Paterno (18 page)

“You won’t go, will you, Daddy?” he asked.

“I’ll do whatever you want, Dave,” Joe said. “What do you think?”

“Don’t go,” Dave said.

The night grew a bit somber after that. Voices began to choke a little bit. The humor of the situation began to hit a little too close. “Who wants to coach professionals anyway?” Sue asked, and it sounded a bit too true to be a punch line. But the decision had been made, and though there was some sadness, Paterno insisted on feeling good about it. “How does it feel to be going to bed with a millionaire?” he asked Sue that night, and she smiled without saying a word. Neither of them could sleep. Joe never slept soundly anyway; all his life he woke up several times each night to scribble something down on paper or to let a thought play out in his mind. “Joe needs to work things out,” Sue explained. “That’s just how he is.” This one was hard to work out. He tossed in bed.

Meanwhile Sue woke up and went to another room to feed Scotty. Down the hall, Joe could hear her crying.

That was the moment when Joe Paterno decided who he wanted to be. Years later, as he lay in a hospital bed knowing the end was near, he marveled at the choice that faced him. “I look back on it and think that choice seems obvious. But it didn’t feel that way then. You know, I’m not opposed to making money. I didn’t take an oath of poverty when I became a football coach. And it was so much money.”

At 5
A.M.
, he called Jim Tarman, who was sleeping. “How can you
sleep when I can’t?” Joe demanded. Tarman groggily asked what was going on. Paterno told him, “I’m not taking the job.”

Shortly after that, when Sue woke up, he told her, “I hope you enjoyed your night sleeping with a millionaire, because it’s the last time you will do it.”

THE REACTION TO PATERNO’S TURNING
down a million dollars to remain a college football coach animated the country. There seemed so little good news in the papers. The war in Vietnam was lost. The Watergate burglary story was beginning its slow but steady march toward the resignation of a president. Eleven Israeli athletes had been murdered in September at the Munich Olympics. The nation was about to be plunged into a recession.

And here was Joe Paterno, the coach who looked like a professor, saying no to money and glory so he could coach young men in college. And why? His quote was reprinted in newspapers across the country: “How much money does one man need?”

“Standards have changed, religion has changed, even baseball has changed,” the United Press International reporter began his story. “Joe Paterno has not changed.”

“In the long run, it came down to lots of money vs. lots of idealism, and for a change idealism won,” the Associated Press wrote.

“Good for Paterno!” was the headline in the
Christian Science Monitor
, complete with the exclamation point.

“In these days of multimillion dollar TV deals with pro clubs, six-figure salaries for athletes and $15 tickets for Super Bowls, money seems the dominant influence in sports,” began an editorial in the
Los Angeles Times
. “Thus it’s refreshing, as well as almost unprecedented, to see a man like Joe Paterno say no to the big dough.”

Though he had not intended it this way, Paterno’s decision had given moral authority to The Grand Experiment. His story seemed impervious to cynicism. A couple of sports columnists suggested that he might have been holding out for a job in his beloved New York,
but when his former Brown University coach Weeb Ewbank called to see if Paterno had any interest in replacing him as head coach of the Jets, Paterno cut him off. “I’m staying here, Weeb. It’s where I’m supposed to be.” Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania declared a “Joe Paterno Day.” Penn State insisted on giving Paterno a contract—his first with the school—and a big raise, though he had not asked for either. A testimonial dinner was held for him, and alumni gave him a new car and a vacation to anywhere in the world. (He and Sue chose Italy.) Speaking requests poured in, including the biggest of all: he was invited to give Penn State’s commencement address.

He was both embarrassed and delighted by the attention. The embarrassment was more public. Again and again, he reminded people that he was just a football coach who liked to design game plans and make sure that his players went to class. “I don’t think I’m a better person than anyone else,” he told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. “I just may be smart enough to know when I’m well off.” He would always remember, with discomfort, going to a basketball game that winter, and when he stood up the entire arena stood with him and cheered so wildly they had to stop the game for a moment. Paterno was going to the bathroom.

