Paterno (7 page)

Sometimes, though, myth has its place. Stanley Woodward certainly could have written the line. Paterno couldn’t pass, but he could run pretty well and his teams did win. Engle’s Brown teams had thirteen wins, seventeen losses, and four ties before Paterno’s junior season. That year Paterno starred on defense and as a punt returner—he set what was then the school record for most yards returned on punts—and Engle often put him in as quarterback to spark the team. Brown won seven of nine games that year. The next year, with Paterno entrenched as the starting quarterback, Brown went 8-1, its best season in decades.

“There was something particularly close about that coach-quarterback relation,” the
Providence Bulletin
columnist Jerry Prior wrote days after Paterno graduated in 1950, “for the latter had come
close to the ideal as a coach’s player, loyal, quick-witted, inspirational and a hard worker. The last line is especially true, for Brooklyn Joe was always working to make himself deserving of the confidence Engle had in him.”

Paterno’s football career at Brown ended with perhaps his most illustrious performance, in a game against Colgate. Before that game, Joe’s brother, George—a bigger and better athlete than Joe but, by his own admission, not nearly as driven—told a reporter that he thought he still had his best game left in him. Joe overheard. When Colgate, a team that had lost seven games in a row, took a 26–7 lead early in the third quarter, an enraged Joe Paterno turned to his younger brother and said, “We’re going to have to do this.”

The Paternos led Brown on a remarkable comeback. George broke through for a 37-yard touchdown run. Joe ran for 42 yards and threw a touchdown pass. Joe intercepted a pass and raced 40 yards. George ran hard for a 15-yard touchdown. And so on. George ended up rushing for 162 yards, by far the most productive game of his career. Brown scored 34 points in the last seventeen minutes of the game for a rousing and overwhelming victory that clinched one of the best seasons in the school’s history.

And Joe? He didn’t score a touchdown. He didn’t put up impressive statistics. When the season ended, he did not get picked for the All–Ivy League team. Maybe this troubled him a bit at the time; the young Joe was not averse to seeing his name in the newspaper. But he would not remember feeling troubled. “You know what I liked best about Aeneas? He was a team player. He didn’t care for individual glory. He didn’t care about getting the credit. He simply wanted to be a part of something larger than himself. That appealed to me.”

THE STORY OF HOW JOE
Paterno became a football coach was told so many times through the years that in time it lost its power and honesty. The story evolved into something of a folktale that went like this: Joe Paterno had intended to go to law school to fulfill his parents’
wishes. But then Rip Engle offered him a job as an assistant coach at a cow college called Penn State. Paterno, the Brooklyn kid through and through, reluctantly took the job to pay off some debts. He saw this as a temporary detour toward the law. At first, he despised this little hamlet in the middle of nowhere called State College (where they put celery in the spaghetti sauce), but gradually he began to appreciate its small-town charms and grew to see that he was destined to be a football coach. He stayed in State College for the rest of his life and coached football there until a terrible series of events sparked a national scandal, and then cancer killed him.

The folktale, like all folktales, oversimplifies. But that’s not the real problem. The problem is that it strips the humanity out of what really happened.

It seems likely that Paterno did not want to become a lawyer. He was almost twenty-four when he graduated from Brown. He had served in the army, he had read the classics, he had been a football star. He craved a life of excitement. He knew full well that his parents expected great things from him; this had been a persistent and overpowering theme of his young life. He had applied to law school and was accepted at Boston University. But, though he was careful not to admit it at the time, the signs pointed to a young man who was hoping for something to save him from what seemed his inevitable fate.

“It’s particularly pleasant to learn today that a young fellow named Joe Paterno will serve as an assistant backfield coach to Engle in his new post at Penn State,” Jerry Prior wrote in the
Providence Bulletin
in May 1950. “Joe, in order to make the move, had to shelve, temporarily, at least, a plan to enter law school. But he had hoped all along to go into coaching if he found the right opening.”

