When Joe Pa’s world came tumbling down
Two of the heartland’s sporting staples, horseracing and football, were throwing up compelling storylines within minutes of each other.
It was the first Saturday of November and the finale of the two-day Breeders’ Cup was reaching its climax in Louisville, Kentucky. The nation’s favourite mare, Zenyatta, was chasing her 20th victory in her 20th and final race, the Breeders’ Cup Classic. Alas, she fell just short of the perfect career, overcoming a dreadful start to lose by a head in an incredibly exciting race. Her place in US folklore was secure nonetheless.
Just 500 miles northeast of the Churchill Downs track, another beloved institution was witnessing history.
It was pushing on to late afternoon and over 107,000 fans were packed into the Beaver Stadium, the home of the Penn State University “Nittany Lions” football team. The hosts had turned a 0-21 quagmire into a glorious 35-21 victory over Northwestern University.
Exciting in and of itself but this was historic. It was 83-year-old Joe Paterno’s 400th career victory in his 45th season as a head coach, his 61st season on the coaching staff. Think Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson wrapped into one astonishing career. Think 12 presidents going back to the Harry S Truman era. Think the rise and decline of Vince Lombardi and the 42 other Super Bowls that came and went as Paterno approached his landmark victory.
Penn State is so venerable an institution that it goes by the more familiar, almost official, moniker, State College.
It is the State College. Its status on the collegiate landscape is intimidating, its football tradition beyond reproach. Until a week ago, that is, when allegations of child sexual abuse against a former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, surfaced. Charges of a cover-up rapidly engulfed Paterno, who turns 85 in December, as well as the university president, a vice president and the athletic director, a quartet of powerful individuals who ignored their responsibilities out of misplaced loyalty.
The failure of Paterno and his superiors (in title, if not in reality) to report an incident which occurred in 2002 cost them their jobs over nine years later.
Instead of retiring with grace as he pledged to do when the suddenly national scandal focused increasingly on his negligence, Paterno was fired late Wednesday evening, his reputation forever tarnished. Students responded by rioting, the sacrifice of their beloved paternal figure and the threat to the future of their football programme, their entire university, causing them to run wild on campus, tipping over a TV truck and protesting for the benefit of TV cameras.
In one sense, the notion that Joe Paterno would have to answer to a “superior” was always laughable. No one at the university was bigger than the iconic coach. Or so it seemed.
Paterno, or JoePa as he is more affectionately known, almost literally built State College.
Football drove the university’s development, transitioning it from its humble beginnings as a farming college in Central Pennsylvania to a worldwide-respected, publicly-owned institution. Paterno even donated more than $4m (€2.9m) to a library that bears his name, such was his commitment to the academic cause.
The so-called “grand experiment” he himself initiated sought to redress the balance in what it meant to be a “student-athlete”: his players would be students first and national champions second, a pinnacle the team reached twice during the peak of his coaching career. The prospect of an NFL career was a distant third.
Football brought in more than $70m (€51.2m) of profit last season alone. Flanked by two of the NFL’s powerhouse franchises, the Pittsburgh Steelers to the west and the Philadelphia Eagles to the east, Penn State owns an out-of-proportion slice of the hearts and minds of this vast swathe of rural America. Everything about it screams tradition: the simple uniforms of white and dark blue could belong to any decade, no names on the back of jerseys, just numbers. Beaver Stadium regularly sells out while it maintains intense rivalries with some of the game’s most storied institutions: Ohio State, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nebraska.
It was against this lengthy backdrop of intoxicating tradition that former defensive coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested last Saturday on 40 counts of molesting eight young boys over a 15-year period.
Honourably, the US media has, by and large, been at pains to consider the victims above the reputation of any one individual or institution. But the aging Paterno was shoved out to the front of the coverage as the sheer magnitude of this incredible scandal began to sharpen its focus on his inaction in the days that followed.
Sandusky was a trusted lieutenant of Paterno from the late 1960s and was there throughout the team’s golden era, which stretched as far as its fifth perfect season in 1994. In 1977, Sandusky started up a charity for at-risk children called The Second Mile. Through his work, he began befriending needy kids, including the eight victims mentioned in a grand jury report which dropped like a bomb last Saturday, just two weeks after Paterno’s 409th victory — a new record, as if that matters now.
The details make for grim reading but the moment that brought down Paterno occurred in 2002 when Mike McQueary, then a graduate assistant and now the receivers coach and recruiting coordinator, witnessed Sandusky raping a young boy in a shower area. McQueary, 28 at the time, panicked and under the advice of his father told Paterno who passed this up along the ladder to Athletic Director Tim Curley who in turn informed university President Graham Spanier. The incident was never reported to the police, a flagrant violation of the law.
Unfortunately, their inaction paved the way for further abuse. Another victim came into contact with Sandusky through Second Mile three years later. As late as 2007, Sandusky brought a victim to watch the Penn State team go through pre-season preparations.
Simply put, nowhere near enough was done by those that had ample opportunity.
As soon as the old coach’s name was first dragged into the spotlight on Sunday evening, it was only a matter of time. Gone with him is Spanier and Curley, the latter also facing charges of perjury and failure to report suspected abuse. McQueary, meanwhile, hangs in the balance though he won’t attend today’s visit of Nebraska due to threats made against him. Paterno’s offer to retire at the end of the season enraged many. It was a final daring act, one man’s attempt to shape his own destiny and folklore, one last chance to prove he was bigger than the institution. State College begged to differ.
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