did not lie to players. This was what made it all worthwhile, this was why D’Elia loved the man—not like a son looking through unfocused eyes but like a skeptic who had finally found one thing he could believe in.

“Why?” D’Elia asked me.

“Why what?”

“Why didn’t he follow up? Why?”

He asked this in the most furious moment, when the scandal had reached its highest pitch, when people openly charged Joe Paterno with unspeakable evil. Madness circled. Fury hovered. Nobody could hear anything but the roar. But D’Elia knew all that was just white noise. “We don’t want heroes,” he had said time and again. “We don’t want to believe anyone can be better than ourselves.”

But now he looked at me and asked the real question, the one that pounded at him, the question that glowed red beneath all the bluster and lies and absurdities. “Why didn’t he follow up?” he asked again.

I looked at him.

“Find the answer to that,” he said, “and you have the story.”

JOEY PATERNO, THE GRANDSON, COULD
do a dead-perfect impression of his grandfather’s walk. They were built the same way—a low rib cage, Joey’s mother, Kelley, called the family trait—and here he was, shirt sticking out, and he strutted that sideline football strut that his grandfather made his own. Joey wore the tie Joe Paterno wore when he won his 300th game. It was his proudest possession. Joey was twelve.

“They beat Bowling Green 48 to 3 that day,” he said.

“How about his 324th win, the one that passed the Bear?” I asked him.

“That was 29 to 27 over Ohio State. They came back from 27 to 9.”

His 400th win?

“Too easy: 35 to 21 over Northwestern.”

His 200th win?

“That was over Bowling Green too, right?” He smiled proudly. In another room, people lined up to touch the casket of Joe Paterno. In this room, Joey bent his head down and looked just like the old man.

EVERY FAMILY HAS A STORY
that can be told without being told. An expression will trigger it. A word. In the Paterno family, they called it the Shyster Story. At family gatherings, all anyone ever had to do was get red-faced and shout “Shyster!” Everyone else would break out laughing.

The Shyster Story went like this: Back in the early 1970s, the Paterno family went to a restaurant, and Diana, the oldest child, ordered an all-you-can-eat salad. Late in the meal, Mary Kay, the second-oldest, reached over and took a cucumber from Diana’s plate and started to munch on it.