Paterno (17 page)

When everyone in the family looked back, they agreed that Joe wasn’t around all that much. Sue was the everyday presence in their lives. She cooked, cleaned, helped with homework, and dealt with every school issue, friend issue, and life issue. Joe would show up for dinner. In many ways, they understood that their role was to not bother him, to not weigh him down, to free him up to do his work. When his fame grew, he could not watch Diana’s cheerleading or Mary Kay’s gymnastics without being bombarded by autograph requests and photo hounds. Once, when he tried to take the family to the amusement park in nearby Hershey, he was so overrun with well-wishers and fans that at some point he went back to the car and designed plays while the family rode the rides. “It’s not fair,” more than one of the kids said. “He’s
our
father.”

But they learned to accept it, the way children of famous people do. They prayed for the team to win. They stayed out of their father’s way, especially when his mind started whirring. They lived by his schedule. And as their father became more famous and more beloved, they found their own ways to live with the most famous last name in college football. Diana, for instance, would interrupt teachers taking attendance before they called out her last name. “I’m here!” she would shout before the last syllable in
Diana
was voiced. On their first date, Mary Kay’s future husband, Chris, was unaware of her last name.

As for Joe, he felt bad about the time not spent, the way fathers
often do at the end of their lives. “I should have been there more,” he admitted, but he knew that he could not have been there more and still be Joe Paterno. He loved them and taught them in his own way. And they knew: he had to coach football. It had not begun as an obsession, but it became one over the years. Coaching young men into great football teams was at the very heart of his existence.

J
oe Paterno became a public saint in 1973, with all the praise and aspersions that go with such a title, but his path to sainthood probably began four years earlier, when he sat in the living room of John and Anne Cappelletti of Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. Their son, John Jr., was one of the best high school football players in the state, and Paterno wanted him to play for Penn State. Paterno spoke a little Italian to Anne, impressing her. He and assistant coach George Welsh explained their approach to football and academics, impressing the father. Paterno had done this so many times, as an assistant coach for Rip Engle, as a head coach and closer, that he was like a veteran
stage actor on his hundredth performance. He did not just know the words, he knew the rhythms. He expected that John Cappelletti would come to Penn State.

Then he noticed that John’s seven-year-old brother, Joey, was slouched on the couch. “What’s wrong?” he whispered to Anne. She told him that Joey had leukemia, and that this was one of his down days.

With that, Paterno walked over to the couch and sat down next to Joey, and they spent the rest of the evening talking. Welsh was left to sell the rest of the family on Penn State and great football and the importance of college. Joe talked to Joey.

In this story, as with so many of Paterno’s actions, you can see the beauty or you can see the self-interest. Do you see a man who came across a child in pain and decided that the most important thing he could do that evening was try to bring a little joy into his life? Or do you see a man who determined that the best way he could recruit John Cappelletti to play at Penn State was to spend the evening talking to his sick younger brother? In many ways, this would be the riddle that would follow Paterno throughout his life. Was it real or was it a show?

“Why,” Sue would ask, “is it so hard for people to understand that we are who we are and Joe is who he is?”

THE SAINTHOOD YEAR OF 1973
began with an offer. Billy Sullivan owned the New England Patriots, an NFL team that played its games in Foxborough, Massachusetts, between Boston and Providence. Football owners, especially in the years to follow, were billionaires looking for a profitable little diversion. But Sullivan was different; he was not a rich man. When the owners of the old American Football League met for the first time, he told the writer Mickey Herskowitz, “I was the only man in the room who could not be described as independently wealthy. Or for that matter, even dependently wealthy. At the time, I had $8,000 to my name, not all of it in cash.”

Sullivan had been a sportswriter in Boston and later, befitting his manic personality, a publicity man for the Boston Braves baseball team and Notre Dame football. He was so relentless in flooding sportswriters with press releases that America’s most famous sportswriter, Red Smith, called him the Maître De Mimeograph. Later Sullivan tried to get into the oil business, with less than limited success. He never did make enough money in his life to stay ahead. Over the years, he would lose control of the Patriots, win it back, go into bankruptcy, fight his way out, and more.

But money did not drive Billy Sullivan. Buzz motivated him. Fame moved him. Heck, that’s why he had called them the Patriots in the first place: he wanted them to be America’s team. In the early years he tried to hire some big-name college coaches like President Nixon’s friend Bud Wilkinson and Notre Dame’s former coach Frank Leahy, but he got nowhere with them. He tried many different promotions, but no matter what he did he just could not grab people’s attention.

In late 1972, Sullivan had his most inspired idea, the one that would finally make his team the talk of the country. He decided to hire Penn State’s football coach, Joe Paterno.

Of course, Paterno had been pitched before, most memorably by the Pittsburgh Steelers’ owner, Art Rooney, after the 1968 season and then by the Green Bay Packers in 1970, a couple of years after Lombardi stepped down. But even counting Al Davis’s attempt back in the 1960s, Paterno had never run into a whirlwind quite like Billy Sullivan. When Sullivan’s call came, Paterno tried to shrug him off. He said he didn’t really want to coach in the NFL. He was happy at Penn State. Sullivan did not seem to be listening. He told Paterno that he was going to make him an offer he simply could not refuse. Enough money to set up his family for life, and to top it off, something that, as far as he knew, had never before been offered a coach: “I’m offering the chance to be part owner of the Patriots.”

Paterno stopped cold. At Penn State, he was making about thirty-five thousand a year, maybe a little less, a comfortable enough living
for a father of five whose wife darned socks and disliked shopping. Paterno recalled Sullivan offering him a four-year deal worth a total of one million dollars plus a home with two cars in the garage. The newspapers reported the deal to be worth as much as $1.4 million. Plus as much as 5 percent ownership of the Patriots. It was the richest offer ever made to a coach. Paterno searched desperately for a reason to say no. “I’d need to know how much control I’d have, because it . . . ”

“You’d have complete control of the whole thing,” Sullivan said.

