Paterno (3 page)

“What are you doing?” Joe asked Mary Kay.

“I, uh—”

“What are you doing?” he asked again, this time a bit louder. He had that serious look on his face, the one they all knew meant trouble. Mary Kay looked at her father with confusion.

“You just stole from them,” Joe said even louder.

Mary Kay looked helplessly around at the table. No one met her eyes. She quietly said she only took a single cucumber. But Joe was off again. When he started on something, nobody could outtalk him, nobody could drown him out; he was like that all his life. “These people work hard to run a business. You are not supposed to share food. It says, very clearly, all
you
can eat. Not all
you and your sister
can eat. You stole from them.”

Here a couple of family members tried, tentatively, to speak up on Mary Kay’s behalf. It was a single slice of cucumber. Diana wasn’t going to eat it anyway. It was just going to go to waste. It was nothing. But Joe could not be stopped. He pounded the table. He ranted. And finally he said, “You all are a bunch of shysters. I don’t want anything to do with you.” And he stormed out of the restaurant. By the time the kids had chased after him, he had taken the car and was gone.

He drove around the block a few times and came back a few minutes later, just long enough to scare them into believing that he had really left them there.

The Shyster Story. Whenever the story was brought up, Joe held his ground. “I was right,” he insisted every time.

AT THE DINING-ROOM TABLE, PATERNO
finished reading the report. He asked a few uncomfortable questions that nobody particularly wanted to answer. Then he asked, “So what are they saying about me out there?” He pointed outside, past the living room, through the window, toward the mass of reporters and their notepads and cameras. His children told him that they—not just the media, but many people all across America—were saying that Joe Paterno had covered up for a child predator. They were saying that Paterno knew exactly what Jerry Sandusky had done and what he was about, that Paterno had protected Sandusky instead of those children. They were saying that after more than a half-century of coaching football at Penn State University, Joe Paterno was willing to let children be harmed in unimaginable ways to protect his legacy.

“How could they think that?” he asked, and no one had the heart to answer. “They really think that if I knew someone was hurting kids, I wouldn’t stop it?”

They looked at him.

“Don’t they know me? Don’t they know what my life has been about?”

Every kid I knew there, the meek and the tough guys, the word to describe them when they came to mind was always the same: Innocent.

—
WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

B
ill Blatty, who later in life would achieve worldwide fame by writing
The Exorcist
, sat in Otto’s, a small sandwich and soda shop in Brooklyn. It was 1944. Blatty was a sophomore at Brooklyn Prep, a high school famous for its rigorous academic standards. He had just finished competing in a citywide oratorical contest and had come to Otto’s to mope. He was sure he had won. The people in the audience seemed sure he had won. As best Blatty could tell, even the competitors thought he had won. But the two judges were not so sure. They picked someone else to be the victor. Blatty was shattered.

“I tried drowning my sorrows with a lemon coke and a minced ham sandwich,” he remembered more than sixty years later. “It didn’t work.” He started to walk out of Otto’s to sulk outside, wearing a hangdog expression usually reserved for characters in comic books, over whose heads gray clouds hover.

Joe Paterno walked in. Blatty described him as swooping in. Joe Paterno, even then, moved in high contrast, a bright-color blur in a black-and-white movie. He was the quarterback of the football team, the captain of the basketball team, and the student council president at Brooklyn Prep. He was a straight-A student, of course. But there was
something else about him, something that Blatty could see but could not yet put into words. For the rest of Paterno’s life, people would tell breathless stories about him, and the quality that connected these stories was their plainness. These would not be stories of Paterno pulling someone out of a fire or saving a cat stuck in a tree. No, the stories were about his doing the simplest things: uttering a kind word, telling a small joke, offering his seat to a near-stranger. George H. W. Bush loved to tell about the time Joe Paterno got him a drink. “He served me!” the president said, wonder in his voice. It’s hard to define that kind of magnetism, the sort that makes the simplest gestures feel extraordinary, even to U.S. presidents. It is fair to say that it’s a mixed gift.

Whatever makes up that sort of charisma, Paterno already had it when he was eighteen years old. Blatty felt awe when Paterno walked over. He recognized Blatty from a school play.

“What’s wrong?” Paterno asked.

Blatty told him about the contest and how he was sure he had won. He had been robbed. He had been cheated of his destiny. He went on for a while, and Paterno listened carefully.

“Then,” Blatty said years later, “he leaned over close to my face, took hold of my arm with one hand, and said in a tone of care and sincerity that even Doubting Thomas would have believed: ‘Bill, you know you won. What else matters?’ ”

G
iuseppe,” Joe Paterno said, and he began to cough. He held up his hand in a silent request to let him finish. In his final months, the violent cough would come and go, like Pennsylvania thunderstorms. He seemed angrier at the cough’s spontaneity than its strength. He never liked surprises. He demanded order and routine; if you worked for him or played for him or simply wanted to be his friend, you set your watch by what everyone called Paterno Time. That was ten minutes early. Maybe fifteen. Possibly twenty.
His former players and his family often disagreed about how much Paterno Time differed from reality.

Paterno leaned forward and coughed into a closed fist until his eyes watered. The cough was dry, almost a wheeze. It brought him no relief; coughing was just something that had to be done. When the cough had subsided, he looked up again. “Giuseppe,” he said, because this is what he called me, “you picked a hell of a time to write about a football coach.”

