Paterno (34 page)

Second, it appears, based on another interoffice email, that Paterno was consulted about the 2001 incident, at least unofficially. In life, Paterno was probably criticized by admirers and supporters more for not following up than for any other nonaction. In a series of emails between Curley, Schultz, and president Graham Spanier, it is made clear that the three met without Paterno on Sunday, February 25, to discuss how to handle the Sandusky accusation. An email from Schultz to Curley after that meeting read: “Tim, I’m assuming that you’ve got the ball to (1) talk with the subject ASAP regarding the future appropriate use of the University facility; (2) contact the Chair of the Charitable Org and (3) contact the Dept of Welfare.”

Two days later, Curley wrote that he wanted to have a meeting.
“After giving it more thought and talking it over with Joe yesterday—I am uncomfortable with what we agreed were the next steps. I am having trouble with going to everyone but the person involved.” Curley then recommended meeting directly with Sandusky, to alert him to their knowledge of the first incident and to “indicate we feel there is a problem, and we want to assist the individual to get professional help.” He went on to write: “We feel a responsibility at some point to inform his organization and maybe the other one about the incident.” (“His organization” meant The Second Mile. It is possible “the other one” meant child services.)

When news of this email broke, the general media takeaway from this email chain was that Paterno had convinced Curley to back off reporting Sandusky and to handle this in-house. Others familiar with the emails believed instead that Paterno had demanded they confront Sandusky. It is entirely possible, with those opinions based only on a short email, that both explanations are wrong. Paterno had not talked about any follow-up meeting at all, and he died before the emails were discovered.

It is beyond the scope of this book to look at the role of anyone but Paterno in this harrowing affair, but it is certain that no one, Paterno included, was aware enough, courageous enough, or decent enough to stop a man who would be found guilty of forty-five counts of child molestation. Jerry Sandusky committed heinous crimes against children, and—as Paterno himself said—many people in and around State College would have deep regrets. Nobody—not the president of the school, not the athletic director, not the legendary coach—reported the incident to the police, and this would haunt a community, shatter the reputation of a great American university, and darken the legacy of the coach who made it his life’s goal to strive for success with honor.

TEN AND A HALF YEARS
after that conversation between Paterno and McQueary, a more complete and sinister picture appeared, and it appeared
suddenly and brutally. The Pennsylvania grand jury released a presentment that charged Jerry Sandusky with forty counts of child abuse (later the total was fifty counts). The presentment was graphic and grotesque and included numerous charges of Sandusky indecently fondling, performing oral sex on, hugging, and kissing young boys who were involved in his charity, The Second Mile. Some of these alleged crimes happened on the Penn State campus. It was as revolting a document as most people will read in their lives, the most stomach-turning Paterno had ever read.

In the presentment, the story was this: On Friday, March 1, 2002 (later changed to Friday, February 9, 2001), at about 10
P.M.
, McQueary went to the Lasch Building. When he got there, he heard those rhythmic slapping sounds he described to Paterno. As he put his sneakers in the locker, he looked into the shower and saw a boy about ten years old with his hands up against the wall who was “being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky.” The next morning McQueary “went to Paterno’s home, where he reported what he had seen.”

The presentment, as such things do, made black and white what was a smoggy gray. When questioned, McQueary admitted that he did not see anything very clearly. He also said under oath that “out of respect,” he had not used graphic terms and had not gone into much detail with Paterno. In this their memories coincided: Paterno said what McQueary told him was not even close in specifics or in brutality to what was in the presentment.

There is strong evidence that McQueary was much less certain about what he saw in the aftermath of the incident. According to testimony, that Friday night, after he left the Lasch Building, he went to his father’s house to ask for advice. The two of them talked at some length, and then they called over a family friend, Dr. Jonathan Dranov. Dranov, a prominent doctor in the community, told Paterno family investigators in 2011, and a Pennsylvania jury in 2012, that McQueary said he heard some “sexual sounds” but could offer no more detail. Dranov said that three times he pressed McQueary to
describe what he actually saw, and three times McQueary said that he did not see anything in the shower. Dranov conceded that McQueary might have been holding back; he too remembered just how upset McQueary was, which was why he kept pressing the issue. But at the end of the conversation McQueary continued to say that he did not see any act but that he heard those noises.

