Paterno (6 page)

His self-deprecating nature is in every letter, such as this one about playing softball:

June 11, 1946

We played the Hospital in softball again and, hold on to your seats, believe it or not, we won 6–2. And, another believe it or not, yours truly got a couple of hits. Just to show you how indispensable my buddy and I are to a softball team, I will tell you what happened to Hdgs. Co. softball team when we left. When we played on the team, it won a game and lost around 6. The other day one of the fellows from Hdgs. Co. was up here. He told me that since Tony and I left, the team has won 6 straight games. I knew they couldn’t do it without us (ha ha).

For the most part, though, the letters home tell the story of a brash young man who wanted to get going but was not entirely sure where
to. Like most soldiers, Paterno sought out the familiar. He asked about the Brooklyn Dodgers. He wondered if his brother was still dating a girl named Mal. He worried about his father’s health, encouraged his mother to buy some clothes and take some time away from work, asked often about the old neighborhood. This was how he remembered himself in the army: “I was driven to succeed. But succeed in what? I didn’t know. I talk to these people who always knew they were going to become a coach or always knew they were going to write or whatever. I didn’t know. I assumed I would go into the law, and live in Brooklyn, and be like my father.”

T
hey called Everett Arnold “Busy” because he wouldn’t shut up. The nickname went back to when he was a boy in Providence, Rhode Island. He talked constantly in class. He would butt into conversations, even teachers’ conversations. He interrupted anyone to offer his opinion. The teachers called him “Busybody.” The kids in class shortened it to “Busy.” He was called Busy Arnold for the rest of his life. And he never did shut up.

Busy Arnold became a comic-book titan. That was a time in
the American story when you could become a titan of more or less anything: Conrad Hilton was a hotel titan, Stanley C. Allyn a cash-register titan, Milton Hershey a chocolate titan, Daniel F. Gerber a baby-food titan. Busy Arnold worked his way from selling color printing presses to printing comic books. He gained a reputation, rare in the comic-book world, of giving artists creative freedom and paying them a fair wage. He hired the artist Rube Goldberg. He hired Will Eisner, who would become famous for creating a hero called The Spirit. Busy Arnold made a fortune.

He spent his money well. He liked being in the middle of the New York scene. He wore the finest suits and was often seen at hot spots like the Stork Club with beautiful women who shared the distinction of not being his wife. He also became known for some of the wild parties he threw.

How does Busy Arnold, comic-book titan, enter our story? As much as he loved money and women and being photographed, Busy Arnold’s greatest love may have been his alma mater, Brown University. He wanted the Brown football team to win. He wanted this so badly that he personally looked for talented football players he could send to Brown on an unofficial Busy Arnold scholarship.

This was not against regulations in the mid-1940s; there really weren’t any college football regulations in the 1940s. The National Collegiate Athletic Association did not have an executive director until 1951. In the 1940s, many schools, including what was then known as Pennsylvania State College, did not offer football scholarships. So there was an opportunity for industrious alumni to find talented football players and pay for their tuition and books and maybe a little extra. Busy Arnold was just such an alum. Joe Paterno was just such a player.

Arnold became friends with various high school coaches around New York, including Brooklyn Prep’s football coach, Zev Graham, whose real name was Earl, but nobody called him that. Graham had gone to Fordham to play baseball in 1923, but he showed such blazing speed as a football player that he became a starter even though he
was just five-foot-six. After his first game, a New York sportswriter nicknamed him Zev after the Kentucky Derby winner in 1923, and he was Zev for the rest of his life. He became an All-American and one of the biggest college football stars of his era. Years later he would become coach at Brooklyn Prep and the man who turned his team over to a smart quarterback who couldn’t throw.

“Busy Arnold really must have trusted Zev,” Paterno’s old teammate Joe Murphy said, “because it seems like he sent half our team to Brown.”

