Paterno (43 page)

“No, he didn’t, Mary Kay,” Guido said, smiling though there were tears in his eyes. “I worked with this man for forty years, and he never once said thank you.”

They lined up, one by one, to share a final moment: his children, his wife, some of the players who were closest to him. Jay, who idolized his father probably more than anyone, wrote some football plays on a pad. There was I-Right 643, the pass to Gregg Garrity that had won the 1982 championship. There was Slot Left 62Z, a pass to Bobby Engram that won the game at Michigan in 1994. Jay leaned in close to his father and said, in his strongest coach’s voice, “Remember how you always told us that you have to keep something back, something in your back pocket, something you will use when you need it most? Well, if you held anything back in your life, now’s the time. Use it now! Use it now!”

On Sunday morning, January 22, 2012, Jay again leaned in close to his father. This time he whispered, “You’ve done all you can do.” Moments later Joe Paterno died. The obituary in the
New York Times
led with a paragraph stating that he had won more games than any other major college coach, became the face of Penn State and a symbol of integrity, and had been fired during a child sexual abuse scandal. Joe Paterno was eighty-five when he died. People lined up for three days to walk by his casket. They lined the streets of State College
as his hearse passed through. At the memorial, his son Jay led the gathering in a reading of Joe’s favorite prayer, the Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy Kingdom come,

Thy will be done

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses

As we forgive those who trespass against us;

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom,

And the power, and the glory,

Forever and ever.

Amen.

Joe Paterno would end every game by gathering the players and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He loved it—not so much for religious reasons but for the words. Look. The Lord’s Prayer uses the words “us” and “we” and “our.” It doesn’t use the word “I” or “me” or “mine.” Paterno understood. It’s a team prayer.

W
hen Diana, Joe Paterno’s oldest child, was getting her master’s degree in business, she wrote a paper about how to motivate people without offering monetary rewards. She called to interview her father. He told her that he found he had to treat everyone differently. Some of his players responded to screaming; some did not. Some responded to praise; some did not.

“How did you know which was which?” she asked.

“I wasn’t always right,” he answered. “Sometimes I missed the mark. Sometimes I thought they could handle it when they couldn’t. But I think I was right most of the time.”

Diana laughed when thinking about this. Her father was hard on
her. He expected her to do well, to stand up for herself, to do the right thing even when it was hard. The expectations were always there. She was not allowed to wear jeans, and straight A’s were expected. As she said, “Dad could be very intimidating.” But she also remembered him growling, pretending to be a monster, and chasing her and the other kids around the house. She remembered him reading to her at night. And, of course, she remembered the dinner table conversations.

Shortly after Joe died, Sue gave Diana a letter Diana had written to her father in 1981, the year she turned eighteen and headed off to college, shortly after a friend’s father had passed away.

Dear Dad,

Going to Chrissy’s father’s viewing tonight made me realize how much my own father, you, means to me. I never really get the chance to tell you how much I love you. I owe everything I am to you and Mom—all my values and knowledge. You’ve taught me so much about life—the importance of being yourself and doing what you feel is right, because in the end
you
have to live with yourself. You’ve also shown me how much honesty means, and treating everyone equally, never being snobby and accepting people for what they are while respecting their beliefs.

You’ve taught me so many other things too, not just by word of mouth, mostly by example! I will always admire and respect your integrity and selflessness. I can only pray to be half the person you are.

I think I’ve finally realized the meaning of growing up. It’s learning to accept and respect yourself and to always do what you know is right (“To thine own self be true!”). I think I have a pretty good idea of who and what I am.

Your little girl
always.

“Since he died,” said Diana, “I have thought a lot, ‘What would Dad do?’ I thought about his character, the whole thing, the board of trustees, the way it ended. People talk about revenge or getting back at people or whatever. That’s not what Dad would have wanted. He would have wanted the truth to come out. That’s all.”

—

JOHN SKORUPAN PLAYED FOOTBALL AT
Penn State and graduated in 1973. He became a salesman, and in his daily life he would think often about how Paterno had always told his players that they needed to play every down believing that they would make the big play that would turn the game around. Of course, most of the time they would not make that play or even have the chance to. But every so often, Paterno told them, the opportunity will arrive: the ball will come your way, your opponent will make a slight mistake, your anticipation will perfectly meet the moment. And the only way to make it work is to be ready for it. “There will be opportunities that will change your life,” he remembered Paterno saying. “You need to be ready.”

—

JIM BRADLEY—THE BROTHER OF TOM
Bradley, who had replaced Jerry Sandusky as Paterno’s top defensive assistant coach, and had become the interim coach after Paterno was pushed out—also played for Paterno. He became an orthopedic physician in Pittsburgh after he finished playing at Penn State. He remembered the time he crashed into Paterno during practice. Paterno had a knack even as a young man for getting in the way in practice.

“I thought I killed him right there and then,” Bradley said. “Amazingly, he springs up and says, ‘I didn’t hurt you, did I?’ ”

—

TIM JANOCKO WAS A RESERVE
player in the 1970s, and when he graduated he became a high school coach. One day, late in Paterno’s
life, Janocko showed up at Paterno’s office early for a gathering of the Pennsylvania Scholastic Football Coaches Association. Even in his fifties, Janocko was still living on Paterno time.

