Paterno (42 page)

Jay still believed that his father would be allowed to finish the season. He thought his father had earned that—at least that. Jay was playing tennis that night when his cell phone rang. His wife told him to call home. Joe Paterno had been fired.

FRAN GANTER, WHO HAD PLAYED
for Paterno at Penn State and coached with him for more than thirty years, showed up at the Paterno house just before 10
P.M.
Wednesday night with an envelope. Later Ganter would tell friends he did not know what was inside.

Paterno opened the envelope; inside was a sheet of Penn State stationary with just a name, John Surma, and a phone number. Surma was the CEO of U.S. Steel and the vice chairman of the Penn State Board of Trustees. Paterno picked up the phone and called the number.

“This is Joe Paterno.”

“This is John Surma. The board of trustees have terminated you effective immediately.”

Paterno hung up the phone before he could hear anything else.

A minute later, Sue called the number. “After sixty-one years,” she said, her voice cracking, “he deserved better.” And then she hung up.

There have been accounts—and certainly will be others—of what happened inside that board of trustees meeting. Graham Spanier was forced out. There was a suggestion that Paterno’s statement, particularly where he directed that “the Board of Trustees should not spend a single moment discussing my status,” was seen as insubordination. There were reports that, when there seemed to be some hesitation or loss of will, Governor Tom Corbett reminded the board, “Remember the children.” Board members spent the next few months justifying their reasons and recasting the firing as something less contentious.
As ESPN’s Don Van Natta reported, “He was simply relieved of his coaching duties but was allowed to continue on as an emeritus professor and would be paid his full salary under his contract, the trustees said.”

Joe Paterno was fired. Why and how the board made its decision is not my story to tell.

The campus was overrun with emotion. A riot broke out, several students were videotaped overturning a television truck, more than thirty-five people were arrested, and there was at least $200,000 worth of damage. Penn State students would be mocked for, as one news site put it, “rioting for a child-molester enabler.” Students gathered in front of Paterno’s house, and Joe and Sue came out for a few moments, he in a gray sweatshirt, she in a red bathrobe. His short speech to the students was quintessential Paterno, filled with raw emotion and winding roads:

I want to say hello to all these great students who I love. You guys are great, all of you—when I say “guys,” you know what I mean, you know I mean girls too. Hey, look, get a good night’s sleep, all right? Study, all right? We’ve still got things to do. I’m out of it, maybe now. That phone call put me out of it. We’ll go from here, okay? Good luck, everybody. Thanks. Thank you! And one thing: Thanks. And pray a little for those victims. We are Penn State.

Elsewhere on campus, a group of students standing around the statue of Paterno cried silently.

“Why are you crying?” I asked one young woman.

“Because everybody lost,” she said.

AT 6 A.M. THURSDAY MORNING
, Jay Paterno went to his father’s house. He had not slept, and his eyes were red and swollen. The night before, he went through various phases of anger and outrage and disbelief.
He told his son that his grandfather had been fired. Joey had a question: “When this is over, will we still be Penn State fans?”

“I don’t know,” Jay answered, and that is when he started crying, and he did not stop until he pulled himself together and went to his father’s house. He could not get over the unfairness of it all. If Sandusky was guilty, everybody was fooled. The way he saw it, his father had followed university policy; he had done what he thought was right; he had heard about an incident and reported it. How could they fire him for this? How could they believe he knew about evils that nobody else seemed to know about?

Like the Penn State players, Jay always called his father “Joe” when they were on the field or in a game. But this was a private moment. “Dad,” he asked, “what do you think I should do?”

“Is there even a question what you should do?” Joe replied. “You have to coach the kids. That’s not even a question.”

Tom Bradley, Paterno’s longtime assistant coach and now the interim head coach, held a press conference. He stuck tightly to his script, calling Joe “Coach Paterno,” referring four times to the “ongoing investigation,” and saying, “That’s up to the administration” three times. Bradley was a Pittsburgh guy who had played for Paterno, coached for Paterno, and liked saying that Paterno yelled at him more than anybody, even Sue. Only once did he go off script to say, “Coach Paterno will go down in history as one of the greatest men. Maybe most of you know him as a great football coach. I’ve had the privilege and honor to spend time with him. He’s had such a dynamic impact on so many, so many, and I’ll say it again, so many people and players’ lives. It’s with great respect that I speak of him, and I’m proud to say that I worked for him.”

If Bradley had said such words even one week earlier, no one would have blinked. People had said things like this about Paterno countless times through the years. But this was not the week before; now people wondered how anyone could say anything good about Joe Paterno. As I was writing this book, the line between the Time Before and the Time After became clear: Before November 5, 2011, it was
very difficult to find anyone willing to say a truly bad word about Joe Paterno. After November 5, it was far more difficult to find anyone willing to say a good word.

ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, PATERNO MET
with his coaches at his house. He sobbed uncontrollably. This was his bad day. Later, one of his former captains, Brandon Short, and his wife, Mahreen, stopped by the house. When Brandon asked, “How are you doing, Coach?” Paterno answered, “I’m okay,” but the last syllable was shaky, muffled by crying, and then he broke down and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.” Nobody knew how to handle such emotion. Joe had always been the strong one, had always seemed invulnerable. Jay claimed that the only two times he had seen his father cry were when Joe’s mother died and when Adam Taliaferro was hurt on the football field. On Thursday, though, he cried continually.

“My name,” he told Jay, “I have spent my whole life trying to make that name mean something. And now it’s gone.”

When Friday morning came, though, Joe was different. The crying was over. Nobody would ever see him cry again. Nobody would see him discouraged again. “It was like a transformation,” Mary Kay said. “He had one bad day. But after that, he was positive.”