Arnold paid for Brooklyn Prep’s football stars Joe Murphy, Chuck Nelson, Bucky Walters, Frank Mahoney, and George Paterno to play football at Brown. And, of course, he also paid the cost of room and board and books for Joe Paterno. “Those were different times,” Paterno recalled. “There was no way for a guy like me to go to an Ivy League school. We couldn’t afford it. Nobody in the Ivy League was giving out athletic scholarships. When Zev Graham told me that Mr. Arnold wanted to send me to Brown to play football, it was like a dream.”

The irony wasn’t lost on Paterno. He would spend his coaching life publicly railing against overbearing alumni eager to pay talented football players under the table and the coaches who looked the other way. He made it clear to Penn State alumni that he would not stand for that. “We want your money,” he often told alumni, “but we don’t want your two cents.”

And yet Paterno’s college football career, and the remarkable coaching career that followed, happened in large part because of an overbearing Brown alumnus willing to do anything to help his alma mater win. Busy Arnold paid Paterno’s tuition and introduced him to Brown’s coach, Rip Engle. And for Paterno, Rip Engle changed everything.

CHARLES A. ENGLE WAS CALLED
Rip because of the many times he ripped his jeans as a child. The nickname fit: Rip Engle forever
expected bad things to happen to him. It was his nature. He did not drink; he did not swear. He worried. People called him the “King of Gloom.” “To Engle,” Walter Bingham wrote in
Sports Illustrated
, “no sky is completely blue, no rose without its thorn.” One of his rival coaches, Ben Schwartzwalder of Syracuse, uttered this classic: “Rip Engle is not happy unless he’s sad.”

In Engle’s mind and heart, every victory was luck, every loss inevitable, every opponent more frightening than the last. To entertain alumni and friends, he would tell stories not of football glory but of growing up in a town so small that the speed bump was considered a city treasure, and of the two years he spent playing football for a star-crossed team at little Blue Ridge College. Friends would call these “Rip’s Humble Talks.” Engle would say that the first football game he ever saw was the first football game he played for Blue Ridge; that’s how terrible the team was. He would invent wonderful and hilarious stories about the team’s incompetence; he said that Blue Ridge lost every game, never scored a point, and eventually closed down to become a bus company. First, though, he said they lost to Temple by more than a hundred points. Of these, only the last was true: Temple did beat Blue Ridge 110–0 in 1927.

Much of this kvetching and brooding cloaked Engle’s talents and competitive nature: he was one hell of a football coach. He was an innovator—a training game he invented called Angleball was still being played thirty years after his death—and he had a knack for getting players to work hard and play together. In his years at Penn State, his teams never had a losing record. When he retired, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

Joe Paterno sensed these coaching qualities the first time he met Engle, when he was a high school student looking for a place to go to college. Paterno had a piercing intuition about people from a young age. Over time he would sharpen the gift, harness it, and develop what seemed to other coaches an almost magical ability to see through a player in only a few minutes and tell if he had the right stuff. In this way, Paterno and his coaches found overlooked and undervalued
football stars probably more often than any coaching staff in college football history. Then, like all gifts, Paterno sometimes took his for granted, especially in his later years. “Joe wasn’t always right,” one assistant coach said, “but he was always sure.”

Paterno knew when he met Engle that he wanted to go to Brown. His father had some doubts about Joe’s going to a non-Catholic school, but Joe wanted to play football for Rip Engle. “Rip just had this nice way about him,” Paterno said. “On the outside, we were very different. I was this fiery kid from Brooklyn, always sure I was right, always getting into little scraps with people. Rip was different. He was a gentleman. On the inside, we probably weren’t too different.”