He arrived early enough that Paterno could give him a tour of the offices. When Janocko was playing, Paterno once asked him, “Have you ever heard about the guy who didn’t get ulcers but was a carrier?” This was the sort of thing Paterno said to players. Now, though, Paterno stopped and said, “Janocko, I’m proud of what you’ve done with your life. You’re helping kids.”

“I’m fifty-two,” Janocko would say, “and I teared up. It meant that much to me.”

—

THE CHILD VICTIMS OF JERRY SANDUSKY
—their names replaced by numbers as they grew older and told their stories—would see Joe Paterno as the man who should have saved them. Many could have stepped forward, of course: Sandusky was surrounded by people who were supposed to be experts at spotting and preventing child abuse. He was the most recognizable of figures in State College, almost as unmistakable as Paterno. Over the years, many people could have understood Sandusky’s crimes and stepped forward to stop him.

But it is Paterno who stands out. Some would call him all-powerful. Some would say he was a past-his-prime coach clinging to his job. Some would argue that he led a cover-up to protect his legacy; others that he was simply one in a faltering chain of command.

But in the end he did not stop Jerry Sandusky. “Find the truth,” he told me. This, in the storm, is the closest thing I could find.

—

MARY KAY PATERNO NEVER LIKED
it when people called her father a saint, but she was never entirely sure why it bothered her so much. She thought maybe it was because it wasn’t true; she knew her father to be opinionated and cranky and tough to be around sometimes. But she thought there was something bigger involved in her reaction.

At the end, when people who did not know her father charged him with horrible crimes and sins, she thought she understood. To call someone a saint or a fiend is to reduce him to cardboard, to turn his life’s decisions into mere computer code, to invest him with superhuman powers—in other words, to make him unlike real people.

One of her favorite photographs was of her father sitting on a park bench outside the Creamery in State College, eating an ice cream cone. He loved ice cream. He would chomp on pretzels when he worked. He sang off-key. He often dragged an old chair out to his back porch and would roll up his pants and design game plans in the sun.

“He always tried,” she said. “That’s what I take from him most.”

—

HIS AMAZING MEMORY: THAT’S WHAT
so many of them thought about after they graduated. Jim Litterelle graduated from Penn State in 1967, so Paterno was still an assistant coach under Rip Engle when he recruited Litterelle. Still, Litterelle remembered the scene of Joe at the dining-room table, talking to his mother and father, laughing.

About twenty-five years later, Paterno was speaking at a luncheon, and there was a line of people waiting to get his autograph. As he looked up he saw Litterelle.

“Hi, Jim!” he shouted. “I still remember the cheesecake your mom served Rip and me when we came to your home to recruit you.”

—

TED SEBASTIANELLI WENT INTO THE
National Guard after he graduated from Penn State in 1969, and fifteen years later he visited Paterno. They talked about Ted’s sister Lisa and a Penn State cheerleader who also happened to be named Sebastianelli. Paterno asked if they were related. “No,” Ted said. “My sister is older than her.”

“She,” Paterno said sharply. “Older than she.”

Sebastianelli was embarrassed to have bungled the language in front of his old coach. But a year later, he was watching a Penn State
game on television, and he heard the color commentator Pat Haden, a Rhodes scholar, admit that Paterno had corrected his English in their pregame meeting. And Sebastianelli felt better.

“To this day,” he said, “whether I’m reading, writing, speaking, or listening, it’s as if I have a little voice in my head asking me, ‘Is that word used correctly?’ ”

—

TAMBA HALI, WHO WOULD GO
on to be an NFL star, remembered Paterno yelling at him, “You are the dumbest player to ever play for me.” He remembered it as one of the cruelest things anyone had ever said to him. But more than a decade later he found the story hilarious, a story he liked to tell again and again.

Ron Pavlechko would become a high school coach and athletic director in State College, and he recalled Paterno screaming, “Pavlechko, keep up that effort and you’ll never be anything but a journeyman!”

“I have always relied on that comment for fuel,” Pavlechko said. “I have relied on it every day for my entire life. I did not want to be a journeyman.”

Matt Millen, who became an NFL star, a team general manager, and a television personality, would never forget the day in 1979 when Paterno stripped him of his captaincy and told him, “Millen, you’re never going to amount to anything.” It took Millen a while to come to grips with some of the hard moments. Years later, he was at Penn State with his own children, chasing them around, trying to keep them in line. “And I look over at Joe,” Millen said. “And he was laughing his head off.”

—

SCOTT HETTINGER WAS NOT A
highly recruited player; it took him four years to score his first touchdown. In his excitement, he left the ball on the ground and celebrated with his teammates. After the game, Paterno came over to Hettinger, who prepared himself for the
coach’s congratulations. Instead Paterno shrieked, “Hettinger, next time, hand the ball to the official. Act like you’ve been there before.”

When Hettinger served in the navy, when he became an insurance salesman, when he was with his family, he thought about that. Act with grace. Always. Years later, when his mother passed away, he found a shoebox. Inside were dozens of little notes Joe and Sue Paterno had sent his family.

—

KEITH KARPINSKI WAS ONE OF
many fine linebackers to play at Penn State. For thirty years, if you were young and wanted to be a linebacker, there was a good chance you wanted to play at Penn State. Karpinski did. His father, Carl, saw it differently. He saw other coaches from other schools aggressively recruiting his son. Paterno was nowhere to be found. “You call Paterno,” Carl told Karpinski’s high school coach, “and tell him if he wants my son to play for him he should come to the house for dinner.”