Paterno (39 page)

There was one behind-the-scenes battle Paterno fought with ferocity. And this one, unlike the others, he decided he could not lose.

VICKY TRIPONEY BECAME THE VICE
president for student affairs at Penn State in 2003. She would become one of the most quoted people of 2011, when, in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, she told the
Wall Street Journal
and others that Paterno had fought her relentlessly over football player discipline. She released some interoffice emails to and from athletic director Tim Curley and president Graham Spanier that strongly suggested Paterno wanted favorable treatment for his players. In one of the emails she submitted to the
Journal
she had written, “The Coach is insistent he knows best how to discipline his players . . . and their status as a student when they commit violations of our standards should
NOT
be our concern.”

“Ex–Penn State Official Saw Paterno’s ‘Dark Side’ ” was the
USA Today
headline. Triponey’s describing Paterno’s “dark side” was galvanizing for a media hungry to find corruption in Paterno’s past. Paterno’s lawyer Wick Sollers put out a standard denial, calling her allegations “out of context, misleading and filled with inaccuracies.” Scott Paterno said, “We can’t swing at every pitch in the dirt.”

Her story played for weeks and months, and stories and chapters written after Paterno’s death continued to be built around her quotes. One close friend of Paterno wondered, “Don’t reporters know how to use Google?” If they had, they would have found that Triponey’s time at Penn State was not without controversy, including well-publicized clashes with student government, the campus radio station, and fraternities.

Paterno had numerous letters in his files from parents complaining about how their sons had been treated by the Office of Judicial
Affairs. He believed that Triponey and the Office of Judicial Affairs targeted his football players. Maybe this was the skewed view of a football coach; maybe it was the truth. Paterno believed it until the day he died.

The decisive battle between Paterno and Triponey was over a fight in April 2007 that involved several football players. The team’s safety Anthony Scirrotto was reportedly walking with his girlfriend when they got into an argument with three young men, who were also students at Penn State. The girlfriend may have kicked one of them, and she was pushed down. Scirrotto stepped up and was hit in the face. He would admit to following the men to their apartment complex and calling his roommate for support. One text message led to another, each sounding more serious than the last, and in time at least seventeen football players showed up at the apartment complex.

Several of the football players forced their way into the apartment and found the men who hit Scirrotto. Punches were thrown, a table was overturned, a bar stool was thrown and may have been used to hit someone. Beyond this, the stories diverge. The story that would be reported in the newspapers and on television was of an out-of-control scene where one man was knocked unconscious with a bottle and then pummeled; another claimed to be punched and kicked in the face repeatedly. The football players involved said this was wildly exaggerated. The police arrested six Penn State players and charged them with a total of twenty-seven offenses, nine of them felonies.

Paterno believed that Judicial Affairs, and Triponey in particular, had no business getting involved in something already being handled by the police. He believed even more strongly that Triponey would not give his players a fair hearing. He did not condone the fight, but, as is clear in his notes, he agreed with his players that the details had been overblown. He never believed the fight had been excessively violent or that anyone was hit with a bottle. Two of the men in the apartment had gone to the hospital but had been immediately released, so there were no long-lasting injuries. (One victim told ESPN that he suffered headaches for weeks afterward.) There was underage drinking
going on in the apartment before the players even got there. He thought it an unfortunate incident that merited harsh punishment, but he also believed that because it was a fight involving football players, it was his responsibility as coach to handle the school discipline. He wrote in his notes:

In my time at Penn State, no University official has ever tried to destroy a football season and a football team over a fight—especially involving a party organized by underage drinkers.

• 
No guns.

• 
No Drugs.

• 
Nobody seriously hurt.

• 
No robbery.

• 
No Sexual Harassment.

If somebody knocked somebody out with a beer bottle and/or a bar stool, and if somebody punched an unconscious person I WANT TO KNOW and I will handle them appropriately. They will be gone . . . . But I want to know. I don’t want to guess. The problem is people assume the worst. I won’t do that.

