Paterno (36 page)

In the Capital One Bowl, Paterno’s record-setting thirty-first bowl game, Penn State lost to Auburn 13–9, and there was much unhappiness afterward. Larry Johnson once again criticized the game plan. “We get so panicky and scared that we don’t know the answer when it’s right in front of our face,” he griped to reporters. Paterno, meanwhile, criticized Johnson, something that had always been beneath him: “He fumbled the ball three times, he slipped a couple of times, dropped a screen pass. It wasn’t one of his better games.”

The larger story was that Paterno decided to play a defensive back named Anwar Phillips, who had been temporarily expelled from school while being investigated for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman. At the time of the bowl game there were no criminal charges, and though he was charged later, Phillips was acquitted. Paterno’s playing Phillips was viewed as yet another sign that the architect of The Grand Experiment had lost his way. Even the school president, Graham Spanier, publicly declared that playing Phillips was a mistake, and he moved to create a rule that would prevent such things from happening in the future.

In time, Paterno would go to war with Judicial Affairs over what he viewed as the unfair singling out of his players. He would go to war with President Spanier as well.

L
ooking back, it is obvious that only a defiant legend could have survived Penn State’s disastrous 2003 and 2004 seasons. The team lost more than they ever had under Joe Paterno: six games in a row in 2003, then six in a row again in 2004. Along with this, there was a conspicuous string of off-the-field incidents by players. There was obvious coaching confusion, including what seemed to be a basic clash over who was running the offense, a clash that involved Paterno’s son Jay, who had become the quarterback coach. To outsiders, the program appeared to be in chaos. Paterno kept insisting that things were better than they looked and that the team was a play or two away from being winners again. These words did not comfort a panicked fan base.

The question of how Paterno survived those two calamitous years leads to a simple answer involving power, force of will, and stubbornness. But before getting there, there’s a deeper question: Why? At the end of 2004, Paterno was seventy-seven, an age even he had conceded was too old to be coaching a major college football program. “I don’t think I want to go over 75,” he had told the writer Bill Conlin in 1998. “I think that would be a mistake.” He had lost the energy to do so many of the things that a coach needed to do. He no longer traveled much to recruit; he had cut his speaking engagements to rarities; he almost never gave a one-on-one interview to a reporter; his practices, which had long been closed, now had the air of a secret government project. He would do charity functions reluctantly and usually only after Sue begged him.

So why go on? Why keep coaching? There is no shortage of theories, but no one can know the depths of another man’s heart. Some took the most cynical view and believed that, despite his protests, Paterno wanted to finish his career with the record for most victories by a coach. Shortly after Paterno passed Bear Bryant on the all-time victories list, his friend and rival Bobby Bowden at Florida State passed Paterno. Paterno said repeatedly that the record didn’t matter to him, which people close to him often confirmed, but many simply did not believe him.

Others, especially close friends and family, believed that Paterno kept coaching because he simply could not imagine another life. He could not imagine waking up in the morning without a thousand things to do, without a game plan to create, an opponent to defeat, and young men to teach. “His mind doesn’t ever stop,” his daughter Mary Kay explained. “It’s like a joke in the family, that whenever he comes over, he will stay for a few minutes and then he will stand up and say, ‘Okay, we better let these kids get some sleep.’ He’s got to go. He’s got to work on something. If he’s away for even a few minutes, he thinks of something he should be doing.” “He can’t even go on vacation,” Guido D’Elia said. “He’s there for three days and he’s going stir crazy. He’s got to get back to work.”

Paterno reduced his explanation to this: he was afraid of dying, afraid, as Hemingway had said, of backing into the grave. He never forgot that Bear Bryant died so soon after he retired, and he believed the same thing could happen to him. “I’ll know when it’s time,” he told friends and family, alumni and reporters, critics and sycophants and everyone else. But this was the riddle: How could he ever know it was time? How could he ever admit that he wasn’t as strong, as quick, as full of life? How could he retire and face what comes after? “Old age should burn and rage at the close of day,” he told me once, quoting Dylan Thomas.

There was something else too, something perhaps best summed up by his longtime friend and colleague Tim Curley: “I’ve never known anyone who loves a challenge more than Joe. When things are rough, he almost seems happier and more excited than when everything seems to be going well. I can remember during the roughest times, Joe would come into the office full of life and energy, like he was saying: ‘Let’s prove some people wrong today.’ ”

All around him in 2003 and 2004 (and the three years prior as well) was doubt. The newspapers were filled with anonymous quotes from donors and fans who said that it was time for Joe to go. That was the unofficial name of the campaign: “Joe Must Go.” There were ads in the paper, letter campaigns to the school, secret meetings of rich and powerful people in the community, all sorts of efforts to convince Paterno to step down or, if that failed, to topple him. The more people tried, the more obstinate Paterno became. This, he admitted, was a function of his personality that he did not control well. He did not lose easily, and he did not lose well. He believed with every fiber of his being that he was the right man, the only man, to be head coach at Penn State. He understood that other people had a different opinion, and he knew they were wrong.

Bob Flounders, a reporter from the Harrisburg
Patriot-News
, asked Paterno at the end of the unsuccessful 2004 season if he deserved to be back. Paterno’s response showed that Flounders’s question had hit bone: “I really don’t appreciate that question, to be honest with
you. After fifty-five years to have somebody tell me that, I don’t appreciate that.”