Dranov said McQueary’s visual description was of a naked young boy in the doorway of the shower. McQueary then said he saw an arm pull the boy back out of the way, and seconds later Sandusky walked around the corner with a towel wrapped around his waist. Dranov and the McQuearys agreed that Mike had not seen enough to go to the police, and Dranov recommended that McQueary go to Paterno on that Saturday morning. Dranov conceded all those years later that, though the incident sounded bad, Sandusky’s reputation as a community icon was still intact. He said he had never heard any rumors about Sandusky and that what McQueary had seen led to the possibility of a misunderstanding and “an innocent explanation.”

Paterno would later say that if McQueary had told him he saw Sandusky raping a young boy, “We would have gone to the police right then and there, no questions asked.” Whatever McQueary actually said that morning, Paterno heard something vague. He clearly did not want to think too much about it. He was seventy-five years old, from another time, and he would say he simply did not comprehend the potential gravity of the situation.

This must be said again: Paterno did not like Sandusky. Paterno had not wanted Sandusky to have access to the Lasch Building in the first place. He had pushed Sandusky out. Paterno did not feel like he should be involved for another reason: He knew that many fans and people in State College viewed Sandusky as the guy who should be coaching Penn State; he did not feel that he was in a position to get involved. He tried to make this clear to the grand jury: “Obviously, I was in a little bit of a dilemma since Mr. Sandusky was not working for me anymore.” This reticence to publicly charge his former assistant and possible rival with molesting a child based on the agitated
recollections of an assistant coach was something he had trouble explaining. He had gone by the book, word for word. He reported the conversation to Curley. This was what the law required him to do, and he did it. The Freeh report—and the public—concluded that it was not nearly enough.

THE 2001 SEASON PROVED TO
be another painful one, though it began with joy. Paterno had spent every available moment with Adam Taliaferro in the hospital. He was there when they told Adam that a vertebra in his neck had burst and that his spinal cord had been bruised. He was there when doctors told Adam he had a 3 percent chance of walking again. And he was there when Adam said that he wanted to lead the team out of the tunnel to start the next season—and he would lead the team while walking.

“He was so positive,” Taliaferro recalled. “He made me believe that I could do anything.” In time, Taliaferro would graduate from Penn State, go to law school, and become a lawyer, and Paterno was with him at every step, pushing him, inspiring him, writing letters of recommendation for him. After Paterno died, Taliaferro successfully ran for a spot on the Penn State Board of Trustees, where he intended to keep alive Joe Paterno’s vision for the school.

And at the start of the 2001 season, Taliaferro led the team out of the tunnel. He walked, even jogged, while the crowd in Beaver Stadium, the first crowd of 100,000 in Penn State history, cheered and cried. It was a beautiful beginning.

Then Penn State lost four games in a row, the worst start and longest losing streak of Paterno’s career. The nation was watching closely. After planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, Americans wanted something to celebrate. Paterno was supposed to lead that celebration. He started the season only two victories away from passing Bear Bryant. But the team kept losing. “As angry as I am right now, all I feel like doing is punching a wall,” Paterno said after the team was crushed by Wisconsin.

“I don’t think I’m too old,” he told the
New York Times
after a 20–0 loss to Michigan.

“It’s the late winter of Joe Paterno’s coaching career, and what a cold time it has become,” Ivan Maisel wrote in
Sports Illustrated
.