JOE PATERNO CAME OF AGE
in Flatbush, in the heart of Brooklyn, during the Great Depression, when boys calculated the heights and depths of their manhood by how far they could hit a ball with a broomstick. The Brooklyn streets of the 1930s and 1940s, before war and television and highways to the suburbs, have been so glamorized and idealized. Woody Allen made them black and white in his movies; Isaac Asimov wrote dreamily about how the streets looked at night. “If there was a national pastime,” the playwright Arthur Miller wrote of his childhood in Brooklyn, “I suppose it was hanging out, simply standing there on the street corner or on the beach, waiting for something to appear around the bend.”

It’s one thing, though, for writers and artists and people led by their heart to attach longing and wistfulness to those Brooklyn streets. It was quite another for Paterno. He prided himself on being clear-eyed, practical, and unromantic. His wife, Sue, was born on Valentine’s Day. Every year Joe would miss both celebrations because February 14 was in the middle of recruiting season. One year he called Sue from the road; he not only remembered her birthday but he had gotten her a wonderful gift.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Leo Wisniewski and Dan Rocco.” They were two important football recruits.

“I like what my brother got me better,” Sue said.

Even Paterno, though, could not help but fall into a sentimental
trance when remembering Brooklyn and his childhood. “I wish you had been there,” he said as he sat straight up in his hospital bed. In his memory, those streets of Brooklyn lingered untouched by the years. They were rain-swept and bright yellow, soaked in the smell of freshly baked bread and narrated by a New York Metropolitan Opera tenor bursting through static on the radio. Mothers gossiped through open windows; fathers huddled on front stoops; children played stickball. It may have been only vaguely connected to reality, but that was how Paterno remembered Brooklyn.

Oh, he wanted to remember. It was remembering that seemed to offer him small bursts of joy in those last months. Most of the time, he wasn’t sad in those final days, and, much to the surprise of people around him, he wasn’t angry either. He was tired. His eyelids drooped and his voice dragged. That voice was such a part of his persona. In his early years as a coach, the players not so secretly called him The Rat, at least in part because his high-pitched voice sounded like Mickey Mouse’s. That voice would rise higher and shriller the angrier he got. Every player he ever coached did an impression of that voice, squeaking at the highest pitch they could reach.

You all are just a bunch of bums!

If we play like that, we’re going to get licked Saturday!

Run to the ball! Geez, fellas, run to the ball!

That was just terrible! Terrible!

After he was fired as coach of Penn State, after he found out that he had lung cancer, after he broke his pelvis, after his hair started falling out and he came to understand that the end was close, his voice lost much of its life and spirit. He would speak in a soft rumble. But when the subject of Brooklyn came up, he was animated again. His hands moved as he talked, and his voice lifted and dropped like the Cyclone roller coaster on Coney Island.

“We never owned a home,” he said, as he faded back to Brooklyn. “We moved around from place to place. Oh, I’d say we moved every year or two.” This was during the Depression. The Paternos weren’t hit as hard as most; Joe’s father, Angelo, had steady work as a court
clerk. But there were family obligations and friends in need, and there was never quite enough money to go around. The family moved up and down between Eighteenth and Twenty-sixth Street in Florence Paterno’s never-ending effort to find someplace just a little bit better and higher up in the world. Sometimes they moved just to stay one step ahead of landlords who raised the rent. Joe did wonder if moving from place to place—so many places he lost count along the way—made him crave stability and shaped the life he would live. But the thought passed quickly. He was happy to remember Brooklyn, but he refused to regret.

As they moved from apartment to apartment, Joe saw the streets of Brooklyn as his real home. On the streets there was no Great Depression; there was no unemployment. There were kids, always, dozens of them, and they argued about the Dodgers and the Yankees, they talked about the movies, they told each other fantastic lies about heroic things they had done. They called each other the worst ethnic slurs they knew—wop, sheeny, mick—and they had fistfights when the name-calling did not feel quite violent enough. They fought their own version of World War II, killing imaginary Nazi and Japanese soldiers who hid behind every fire hydrant. They got in trouble every now and again, but even that sort of trouble was coated with the innocence of the time. Once Joe’s younger brother, George, threw a chain at him. Joe was so outraged, he threw it back, missed, and broke a window of the Thom McAn store. Joe, of course, admitted it to his father—like the little George Washington that he was, his brother would say—and Angelo paid for the window. Like Bill Blatty said: they were all so innocent.

More than anything, they played games that fit the streets where they lived: stoopball, punch ball, curb ball, parked-car football, and, of course, stickball. No Brooklyn story is told without mentioning stickball, that city game played with a rubber ball everyone called a Spaldeen. Joe did not have a knack for hitting a Spaldeen with a broomstick. He was fast and had a quick mind, which served him better in football and basketball. (He always thought basketball was
his best game.) “Sure, there were kids in the neighborhood that were ten times better at stickball,” he said, and again he coughed and again he needed a moment to regain his strength. “But when the wind was blowing right, I could hit two and a half sewers.” He meant the ball would sail over two sewer openings and almost to a third. This was a great distance in the mind of a Brooklyn child.

IN THOSE LAST WEEKS OF
his life, Paterno found himself thinking often about two men from his childhood. One was his father, Angelo. Joe was one of those lucky people who lived a long life and never met a man he admired more than his father.

Angelo Paterno also grew up in Brooklyn. Angelo’s father, Vincent, immigrated to America in 1885 from a small Italian village called Macchia Albanese, between Cosenza and the Ionian Sea. Vincent became a barber. Many people through the years have pointed out the striking connections between Joe Paterno and Vince Lombardi. They were both Italian Americans who grew up Catholic in Brooklyn. They both became football coaches against their parents’ will. They had similarly remarkable careers filled with victories and success and a near-cult following. They would even face each other when they were both still young and uncertain of their future. And they were both grandsons of barbers.