Engle grew up in a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania called Elk Lick. (In later years, perhaps sensibly, the town changed its name to Salisbury.) His father left the family when Engle was a boy. His mother, Cora, was intensely religious; she worshipped in the Church of the Brethren, a religion built largely around the ideal of peace. (Its dictum: “Continuing the work of Jesus. Peacefully. Simply. Together.”) Engle worked a mule in the coal mines when he was just fourteen; the legal age for working in the mines was sixteen, but he was big for his age. When he realized that the mines were not for him, he left to play football at Western Maryland College, and that’s where the unlikely chain of events began. At Western Maryland, he played for a coach named Dick Harlow, who would become a legendary coach at Harvard. Engle started to think about a life of coaching. So, if you want to summarize the story, it might go like this: Harlow inspired Engle and convinced him (against his better judgment) to become a coach. Engle inspired Paterno and convinced him (against his better judgment) to become a coach. Pennsylvania State College became Penn State. And fifty years later, 107,000 people would regularly gather in State College to watch football games that seemed to matter more than anything.

PATERNO LOVED AND DESPISED BROWN
University in somewhat equal parts. He would say that he never felt more alive than he did in
college. At first, he majored in engineering on the advice of a practical uncle, but he quickly came to know his own limitations (“Joe couldn’t fix a sandwich,” his wife would say) and switched to English lit. The humanities suited him better. He was enthralled by gracefully written sentences; some of them stuck with him long after he left Brown. To the end of his life, he could recite from memory Hamlet’s soliloquy, large portions of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and the last paragraph of
The Great Gatsby
.

“I sometimes wonder if I could have been a writer,” he said three weeks before he died. “I tried to write some now and again. But I never really put my heart into it. Who had the time? I would scribble a few things down now and again—ideas, lines, you know. I don’t know, maybe I had some talent for it. [My son] Jay has a great talent for writing. [My youngest son] Scott does too. He does a different kind of writing, but he’s very good. Maybe now, after I get through all this, I will do some writing . . . . I hope so.”

Paterno cherished the feeling of being surrounded by knowledge and curiosity and intellectual power at Brown. He remembered with joy the late-night arguments he and his friends had about Hemingway and Socrates, the infallibility of the pope, and the government’s responsibility to help the poor. As a coach, this was the intellectual atmosphere he encouraged his players to embrace. “This is supposed to be the best time of your life,” he would tell them. “Don’t miss out.”

There was, however, another side of Brown University that Paterno also never forgot. Brown was founded before the Revolutionary War, and many of the students came from old money and prominent families. This was Paterno’s first clash with snobbery and exclusion, and such things tore at him. The name-calling in Brooklyn had been surface stuff—blatant, hot, and unmistakable—and it could be answered with fists and wit. At Brown, though, snobbery, elitism, and prejudice hid behind the eyes and was whispered under the breath. Paterno often told the story of the white sweater. When he was a freshman, he went to an Alpha Delta Phi fraternity party. He wore the nicest sweater he owned, a white sweater his mother had given him, and the
moment he walked into what he called “that room filled with blue blazers and martinis” he felt every eye turn to him and his sweater. This was the Brown fraternity of steel titans Arthur B. Homer and John D. Rockefeller. He recalled hearing someone whisper, “Who invited that dago?” The looks of the young men in the room pierced him. “I still see and feel that room, those people, fingering their cocktails, studying me out of the corners of their eyes,” he wrote in his autobiography forty years after he left Brown. “No, I never forgot what it felt like to walk into that room,” he said in the hospital in his last days.

In some ways, those penetrating stares and hushed snubs molded his outlook on life even more than his success as a Brown football player. He was a marvelous player. The sportswriter and editor Stanley Woodward purportedly wrote, “Paterno, the Brown quarterback, can’t run. He can’t pass. All he can do is think—and win.” Woodward’s pithy line, which later seemed exactly the sort of thing someone would write about Paterno, was quoted often after Paterno became head coach at Penn State and ad nauseam after his teams won. It’s likely, however, that Woodward never wrote the line. Paterno never knew of anyone who had actually seen the quote, and though his family had clipped many of the stories written about Paterno as a player, no copy of Woodward’s quote was found.