Privately, though, he understood exactly what he had done and how it would be viewed. And he liked being viewed that way. Overnight he had become as famous as any college coach in America, as famous as Alabama’s Bear Bryant or Ohio State’s Woody Hayes. The recruiting pitch he had repeated in living rooms across America—
Play for the team, not yourself. Be unselfish. There are more important things than individual glory
—was now bolstered by his own life and had a new kind of power. He was being celebrated not for winning games or devising brilliant strategy, but for having his values in order. He thought this, finally, was a tribute to his father. His mother, who lived to be ninety-two and would build much of her life around Joe’s career, beamed.

Perhaps most meaningful of all, Paterno felt he had lived up to his ideals. He often worried about that. When reliving the Patriots story
almost forty years later, he said, “When I took the job, I found out something about myself. I found that I could be bought. I found out that I had a price.” I pointed out to him that, in fact, just the opposite was true: he turned down the Patriots job. He could not be bought. Paterno shook his head and said something curious: “No. They bought me. I took the job. Afterward, because of Sue and the players, I went back and turned it down. Billy Sullivan would have had every right to be angry with me. I broke my word with him. He was a gentleman about it, but I broke my word.”

He paused for a long time. When interviewing Paterno, I found, the silences were to be honored because they often led to his saying the thing closest to his heart. Finally, he spoke again. “That was the greatest temptation of my life. When I turned down that job, there was no turning back. I knew exactly what I was supposed to do for the rest of my life.”

PATERNO WORKED FOR WEEKS ON
his Penn State commencement address. He clipped out articles, scribbled down thoughts, asked the people closest to him for help. For a long time, he had been self-conscious about speaking. He had practiced talking into a tape recorder over and over to rid himself of the Brooklyn whine, until one of the speech professors told him that the accent was part of his charm. He had the ability to entertain crowds with his speeches, in large part because of the piercing one-liners he invented for the occasions.

From a talk at Gettysburg College: “I understand that they are bringing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address back here. I guess a lot of people felt you were going to need it after Paterno gives his Gettysburg Address. Some of our alumni wish I could get four scores in sixty minutes, much less in a twenty-minute speech.”

From a talk to a group of orthopedic surgeons: “I’ve been really nervous about this speech because I figured I’d be talking to some witty, talented, clever guys. But after being with you guys for two days, I feel better.”

From a speech to the Quarterback Club in 1979, after his team lost to Alabama in a game for the No. 1 spot: “Everyone wants to hold up that one finger to say ‘We’re number one!’ I still see one finger in my travels today. It’s a different finger, and the hand is turned the other way.”

From a talk at a political rally in 1974, just after Watergate: “What am I doing here? I’m not a politician. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I’m a Republican.”

Yes, Paterno had his way of connecting to audiences quickly. That was an extension of his coaching. But he thought of the 1973 commencement address differently. This was his chance to explain who he was and what he was about, not only to the Penn State students but also to himself. In many ways, the previous twenty-five years had been a blur to him. He had been a quarterback and student at Brown University with the expectation of becoming a lawyer. And then, in a dizzying sequence, he had become a football coach; his father died; he lived in a friend’s basement; he did not date much; he met Sue, and they were married, and he was named head coach at Penn State, and the team did not lose for the better part of three years, and people began calling him a genius. He was offered a million dollars. When he turned it down, people started to see him as something larger than life.

For what? What did all this mean? For all his ambition, and for all the effort he spent considering the questions of fate and destiny, Paterno had not spent much time thinking about his own fate and destiny. The New England offer had presented him with perhaps the first difficult choice of his life. Until then, he had allowed himself to float wherever the tide carried him. But now, well, he was not exactly playing it humble when he began his speech by saying, “Some of you have every right to feel let down that after four years of hard work you have to listen to a coach at your graduation.” He’d had serious doubts about giving the speech. “But in spite of these and other misgivings, I accepted because I realize that in a day when materialism is rampant, many of you felt that my interest in doing other things besides
making money has in some way helped you to reaffirm your ideal of a life of service, of dignity, and a life of meaning.”