BASED ON THE EMAILS SHE
released, Triponey believed that Paterno would be too lax in his punishment of players; she insisted that such punishment was the purview of Judicial Affairs. Paterno believed Triponey wanted to make headlines punishing football players. Maybe one was right and the other wrong. Maybe there was something to both of their arguments. “It’s not a fight I want—it would be a Pyrrhic victory,” Paterno wrote in a note to himself. “But if I fight, I cannot afford to lose.” He announced that every member of the team would perform ten hours of community service and spend two hours cleaning up the stadium on Sundays after home games. And then, in quick succession:

• Four players had their charges dropped, leaving Anthony Scirrotto and Chris Baker.

• Scirrotto had five of his charges dismissed and pled to a lower charge on the sixth; the judge said there was no evidence to suggest he had assaulted anyone or tried to incite his teammates.

• Baker allegedly got into another fight in October and was thrown off the team the following summer.

In the middle of it all, Vicky Triponey announced her resignation. Four years later, after the Sandusky revelations, she came forward with the emails accusing Paterno of favoritism and meddling. At the time, nobody would publicly stand up for Paterno, but one player who was involved in the fight said this on the condition that he would stay anonymous: “If it was up to that woman, they would have thrown me out of school and let me rot. That’s how she was. They only cared about me on Saturdays. Some of them didn’t even care about me then. But now I’m a father, and I have a child, and I have a good job. I owe that to Joe Paterno. He wasn’t perfect. But he believed in me. When nobody else did, he believed in me.”

Prince Richard:
He’ll get no satisfaction out of me.

Prince Geoffrey:
My, you chivalric fool, as if the way one fell down mattered.

Prince Richard
: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

—THE LION IN WINTER

Joe Paterno, Guido D’Elia, Scott Paterno, and Dan McGinn

In Joe Paterno’s kitchen

November 9, 2011 (reconstructed from interviews)

Dan McGinn (crisis manager):
Okay, I’m going to read the statement out loud here, so all of us can hear it. We’ve been over this a lot, so let’s go from the beginning to the end. Okay, here we go.

I am absolutely devastated by the developments in this case. I grieve for the children and their families and I pray for their comfort and relief.

I have come to work every day for the last sixty-one years with one clear goal in mind: To serve the best interests of this university and the young men who have been entrusted to my care. I have the same goal today.

That’s why I decided to announce my retirement effective at the end of the season. At this moment, the Board of Trustees should not spend a single moment discussing my
status. They have far more important matters to address. I want to make this as easy for them as I possibly can.

This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more. My goals now are to keep my commitment to my players and staff and finish the season with dignity and determination. And then I will spend the rest of my life doing everything I can to help this University.

Okay, thoughts?

Scott Paterno:
I think it’s the best we can do.

Guido D’Elia:
I’m still a little worried about the part about Joe saying with the benefit of hindsight he wished he would have done more.

Joe Paterno:
Guido . . .

Guido:
I just think that people are going to misquote that. They’re going to try to use it as an admission of guilt.

Joe:
Guido, it’s how I feel. I do wish I had done more. I thought I did what I was supposed to do, but you look at it now, everything that’s happened—I do wish.

Scott:
I don’t think it’s an admission of guilt. I think we’re making it clear that if Dad had known what really happened, he would have done more. But he didn’t know, and he’s just saying he wished he had known.

Dan:
I think, under the circumstances, this is probably the best we can do.

Joe:
There’s one thing that bothers me about this statement.

(Everybody looks at him.)

Joe:
This part here that says, “I have come to work every day for the last sixty-one years with one clear goal in mind.”

(Everybody continues to look at him.)

Joe:
Well, I didn’t come to work every day for sixty-one years. I was sick a couple of days, and there were other things, like when David got hurt. I don’t know if I’d say that’s completely honest.