No, Joe would not go. Jay Paterno would always remember being in the Beaver Stadium tunnel before a game, with 108,000 people screaming as the team prepared to run onto the field. Joe walked close to the entrance, the crowd grew even louder, and Joe turned back to his son, winked, and said, “Why would anybody give this up?”

The more they told him to go, the more Joe Paterno intended to stay.

THE 2003 SEASON WAS THE
worst one yet. Paterno threw a player off the team after he allegedly struck a woman on campus. (The charges were later dropped.) He suspended a player for underage drinking and suspended another for driving under the influence. He cut another player from the team after a drunken-driving arrest and had a player expelled from school for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend. (He was convicted.) Other players got in trouble as well. Something rotten about Penn State football seemed to be in the news every day.

This was not exclusively a Penn State problem, of course. Every major college football program had off-the-field incidents, especially involving alcohol. “These are young kids—eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old kids,” Paterno said. “They are aggressive young men. They make mistakes. What do we want to do, allow those mistakes to ruin them, or use those mistakes to teach them how to act?”

In 2004, Paterno believed he had to get tougher, had to impose discipline on his players. But no matter how tough he got, the off-field incidents kept showing up in the papers. There was a fight at an ice-skating rink involving three players. There was a bizarre bow-and-arrow incident involving two players; the charges were later dropped, but not before it became the talk of State College. Paterno thought—and never stopped thinking—that there were people trying to make a name for themselves by singling out his program and his players. In 2008, an investigation by ESPN’s
Outside the Lines
reported
that forty-six Penn State players had been charged with crimes between 2002 and 2008. Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier, was quoted in the report saying that it was embarrassing. Paterno called the whole thing a witch hunt and later said that the report and others like it reflected something sad about society.

One afternoon in November 2011, while sitting at his kitchen table, Paterno offered a soliloquy on his role as football coach:

To so many people these guys are numbers. But I can honestly tell you, they were never numbers to me. I wanted every one of them to go on to live good and meaningful lives. We go into some rough places, and get some kids with rough edges. They grow up without fathers, without mothers, in places where most people wouldn’t walk in bright daylight. Are they going to make some mistakes? Sure they are. And some of them are bad kids; there’s nothing we can do for them. But most of them, they’re not bad kids. They’re good kids. They want to do good. They don’t know how. They trip up. We can help them. We can make a difference in their lives.

You’ve got some people who want to catch them in the act, to punish them, to send them home. I’m just being honest about it. They don’t care what happens to them after that. They see that a kid got arrested or that there was some kind of fight, and they immediately say, “Oh that’s a bad kid. You should get rid of him. You should send him back where he came from.” They don’t even want to know what happened. I could make myself look good—hey, Tough Guy Paterno—if I cut them. But I couldn’t do that. There are probably some kids I gave a second and third chance to who probably didn’t deserve it. I’ve made mistakes. But I don’t regret that. You know what I regret? I regret the kid I threw out too soon, the kid who I gave up on who I could have helped if I’d just stayed with him a little bit longer.

Let’s not kid anybody, football players are targets, especially at a place like Penn State. They are in the public eye all the
time. They make a mistake, and everybody knows about it. If they are falsely accused, everyone believes it because they’re football players. I’m not condoning the bad things, and I threw plenty of kids off the team through the years . . . . But I always thought it was my job to coach them and to help them. I wasn’t going to hurt them and give up on them just so I could look good in the paper or in some television report.

While the incidents of 2003 and 2004 made news, sparking “Happy Valley Not So Happy” stories across the country, Penn State kept losing. Most of the losses were close, which gave some credence to Paterno’s enduring line about the team being only a play or two away from a victory. He again criticized officials after close losses. But as Paterno himself said, nobody at Penn State cared about moral victories or excuses. The losing told the only story anyone heard.

The losses came one after another, week after week: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Purdue, Iowa, Ohio State, Northwestern, all losses, all in a row in 2003. The talk Paterno had given to his coaching staff in 1998 about the other Big Ten schools catching up had come true. Perhaps because of a dip in their own recruiting, perhaps because of the parity of college football, Penn State was no more talented than the other schools. Every game would be close. Superior coaching and conditioning had led the Nittany Lions to so many close victories over the years. In the early 2000s they simply stopped winning those games.

An ad demanding that Paterno be fired was placed in the local paper. A “Joe Must Go” website was started. People chanted “Joe must go” at home games. Nobody, not even Paterno’s biggest fans, would argue that he could turn the team around. The best anyone seemed able to say was, “Well, Joe Paterno has earned the right to leave on his own terms.” Those weak defenses were soon drowned out. It seemed as though everybody agreed that the game had passed Paterno by, that he had to retire for the good of the program, his legacy, and the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The only person who didn’t agree was Joe Paterno.

He also seemed to be the only one who mattered.

The 2004 season was every bit as dreadful as 2003. Paterno shuffled his staff a bit, moving longtime coach and friend Fran Ganter into administration and hiring former Penn State quarterback Galen Hall as a new offensive coordinator. This raised more eyebrows; Hall had not coached college football for fifteen years, after being forced to resign as head coach of Florida while the school was being investigated for various rule violations. He had been banished to various minor professional sports leagues during those fifteen years, until Paterno gave him a chance. “Galen’s a good coach and a great teacher,” he told reporters. When they pressed him on the violations at Florida, violations Hall consistently denied, Paterno replied, “He got screwed.” Paterno also gave his son Jay added responsibilities and hired the same graduate assistant who had told him about Sandusky in 2001, Mike McQueary.