He made the speech while the Watergate investigation was heating up, and he could not resist what would become his famous jab at Nixon knowing so much about college football and so little about Watergate. But that was mostly where the joking stopped. Joe Paterno had something to say.

I’m sure that it is obvious to all of you that you are going out into a fragmented, disillusioned and oftentimes confused society—a society which has promised more than it is now willing or perhaps able to deliver to our minority groups and, among others, to our poverty victims. There is corruption, fear, mistrust, lack of leadership, unequal justice, privileged economic groups and all the abuses you would expect in a nation without consistent direction—in a country without a common purpose and a people unsure of moral commitments. We are experiencing the frustration of a society, which is desperately struggling with itself, afraid that at any moment it will be ripped apart by deep-rooted racism, which regardless of all our enlightened medication persists as a cancer which defies cure. We cannot get rid of a war we do not want to fight. We cannot wash our hands of the blood that has been shed when we only wish peace and freedom for everybody. We are a decent people struggling with ourselves.

This was Paterno in full bloom: opinionated, thoughtful, forceful, controversial, the man Angelo and Florence Paterno had hoped might someday be president. As the years went on, he showed this side of himself less and less to the outside world. Maybe, Paterno wondered, he became a bit less idealistic, a bit less trusting of the world, a bit less certain of his ability to do much more than affect the lives of his family and football players. More likely, he had been beaten up by the expectations. He grew tired of being called a hypocrite and a moralist,
of having critics turn every one of his mistakes and soft spots into a referendum on his character. He retreated inward and built walls around himself and his program. But in 1973, Paterno was open and vulnerable and willing to speak from the heart.

Our forefathers, who carved out this country, had blind faith in America. They had no responsibility to the rest of the world, and they had only to be concerned with what was best for their nation. They had never been beaten and they had supreme confidence. Our state of mind is different. We cannot morally escape our responsibility to the rest of the world, and we can never again do what is right just for America. We will never again have supreme confidence that everything we do is right. Not after Vietnam and Kent State, not after the assassination of Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, not after the death of Bobby Kennedy, and not after Watergate. But this doesn’t mean we can be less decisive than our forefathers. We must always act, but when we are wrong, we must be mature enough to realize it and act accordingly. This is where greatness lies.

There is another thing I tell my team. I tell them to keep hustling. Go all out on every play no matter how bad things look—because, if you keep hustling, something good will happen . . . . So keep hustling. You’ll do all right. Enjoy yourselves. Enjoy life. Have some fun. Our squad enjoys kidding me because on a nice day before a game I like to walk into the locker room and say, “Boy what a day—oh to be young again.”

I cannot adequately describe to you the love that permeates a good football team—a love of one another. Perhaps as one of my players said: “We grow together in love—hating the coach.” But to be in a locker room before a big game and to gather a team around and to look at grown men with tears in their eyes . . . huddling close to each [other] . . . reaching out to be a part of each other . . . to look into strong faces which say, “If only we
can do it today,” . . . to be with aggressive, ambitious people who have lost themselves in something bigger than they are—this is what living is all about.

Paterno’s speech made news all over America. “ ‘The System Is You,’ Paterno Tells Graduates” was the headline in Charleston, West Virginia. In Centralia, Washington, the headline was “Paterno Speaks Out.”
Sports Illustrated
reprinted large chunks of the speech in its “Scorecard” section. “Paterno urged graduates to admit when they are wrong,” reported a paper in San Antonio, Texas. The
New York Times
and
Washington Post
each wrote about Paterno’s speech in relation to Watergate. “Joe’s Penn Statement: Compete!” is how the story was headlined in the
Chicago Tribune.