Paterno (35 page)

Paterno would live another decade after saying that. He would never believe that the program would be better in someone else’s hands.

G
eorge Paterno struggled with being Joe’s younger brother. He had grown up in the same environment as Joe, going to Brooklyn Prep, playing football at Brown, serving in the army, but unlike Joe he never could find his life’s center. “Joe is the doer,” George would tell friends, “and I’m the dreamer.” He worked as a football coach for a while. He was a police officer. He served as the radio color commentator of Penn State football, often criticizing his own brother on the air, which was a kick for everyone, including Joe. He enjoyed a drink and good company. He never married.

The brothers clashed often, as they had when they were young. But there was a deep connection that transcended friendship. George understood, in ways that few could, what drove Joe.

At the end of the 1992 season, for instance, Joe faced a difficult decision. He had a brilliant linebacker named Rich McKenzie on the team. McKenzie had been a star high school linebacker in Florida, the No. 1 high school linebacker in America, and he had gotten it into his head that great linebackers are supposed to go to Penn State. Paterno did not want him. McKenzie’s grades were poor, his commitment to academics suspect. But McKenzie pleaded and Paterno made him a deal, similar to the deal he had made Bob White: if McKenzie would read three books over the summer and send book reports to Sue, and also agree to be tutored by Sue while in college, Paterno would give him a chance. McKenzie did the reports, and Paterno was impressed. For four years McKenzie teetered in his classes, always seemed on the brink of failing, but he managed to pull himself together. Paterno loved the kid. The whole family did. McKenzie even offered a toast at Jay Paterno’s wedding. “This was a kid who, when he first got to Penn State, he couldn’t even look you in the eye,” Guido D’Elia said. “And by the time he left, he was a new man. He was ready to live a successful life. I don’t want to overstate it, but Rich McKenzie was exactly the reason why Joe Paterno coached football.”

In his senior year, however, McKenzie let things slide even more than usual. He thought he had failed a class, so he stopped going to practice for a while, and he stopped putting extra effort into his other schoolwork. Paterno warned him and warned him again, but McKenzie would not straighten up. At the end of the season, Penn State was invited to play in the Blockbuster Bowl near McKenzie’s hometown of Fort Lauderdale. Paterno first decided he would not take McKenzie to the game, but Sue and Jay lobbied for him. “It’s his hometown,” Jay said. “All his friends will be there. He’s been so great for Penn State.” So Joe took him along, but he told McKenzie he would not play. “I’ve been fired,” McKenzie told the media.

For all his bravado, Paterno was not sure benching McKenzie was
the right thing to do. Yes, McKenzie had broken the rules and had to be punished; Paterno had always leaned to the side of the rules. But Paterno also understood that McKenzie had worked much harder than some of the other players to achieve as much as he had in school. None of it had been easy for him, and he had come so far. This game was in his hometown. Paterno wondered if benching the player was really fair.

Joe asked George to take a walk with him. Together they walked around Joe Robbie Stadium near Fort Lauderdale and talked about what to do. George told Joe he should play the kid. For one thing, the other players on the team were watching closely and would not think it fair if he didn’t play McKenzie in his hometown in the last game of his college career. More to the point, though, George thought Penn State had no chance of winning without McKenzie. This bowl game was against Stanford and its brilliant coach, Bill Walsh. CBS was promoting the game as “the Genius versus the Legend.” “I’m not sure which one I am,” Paterno joked before the game. But to George it was no joke. He did not want to see his brother beaten by Walsh, leaving everyone to think he had been outcoached.

Joe listened carefully and finally said, “Ahhh, mind your own business.”

He did not start McKenzie. He did allow him to play in a handful of plays in the second half, but that was after the game had been decided. Penn State lost 24–3, fulfilling George’s fears. But the larger point was that Joe would listen to George, even when they disagreed. And there were not many people Joe Paterno listened to at the end. George wrote Joe a letter once about how his head was getting too big, and Joe took it to heart.

Paterno needed such balance. He feared getting too comfortable, being surrounded by yes men, being treated like some sort of icon rather than a real flesh-and-blood person. But even as he feared those things, they were happening. He had few close friends even in his younger days; it was not in his nature to open up. During the 2000 and 2001 seasons, when Penn State was losing and people were
questioning his very ability as a coach, he would get encouraging calls from people all the time—and these calls made him crazy. He didn’t need anybody to tell him that everything would work out. He didn’t want anyone to tell him that. George was one of the few to understand this.

In 1997, George published a book,
Joe Paterno: The Coach from Byzantium.
It included some criticisms of Joe, and it created family friction. Joe insisted he did not care. Heck, he offered a quote for the back cover: “My brother tells me that the book is 80% good, 10% bad, and 10% his own personal observations. That’s fine with me.” Joe would always say he never read the book.

But Sue read the book, as did other family members. Most of the book
was
proud and supportive and admiring, but the negative stuff was what was played in the press. George seemed to buy into the idea that Sandusky’s coaching genius was at the heart of Paterno’s success. He made some unflattering remarks about Sue and her role in Paterno’s coaching life, and at different times in the book, he called Joe sanctimonious, egotistical, self-centered, and forgetful of the virtues that made him successful in the first place. Everyone in the Paterno family found it appalling that George would write such a book while Joe was going through tough times. Some family members never could forgive him. “George was not in a very good place when he wrote that book,” one close friend said. “He was very sick. He was in a lot of pain. And I think he lashed out. It caused a lot of pain, most of it to him.”

“I don’t mean this to sound negative,” Scott Paterno said near the end of Joe’s life, “but Uncle George was tough. He was tough. He was tough on my mom. He grew up in Brooklyn and had a different style from everyone else. He liked to have a couple of pops, and he had a drinking problem. He wasn’t a mean drunk or anything like that . . . . He was the guy that would call Joe up and tell him off. There’s nobody that does that anymore.”

Joe felt deep regret about how George’s life had turned out. Close to the end, George lived alone in New York. He was ill, and he was suffering. “I think he felt disappointed,” Joe said. One of the thrills of
George’s late life was appearing in a 1996
Sports Illustrated
story titled “One Big Happy Valley Family.” The story was positive and told of the fascinating relationship between the two brothers. But even this George wrote about with some sadness in his book:

The author kept implying that Joe and I are very different people. I convinced him we had the same ideals but used different methods in postulating and sharing them. Joe was a pragmatic idealist operating within the establishment, and I was the romantic idealist and dreamer operating out of the loop. The author decided I was an eccentric independent with a free spirit. I guess he’s right. The article was well received and many people told me they identified with me and even though they were not famous either, they had productive and good lives. We all can’t be heroes.

At the beginning of 2002, Joe moved George back to State College and checked him into a hospital. He tried to bridge the gap. Some of Joe’s children and grandchildren came to visit. George died in June of that year, and his death took a terrible toll on Joe, one he would not talk about publicly. “Their relationship was complicated,” one friend said. “But when George died, I really believe, there was a void in Joe’s life that nobody else could fill.”

WHEN THE 2002 SEASON BEGAN
, Paterno was surrounded by doubts. Reporters, alumni, and even longtime fans had come to believe that Paterno’s time as a successful football coach had expired.

“I really don’t care what people say,” he told the
New York Times
. “I try to tell young coaches, the minute you start reacting to criticism, forget it. It affects your judgment and ability to make tough decisions. You lose your courage.”

The team improved and won nine games in 2002, in large part due to the inspired running of Larry Johnson, who had so blatantly criticized the coaches two years earlier. Johnson was a powerful running
back, but even more than talent and speed, his success originated in a deep rage that propelled him forward, a rage Paterno had a hard time understanding. Paterno had called Johnson “high-strung” and “impatient,” and he kept him on the bench for three years. Johnson stewed as he waited for his chance to get on the field, and when he got the opportunity he ran with a power that no Penn State runner, not even John Cappelletti or Lydell Mitchell, had ever shown. He blasted his way for 327 yards against Indiana. When he needed 264 yards against Michigan State to become the first Penn State running back to rush for more than 2,000 yards, he got 279 in the first half.

Even during a modestly successful season—modest by Paterno’s high standards—there were signs that Paterno had lost his way. Penn State began the season with three straight victories but then lost in overtime to Iowa. As soon as the game ended, Paterno raced after one of the officials, Dick Honig, grabbed him, and screamed about two calls that he felt sure were missed. The image of seventy-five-year-old Joe Paterno running after an official and grabbing him was striking; it reminded some longtime college football observers of the sad scene at the end of Woody Hayes’s career, when he hit an opposing player at the end of his last loss.

Paterno did not appreciate the comparison. He didn’t hit anybody; he didn’t think he had done anything wrong. “Why should I regret it?” he barked at reporters. “What did I do? I did not make contact with him . . . . I was running into the locker room and grabbed him by the shirt and said, ‘Hey, Dick, you had two lousy calls.’ ”

Paterno had always demanded that his players treat the officials with respect. He had always responded to missed calls with thoughtful irritation; he said that in life some calls go your way and some don’t. And although, yes, he privately grumbled to coaches and friends about referees who he thought had cost him victories, he also knew that through the years Penn State probably got more close calls than most.

But suddenly that perspective had dissipated. He went public with
his complaints. The Iowa incident was just the first. Two weeks after that, Penn State lost to Michigan in a devastatingly close game that may have been influenced by a close call that went against Penn State receiver Tony Johnson with just forty seconds left in the game. The officials ruled him out of bounds on a catch. The replays suggested he was in bounds, though there may have been some question about whether or not he had possession of the ball. It was probably a good catch. Paterno went mad. He had Tim Curley write a letter to the Big Ten demanding a full review. He publicly called into question the character of the officials by asking why three of them lived in Michigan. He even allowed a little referee effigy to be placed in front of his house; he would not say whether he put it there himself. He told reporters, “You’ve got a bunch of kids who are busting their butts to win a football game . . . . You owe it to them to make sure the game is won by the players.”

It seemed so out of character for Paterno, who had managed, with few exceptions, to harness his competitive fury and act consistently with his belief that winning and losing weren’t the most important things. Many across the nation wondered if he had lost his mind. “What’s Up with Joe Pa?”
Sports Illustrated
asked. The
New York Times
wondered why Paterno was taking all the attention away from Larry Johnson, a legitimate Heisman Trophy candidate. (Johnson finished third in the Heisman voting, and there were those who thought Paterno should have worked harder to promote him.) “He knows better than anyone that no coach or argument should be bigger than his players,” the
Times
’ Joe Drape wrote.

Paterno seemed to realize that he had overstepped, and he backed off a little. But it was clear that something was different. He was testier. “I had known Joe well for more than forty years,” one friend said, “and one day he called me into his office and just started screaming at me. He disagreed with something I had said, and he just tore into me . . . . Joe had always needed to be right. That was part of his personality. He used to joke about it. But I think as he got older, that part
of him grew stronger. We all lose a bit of our patience when we get old—I certainly have. I think Joe lost some of his patience to listen to other points of view.”