Paterno read books for strength. He read
Moby-Dick
again, and Michael Shaara’s classic Civil War novel,
The Killer Angels
, and
The Red Badge of Courage
. He was looking for tales of triumph over adversity. In the fifth game of the season, Penn State beat Northwestern 38–35, and Paterno tied Bear Bryant’s record. A week later, the Nittany Lions beat Ohio State at home in front of more than 108,000 people for the emotional victory that pushed Paterno past Bryant to the top of the all-time victories list. The word “finally” was in the headline in most newspapers.

“You know, every once in a while, people say ‘You ought to get out of it,’ ” he told reporters after the game, a classic bit of understated Paterno humor since that was all anyone had said to him for months. “I think about it, and I think about how much it means to me, and the great moments I’ve had. I don’t want to get out of it.”

The team played better the rest of the season, but not a lot better. They finished with a losing record for the second year in a row.

EVERYBODY SEEMED TO HAVE A
theory about why Paterno’s team stopped winning. His age, of course, was the most prominent of these. He turned seventy-five after the 2001 season, and it was written again and again that the game had passed him by. There was talk that the move to the Big Ten prevented Penn State from ever being a national power again; the competition had grown too tough. There was talk about how Paterno’s basic football philosophy—
Play great defense. Hold on to the football. Make fewer mistakes than your opponent
—could not win in the new reality of college football, where television and bowl connections and the money those generated drove the game.

But there was another prominent theory, one that would play a
large role in the last decade of Paterno’s life: that Paterno was simply not the same without Jerry Sandusky as his defensive coordinator.

“Most people don’t realize how much Jerry meant,” former star Brandon Short told
Sports Illustrated
. “He was just as much a part of Penn State as Joe Paterno is.”

“Let us give credit to Jerry, not Joe, for all those wonderful years,” a fan named Donald J. Smith wrote to the
Sunday News
of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “No, I am afraid time has not passed by Joe Paterno. It has simply laid open before the world that Joe is an average coach who had some terrific assistants.”

“I don’t think people understand the impact Jerry Sandusky had,” former player Mac Morrison told the
Seattle Times
. “He’s not just an assistant coach. He has the best defensive mindset and defensive knowledge that I’ve ever known.”

“The retirement of Jerry Sandusky removed a crucial pillar from the program’s foundation,” was the conclusion in the
Palm Beach Post
.

“The loss of longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, who retired after the 1999 season, was a bigger blow than most people realized,” argued the
Philadelphia Inquirer
.

“With each Penn State loss, the picture becomes more clear: Jerry Sandusky was the head football coach for the past twenty-five years, and Joe Paterno was apparently the director of marketing,” an unnamed fan called in to the
Times Leader
in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

And this in the
Bergen (New Jersey) Record
:

The defense, meanwhile, has not been as strong as years past, and some reason that the retirement two years ago of longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was a turning point. At the University Creamery, the school’s coffee house, Sandusky, like Paterno, has an ice cream named for him. Listed on the menu underneath the Peachy Paterno is the Sandusky Blitz, a banana and caramel swirl with chocolate-covered peanuts.

Victor Wills, a sophomore from Bethlehem, Pa., who works at the Creamery and plays the sousaphone in the marching band, said he wishes Sandusky would return, “So our defense will be the way it used to be and we’ll be known again as ‘Linebacker U.’ ”

These are only a few of the hundreds of things written and said about how Sandusky’s retirement had exposed Joe Paterno. It would seem remarkable years later that, within a tight-knit community like State College, word of the 1998 investigation or McQueary’s account had not leaked to someone in the media. But apparently, it had not. There was a powerful groundswell within the community to convince Paterno to retire, finally, and to bring Sandusky back as head coach. The sentiment was popular nationally too. So many who had admired Paterno, even grudgingly, were concerned that he was tarnishing his legacy by stumbling around as a coach when he could no longer compete.

Paterno refused to see it. He began to say things like “We’re just a couple of plays away” and “We just need one or two breaks and we’ll be back on top again.” To many people, it sounded like Paterno was out of touch, but he believed it. “If I wake up one morning,” he told an
Atlanta Constitution
reporter, “and believe the program would be better in someone else’s hands, then it’s over.”