There is the key phrase:
He had hoped all along
. When the 1949 season ended, Engle asked Paterno as a favor to work with the quarterbacks who would replace him at Brown. He loved it. Here was a calling that spoke to his highest aspirations: teaching, pushing for perfection, making an impact on people’s lives. Here was also a calling that fed some of his more earthbound ambitions: winning, being
in charge, having the last word. Paterno said he spent those few weeks of coaching as a diversion to fill the time before law school began. But this might be his memory playing tricks. He had read the
Aeneid
; it seems likely that he hoped for the Fates to step in and change the course of his life.

And the Fates came through. Rip Engle was offered the head coaching job at Penn State University. He had been offered coaching jobs at schools before, and he turned them down, but this one was different. For one, his coach and mentor Dick Harlow had played for Penn State. For another, Engle was from a small Pennsylvania town and knew the territory. But perhaps most significantly, Penn State had determined, after a long hiatus, to give full scholarships to football players. This was a chance for Engle to recruit top athletes and coach big-time football. And Engle, gloomy and modest though he might be, had ambition.

He took the job, but there was a stipulation in the offer: Engle had to keep the entire coaching staff intact. Penn State officials worried about losing the mission of college sports (which is why they had stopped giving out football scholarships in the first place). School administrators liked to think of coaches as professors, so much so that they offered their coaches tenure. They did not want coaches fired for losing games; theirs was to be a higher calling. If Engle wanted the job, and the tenure that came with it, he would have to take on the assistant coaches too.

Engle agreed but pleaded for the chance to bring in one new coach. He wanted to teach the players his own complicated version of the Winged-T offense, and none of the Penn State coaches knew it. The school granted him this request, and Engle tried to hire his first assistant coach, Gus Zitrides, but Zitrides decided to stay on as head coach at Brown. (It was a doomed move for him: Zitrides’s team lost eight of nine games, and he was promptly fired and went to work for the government.) Engle then tried to hire his second assistant, Bill Doolittle, but he decided to stay with Zitrides at Brown.

Engle was stuck. He was out of assistant coaches. (Another of
his coaches, Weeb Ewbank, had become an assistant coach for Paul Brown and the Cleveland Browns; he would go on to a Hall of Fame coaching career in the National Football League.) In desperation, Engle convinced his graduating quarterback and favorite player, Joe Paterno, to come with him to Penn State and help him get the program off the ground.

Paterno would entertain countless dinner audiences, men’s clubs, and alumni gatherings with the story of his drive with Engle through the mountains on the way to State College. “Rip kept talking about how clean the barns were. I remember that’s the thing he kept saying. ‘Oh, the barns there are so clean, you could eat off the floors.’ I was a kid from Brooklyn, what the heck did I know or care about barns? And then we actually got there, and those barns stunk like you wouldn’t believe. Eat off the floors? I couldn’t eat within two miles.”

Paterno would tell interviewer after interviewer that coaching at Penn State was a fluke, a temporary thing, a holding pattern until he had made a few dollars and could go to law school and follow in his father’s footsteps. That was certainly the story he told his parents at the time. Angelo was typically kind and understanding when Joe brought up coaching, at least at first. Angelo had hoped his son might achieve great things; he had told Joe that he might be president someday. But here, in the pivotal moment, he told his son to follow his heart. “I never made a lot of money,” Joe remembered his father saying, “but I tried to do the thing I loved. If this is what you want to do, try it.”

Florence was typically skeptical. “What did we send you to college for?” she asked.

Over the years, Paterno came to believe the folktale version of his own story, came to believe that on the way to law school he lucked into a coaching gig and sort of drifted into his life as a legendary football coach. But he had to know the story did not go quite like that. Paterno was not the sort of man to float aimlessly toward his destiny. He coached his football players to “make something happen.” He taught his children to “make an impact.” He read books about
Churchill and Patton and Alexander the Great—“you know,” he said, “the doers.”