“You know what?” Joe said. “I’m not going to feel sorry for myself. Are you kidding? I’ve lived a great life. Healthy children. Healthy grandchildren. Loving wife. I look around the world and see people who have real problems, serious problems. I’m the luckiest guy.”

The stories swirled on television and radio, the Internet and newspapers, each getting progressively darker. A couple of people from Paterno’s past, including Vicky Triponey, emerged to air their grievances. The press gave them a big stage. Anything resembling a Paterno defense was attacked mercilessly. When Franco Harris publicly defended his old coach, a Pittsburgh casino—a
casino
—put its relationship with Harris on hold. There was talk of canceling the rest
of the Penn State football season. Paterno stayed silent. He watched the Nebraska game on television. Penn State lost 17–14.

A few days later, it was announced that Paterno had lung cancer. He had not felt well for a few weeks, but he would not have gone to see the doctor had he still been coaching. When the doctor gave him the diagnosis, Paterno felt confident he would beat it. In their press release, the family described it as “treatable.” They always did hope for the best.

“We had been through so much,” Sue Paterno recalled. “And I always thought, in the end, we would win.”

T
here were good days and bad the last month and a half of Joe Paterno’s life. Most of them were bad. Outside, the cancer diagnosis was seen as something unreal. If Paterno’s life had been a novel, an editor would have insisted there be some time placed between Paterno’s firing and the discovery of the cancer that would end his life. But it happened all at once in real life. And while the cancer diagnosis was seen by the outside world as merely another surreal part of a surreal story, it was from Paterno’s perspective all that mattered. The chemotherapy and radiation wrecked him. When he got out of bed one evening and tried to go to the bathroom without
turning on the light, he fell and broke his pelvis. He was in pain except when medicated.

Every now and then he seemed like his old self. He loved the television show
M*A*S*H
. The show had gone off the air in 1983, but he was too busy to watch it then. Now he watched the show every chance he could, and he talked about it often. “Alan Alda is an Italian kid from Brooklyn, I think,” he would say. Alda was actually an Irish Italian kid (nine years younger than Paterno) from the Bronx. But close enough.

He tried to be spirited. The family threw an eighty-fifth birthday party for him just before Christmas, and for that one day he seemed younger, not older. He told stories; he laughed at jokes. Friends called, former players showed up, and he came to life. Paterno did not party often, but when he did he was usually the most enthusiastic person in the room.

Most days, though, he felt tired. The treatments were hard on him. He refused to be somber. In many ways, he reverted back to the young man who sent cheery letters home from Korea. He talked about getting better, traveling with Sue, maybe writing down a few of his thoughts for a book. He talked about writing a book of poetry. “My poems will rhyme,” he promised. But as the days went on, it grew harder and harder for him to build up his energy even for such thought. Outside his home, outside State College, it was open season on Paterno. The Big Ten Conference took his name off their football trophy. Jim Boeheim, the Syracuse basketball coach whose team had once been banned from tournament play by the NCAA for recruiting violations, told reporters, “I’m not Joe Paterno,” when child molesting allegations were made against his longtime assistant coach. Former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer insisted that Paterno and his staff had to know about Sandusky. (An outraged Galen Hall called Switzer to say that he had been Switzer’s assistant coach for years and didn’t have any idea of some of the private stuff Switzer had been doing.)
Sports Illustrated
put a photo of a downtrodden Paterno on the cover under the headline “The Failure and Shame of Penn State.” As Guido
D’Elia had predicted, dozens and dozens used Paterno’s own words—misquoted, even—to assert that he should have done more.

Was Joe Paterno bitter? It is impossible, of course, to know his deepest thoughts. Again and again his formers players would call to check up on him and find, instead, that Paterno said: “Ah, don’t worry about me. How is your family?” When he was told about someone on television or in the newspaper charging Paterno with grave sins, he would say: “Ah, the truth will come out.” He had his dark moments, certainly, when he wondered how old friends could turn so suddenly on him and how people at Penn State, the school he had loved and championed for most of his life, could believe such terrible things about him. But by all accounts, he would not allow those dark moments to torment him. He read. He watched television. He talked with family and friends and former players. He talked about how the love people expressed for him overpowered the condemnation, fair and unfair.

“[The criticism] really doesn’t matter,” said Paterno in our last conversation. “It really doesn’t. I know what I tried to do. Maybe everybody will see that in time. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they will judge me by what I tried to do. Maybe they won’t. What difference does it make? I just hope there’s justice for the victims.”

He was spent. After we talked, I called my wife to say that Joe Paterno would not live much longer. When she asked me what made me say that, I told her that Paterno had said, “If I make it through this, I think I’d like to travel to Italy again.”

“So?” my wife asked.

“He said ‘if.’ And Joe Paterno is not an ‘if’ kind of person.”

THE WEEK BEFORE PATERNO DIED
, he did an interview with Sally Jenkins of the
Washington Post,
the only interview he would grant except for the conversations we had for this book. He and his team thought Jenkins was a good and brave journalist and that she would be fair. They had dinner with her at the round table in the kitchen.
Her story ran in the
Post
on a Sunday, and the family agreed it was fair. By then, Paterno was back in the hospital.

By Wednesday, most of the family suspected that Joe would never come out of the hospital. Sue, who had seen her oldest son, David, come back from near death, was the last holdout. She still hoped for a miracle. But reality was harsher this time. Too many organs were failing. By Saturday, everyone knew that it was a matter of hours. He was not in pain, but he was also unable to speak. People tried to read his eyes and his face as they came to say their goodbyes. Guido D’Elia leaned in close and told him, “We’ll keep that stadium filled. We’ll get the right players. We’ll graduate them.” At that point, Mary Kay said, “Look! His lips moved. He said ‘Thank you.’ ”