Free Paterno by Joe Posnanski

would be shouting, ‘Get off your feet!’ ”
    Paterno spent his days watching films of opponents, preparing practice schedules, arguing with his fellow coaches (who followed the lead of former coach Joe Bedenk and called Paterno a “whipper-snapper”), chasing football players around to make sure they were doing the right things, and constantly trying to strike up football conversations. He was inexhaustible. At night, he wrote countless notes (all his life, he was a compulsive note-taker) about football ideas he wanted to try, plays he wanted to run, techniques he wanted to teach, improvements he wanted to make, thoughts about leadership that crossed his mind. He wrote so many notes to himself that every monthor so, Betts O’Hora, Jim’s wife, would drop him a note of her own saying, “Clean this up, or move out.”
    He was such a force of will that people just bent to his way of thinking. Friends remembered him getting into furious shouting matches with Penn State’s athletic director, Ernie McCoy, blaming McCoy for holding back the football team. But McCoy seemed to take it all in stride. (He would eventually hire Paterno as head coach.) In newspaper interviews, Paterno played it small, always acquiesced to Engle and the other assistant coaches, but in the closed circle of the program everyone understood that it was Paterno’s drive and single-mindedness that powered Penn State football.
    His first conversation with Suzanne Pohland had to do with football.
    “He’s your boyfriend, right?” Joe asked her as she began to leave for the night.
    “Yes,” Sue said.
    “Well, listen, you better get him to study or he isn’t going to be here much longer.”
    Joe was not sure that the conversation happened in the library. Sometimes he remembered asking Sue to meet him somewhere else to discuss her boyfriend. Sometimes his memory supplemented that brief exchange with small talk. “You remember,” Sue said, “you told me I wasn’t in love with him.”
    “I didn’t say that,” Joe said.
    “Yes, you did. You said, ‘You’re not in love with him,’ and I said, ‘How do you know?’ ”
    Joe shook his head, with the comic timing of a Marx brother. Truth is, that first conversation, whatever it happened to be, didn’t have much of an impact on him. She was a freshman from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, hoping to become a teacher. He was a thirty-two-year-old assistant coach perpetually worried about the next game. The one thing he remembered for certain, the one thing that stuck with him through the years, was that the football player Sue dated did fail out of school. “Shame,” Joe said. “He was a talented kid.”
    RIP ENGLE’S DEFINING QUALITY AS a coach was his gentle nature. It was certainly not his only quality; he could be stern, he often raged at officials and players on the sideline, and the reporters knew him best for his entertaining gloominess and pessimism. But his gentleness stood out to his players and assistant coaches. And it was gentleness that had the largest impact on the young Joe Paterno, perhaps because Paterno himself was so ungentle.
    Here’s an example: Football coaches often talk about having a player “cheat” to one side, meaning that they want the player to stand a step or two closer to that side in anticipation of a certain play. Engle refused to use the word “cheat,” and he would not allow any of his coaches to use it. He believed that the word had no place in fair competition. Instead, at Penn State, they would talk of having players “fudge” to one side.
    This may sound ridiculous, but little quirks like this were the bricks of Engle’s day-to-day coaching style. There were many other examples. Football has a position called “monster back,” usually a player who stands behind the linebackers and is given the freedom to roam all over the field in pursuit of the football. Well, to Engle, “monster” was an even less suitable word than “cheat,” and so at Penn