J
oe Paterno began the last football preseason of his life feeling great. Anyway, that’s what he told himself. During the previous two seasons he had been ill and he looked gaunt; now he had the strength to walk again, and he walked all over State College. People spotted him miles from his home. “You need a ride, Joe?” they would shout through the car window, and he would wave his hand, smile, and keep walking, as he had as a young man, focusing on the road ahead. He was eighty-four years old, but he announced to anyone who would listen that he had not felt this good in years. And he had a good feeling about his team.

Later he would tell friends and family that he knew, even then, that this would be his last year as a coach. There were a few quiet signs of this, including the simple fact that he allowed me to write a book about him. But he mostly kept such thoughts to himself. First, it was nobody’s business. Second, the last thing in the world Paterno wanted was one of those “We’ll Miss You, Joe” celebrations that he called a “living funeral.” Third, and perhaps most important, he wanted the freedom to change his mind. He would joke with reporters, using a line from Tennessee Williams: “I knew no one was immortal, but I thought I was the exception.”

He entertained reporters with stories and jokes for more than an hour at the Big Ten Media Days in Chicago. This was Paterno as he had not been with reporters in a long time: at ease and engaging. A year earlier, the Media Days were notable only because Paterno was recovering from a virus and an allergic reaction to medicine, and he looked so near death that newspapers and magazines across the nation began writing his obituary in anticipation of the inevitable. They were not so far off: few people knew that a couple of weeks earlier, when the allergic reaction first struck, Paterno was in such bad shape that last rites were performed. A couple of family members felt certain he would not survive the month. “I thought Joe would live forever,” his son Scott said. “But when I saw him in 2010, and I thought he was going to die, I came to grips with his humanity.”

Paterno recovered, and his vitality slowly returned. He coached through 2010, and as the 2011 season was about to begin he was as feisty and sarcastic as ever. After going through a short question-and-answer session with the media in a ballroom, he stepped down from the podium, winked at Guido D’Elia, and said, “I didn’t give them nothing.” Later, as he sat at a table with about a dozen writers, he told marvelous stories. “That was the best I’d seen him in a long, long time,” recalled Dick Weiss of the New York
Daily News
, who had been writing about Paterno for years.

At the Big Ten luncheon, Michigan State quarterback and Chicago native Kirk Cousins gave a stirring speech about how playing football was a privilege, and that with privilege comes responsibility to “work hard in the classroom . . . to give our all for fans . . . to represent the names on the front of our jerseys . . . to provide a true example of what it means to be a young man.” It was as if the speech had been written by Joe Paterno himself. “It has been a privilege to go to places like Happy Valley,” Cousins said, “and play a team coached by a man who embodies what it means to have a calling in life, and who proved you can have success with integrity.”

Paterno stood and applauded with everyone else. A few minutes later, while the lunch was going on, Paterno walked over to Cousins.
They spoke for a minute, then Paterno headed for the exit. “Time to go back,” he told Guido.

“But the luncheon . . . ”

“Time to go,” Paterno repeated. “We’ve got work to do.”

THE LAST MONTHS OF JOE
Paterno’s life were so crowded with devastating events—injury, scandal, getting fired, cancer, and finally death, all in blinding succession—that it would be easy to miss the ripples and small surprises also taking place. Paterno was called to testify in front of the grand jury in January 2011 about his former coach Jerry Sandusky. According to his family and friends, he did not spend a lot of time thinking about what he would say. However, many of those friends and family, particularly Scott Paterno and Guido D’Elia, saw storm clouds ahead. Scott recalled interrogating his father about Sandusky, asking question after question about what he had known and what he had done. He also went through Joe’s files, folder by folder, in an effort to find anything he could about Sandusky. He came away convinced that the only thing Joe knew about Sandusky’s alleged crimes—or remembered knowing—was the vague conversation he had with Mike McQueary. Scott made himself his father’s lawyer, and they met in Harrisburg, where the grand jury was sitting.