If you go deep into the Brown University Archives, you can find a 1949 Football Press Guide. This was written before the 1949 football season began, months before Penn State hired Rip Engle, months before Boston University accepted Paterno to law school. The Joe Paterno blurb did not get everything right—it called him an economics major, for instance—but it had a fascinating conclusion:

Big brother Joe Paterno is one half of Brown’s first set of co-captains since 1940. This popular leader from Brooklyn, New York is an excellent field general on offense and a tough man to go through or over on defense. Also used to run back punts and kickoffs, Joe rated with the best in the country. A halfback at Brooklyn Prep, he made the All-Metropolitan squad in 1944. He also captained the school basketball team. At Brown, he was switched to the “down-under” position. He is an economics major, a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and hopes to become a football coach after graduation.

“When they first told me that, I was surprised,” Paterno would say at the end. “I guess maybe I did want to be a football coach. I just didn’t think it would happen.”

I
n October 1945, when Joe was at Fort Dix, and two months after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Angelo Paterno was director of Interfaith Movement Inc., an interracial group formed just before the war with the pledge of “allegiance to the kingdom of truth, the brotherhood of all mankind, and a world indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” He stood in front of a group of about 250 people gathered at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park to honor Colonel Clarence Eymer, who had led troops at Omaha Beach. There were other speakers. Rabbi Max Felshin of the Radio City Synagogue spoke; so did Judge Arthur Markewich, who years later would preside on the panel of judges that disbarred Richard Nixon.

This appears to be the only time Angelo ever spoke in front of the Interfaith crowd. “Realizing that the program for the evening is quite lengthy,” he began, “I do not propose to take one minute longer than is absolutely necessary for me to convey to you assembled here this evening my thoughts in reference to this worthy interfaith movement.”

Joe did not recall his father’s being particularly eloquent or forceful. Angelo usually lost the arguments at home to Florence. Joe did not remember many enduring quotes from his father. He remembered that his father said “Make an impact” and that when he came
home from playing a sport, Angelo always asked “Did you have fun?” (and never “Did you win?”). Angelo’s wisdom breathed in the silences. Joe worried, even at the end of his life, that he had not done his father’s memory justice, that he had not lived up to his father’s silent hopes, that he had not expressed well enough Angelo Paterno’s depth of character.

Maybe this was because Angelo was not one to make grand speeches, not one to preach to his children about the Golden Rule or, as one of Joe’s contemporaries and heroes Martin Luther King famously said, that people should be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. These lessons, Angelo seemed to think, were too big to be taught with words.

Some people look upon the Movement as an outlet for prodigious writings wherein they extol the virtues of our cause; others expound the theories of Interfaith by loquacious and lengthy discourses . . . . To me, Interfaith has only one meaning. To me, it signifies the opportunity to manifest our consideration for our fellow beings by our conduct. All the talking and all of the literature in behalf of tolerance are wasted energies unless accompanied by overt acts.

George Paterno found this speech many years later and put it in the introduction to his book,
Joe Paterno: The Coach from Byzantium.
George too found it difficult to sum up the wonder of his father. There were easy enough descriptions. Angelo was a disciple of FDR, so much so that he named a son Franklin Delano Paterno, who died at eighteen months. Angelo was a devotee of the law, a tough semipro football player, a veteran of war, the uncle and cousin that everyone called when they needed help. He believed that tough people overcome. But, again, these are only words.

Stripped of all descriptive phrases and divested of its many interpretations, Interfaith means just that: Do unto others as
you would want them to do unto you. This movement should emanate from our hearts. The propelling force will then be strong enough to enable us to overcome all the obstacles placed in our paths . . . .

We must all act as missionaries, and we must preach to our fellow men, night and day, of the evils of this hydrated monster of bigotry. The forces of intolerance and hate are on the march today. The seed of hate and discord is being sown all around us. It is our task to inculcate our worthy ideals into the warped minds of the weakling before this seed takes root . . . .