Free Paterno by Joe Posnanski Page B

votes were counted, all the coaches except Paterno voted to stay in State College. “It’s a good thing I didn’t go into politics,” Paterno said.
    After the USC letdown, Paterno began to look at State College as home. To his surprise, he found that there were many things about the place he liked. He liked the ease of things, the comfort, the way he could focus on football without the inconveniences of daily life to distract him. He liked the routine so much that he did not leave the O’Hora home. The end of that living arrangement came only when Jim O’Hora sat Paterno down and gave him a speech that Paterno remembered for the rest of his life. In Paterno’s memory, this is what O’Hora said:
    “You know, Joe, when my father came from Ireland, and my cousins would come over, they’d stay with us for three or four months. And my Dad would say, ‘You’ve been with us four months now. It’s time to get out, cut yourself from us, go and live your life.’ . . . Joe, you’ve been with us ten years. Get the hell out of here.”
    To which Paterno remembered asking, “Have I been here that long?”
    The continuity and regularity of the seasons comforted him. Thestudents stayed young and eager and were less spoiled than they had been at Brown. He liked the ice cream at the historic Creamery on campus; in time, their most popular flavor would be Peachy Paterno. He found that he loved to walk around the town; the beauty of Mount Nittany and the surrounding forests did not inspire him to write nature poems, but he could think clearly as he walked along the familiar streets, friendly people waving as he walked briskly past. The anger and commotion of the day seeped out of him. Ideas and football plays crystallized in his mind. Those walks around Happy Valley would calm and energize Paterno for the rest of his life.
    THE PERSONA THAT WOULD BECOME so familiar to college football fans was coming into focus when Paterno first met Sue Pohland. He was argumentative, certainly, and obsessive and always certain, but he was also charming and funny and smart. He was a popular speaker on campus and around Pennsylvania. Reporters generally loved him. Players, even those he speared with sarcasm in his high-pitched voice, could not help but be drawn in by his energy.
    His passion for education was apparent from the start. He hated the idea of players coming to college only to play football. He also hated the idea of teachers treating football players differently from other students. In his mind—and Engle believed this too—coaches were professors and football was a particularly intense class designed to teach discipline, focus, and various life lessons. For the rest of his life, Paterno would publicly uphold this ideal, graduating 80 to 90 percent of his players and influencing young men who would become doctors, lawyers, chemists, and teachers.
    His purpose was so public that many people, especially late in his life, would wonder if he exaggerated his commitment to education or, worse, was an out-and-out phony. But it seems no matter how deeply you dig into the life of Joe Paterno, no matter how many players or professors you talk with, you find a man driven by the cause of education and repelled both by schools who took advantage of footballplayers and by football players who did not take advantage of their opportunity to learn. “I don’t see why people can’t just realize that Joe is who he says he is,” Sue said. “He isn’t perfect. But he tried to teach young men how to live.”
    This passion was in place from the start. Here’s part of a letter a young Joe Paterno wrote in 1952 to a recruit named Earl Shumaker:
    Dear Earl,
    As I told you last December we definitely feel that you are the type of boy we want at Penn State—a good student as well as a good football player. All the people I have talk[ed] to about you have told me the same thing—you are interested in going to college to get an education first and to