“Complete control?”

“Over the whole thing. You’d be coach and general manager. It would be your show.”

Paterno was entirely shaken. Things like this didn’t happen. He had been a successful college coach, no question about it. After the unbeaten streak ended in 1970, Penn State had won eleven games in 1971, ten more games in 1972, excellent records. He had built his reputation by taking on Nixon and by speaking out against corruption in college sports. “Too good to be true,” the
New York Times
called him. Even so, this offer seemed out of touch with Paterno’s life. He was not sure he wanted to take the job, but he did not see any way he could turn it down.

To complicate matters, the offer came just as Penn State was to play Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl. Throughout his life, Paterno hated distractions. In his mind, his job was to coach football, and that was all he ever really wanted to do. He did the other stuff—the interviews, the speeches, the recruiting, the schmoozing—because he knew that it was part of building a great football program. But he resented much of it. In the last fifteen or so years of his life, after he had built Penn State into one of the nation’s most respected football programs and there was nothing left to prove, he gradually stopped doing all the other stuff. He delegated everything except the actual coaching. “He would scream at us all the time, ‘Would you just let me coach my football team?’ ” his friend Guido D’Elia would say. “That’s all he wanted to do. Every other thing made him crazy.”

Now he was trying to get his team ready for the Sugar Bowl, but all people wanted to talk about was the Patriots offer. Billy Sullivan showed up in New Orleans, which amplified the rumors. Back in State College, people were sick with worry that Paterno would leave. A campaign was launched to keep him at Penn State, complete with “Don’t Go, Joe” bumper stickers, signs, and buttons. Diana and Mary said this was the first time that everyone at school singled them out as Paternos. They were showered with affection and requests: “Tell your Dad, we love him!” Penn State lost to Oklahoma 14–0, and Paterno was miserable. He felt he had allowed the Patriots talk to distract him and he had let the team down.

But the decision still loomed. Paterno agonized. He had become a decisive coach, but now he found himself wavering like a rookie. Deep down, maybe, he did not want the job. He liked coaching college football. He liked it that Sue felt comfortable in State College; her comfort made him comfortable. He liked the idea that he was a teacher as much as a coach. He liked the players he had recruited; he knew that his team was going to be terrific in 1973, featuring senior John Cappelletti.

Perhaps most of all, he liked the feeling that, in his own way, he was living up to his father’s charge to make an impact: he believed he was improving the lives of young men. Could he really make an impact in pro football? His friend Tom Osborne, who had just become coach at Nebraska, would always remember a conversation he’d had with Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry: “He told me one time that even after all the wins and all the accomplishments, he really didn’t think he made any difference at all in his players’ character. He thought by the time he got them in pro football, it was too late.”

Paterno, deep down, believed the same thing. What could he teach pro football players about life? How could he honestly call himself anything more than a football coach if he was making a million dollars to coach professionals? He also knew, even if he did not want to admit it, that Sue did not want to move the family from State College. The family acted happy enough. At one point Mary Kay, who
was seven, rushed into the house and asked, “Is it true that if Daddy signs a piece of paper, he will get a thousand dollars and coach the Miami Dolphins?”

“No, Mary,” Diana said. She was ten. “It’s a million dollars and it’s the New England Patriots.”

“Same thing,” Mary said.

Sue told Joe that they could be happy anywhere, they would adjust, and that it was his decision. But Joe knew how she really felt.

“I really didn’t want to go, but I felt he’s in charge of his career,” Sue said. “I just thought where we lived was so comfortable . . . . We met with the Sullivans at the bowl game, and I asked one of the dumbest questions. Scotty was just two months old, and our doctor was just five minutes away. I had very accident-prone children. I looked at Mrs. Sullivan and I said, ‘Foxborough? Is that like our town or is that all big roads?’ She looked at me like, ‘What do you mean, big roads?’ So I said, ‘Super highways.’ She said, ‘Oh yeah, you can get anywhere.’ I let it go. But I thought that wasn’t a very smart question.”

Even with these things pulling at him, Paterno knew something else: he couldn’t turn this down. It was too much money, too much control, too much glory to pass up. He could coach for a few years, be set for life, and then do whatever he wanted. He could get the house on Cape Cod that all those kids at Brown treated as their birthright. He could set up his family so that they would never have to worry about anything. He could—he had to admit it—he could be a famous coaching hero. Like Lombardi. Paterno had no doubt about what would happen if he took the Patriots job: he would lead the Patriots to the Super Bowl, win the Super Bowl, win more than one Super Bowl. “I had a big ego,” he confessed. “I tried to cover that up a little bit, but I thought I was as good a coach as anybody. The Patriots had some good young players—they had just drafted Jim Plunkett with the first pick—and I knew I could go there and win.”

Paterno took the job. Sure he did. On Thursday night, he called Sullivan and said he would be proud to be the next coach of the New England Patriots. Penn State sports information director Jim Tarman
and his wife, Louise, came over to the house, and the first thing they saw was four-year-old Jay carrying around a Patriots pennant. “I guess he’s going,” Jim said. Paterno welcomed them with bourbon and Pepsi and asked Tarman to come along to work with the Patriots. Joe had already asked his brother, George, then coaching football at the Merchant Marine Academy, to be an assistant coach. Everything was in place. The Paternos and Tarmans toasted the future and told stories until midnight. At one point, six-year-old David stumbled downstairs. The conversation that followed was recounted for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
: