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Surma told Paterno, “In the best interests of the university, you are terminated.” Paterno hung up and repeated the words to his wife. She grabbed the phone and redialed.
“After 61 years he deserved better,” she snapped. “He deserved better.”
Joe Paterno’s last interview
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The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins discusses her exclusive interview with Penn State legend Joe Paterno, in which the former head football coach spoke at length about the child sexual abuse scandal involving former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. (Jan. 14)(Sally Jenkins and Alexandra Garcia/Photo: John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
A look at the victims and events in the case against Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, as reported by the grand jury that investigated.
The firing provoked a riot on campus that night.
To Penn State students, Paterno was less a person than a beloved monument. He had arrived at a “cow college” in 1950 as an assistant coach armed with a flathead haircut, a Brooklyn accent and a degree from Brown. As the head coach from 1966 on, he struck an austerely iconic pose, managing to be both fierce and bookish, with his black cleats and his thick black-framed glasses. To his rivals, he was a holier-than-thou prig who intimated he was more principled than they were.
Under his leadership Penn State football became a kind of gross national product as he won more games than any other coach in history, yet regularly posted high graduation rates — his team was ranked No.1 academically out of the top 25 football teams in 2009 and 2011 by the New America Foundation’s Academic Bowl Championship Series. The “cow college” grew into a public research university with $4.6 billion in revenue and buildings as large as airplane hangars. Beaver Stadium was renovated and enlarged six times during his tenure.
But after 61 years on the campus, Paterno cleared out his office in the space of one day. It was an end he was unprepared for. Yet it came with the realization that as the face of the university, people assign him greater responsibility than other officials.
“Whether it’s fair I don’t know, but they do it,” he said. “You would think I ran the show here.”
Over two separate conversations on Thursday and Friday, Paterno discussed his career and his actions relating to Sandusky. His attorney Wick Sollers of the Washington law firm King & Spalding, and a communications adviser, Dan McGinn of TMG Strategies, monitored the conversations, in part to be sure Paterno was lucid, since he has experienced fogginess from his chemo treatments, one of which he underwent the day before the first interview.
Since the scandal broke, Paterno has been largely silent while dealing with his health issues, despite scathing criticism that included accusations that he protected Sandusky and wielded more power in the cloistered community known as Happy Valley than the university president.
Paterno was initially reluctant to speak because “I wanted everybody to settle down,” he said. But he is so eager to defend his record that he insisted on continuing the interview from his bedside Friday morning, though ill. He was hospitalized for observation later in the day due to complications from the chemo but, according to the family, had improved by Saturday morning.
Mostly he sat in his wheelchair covered by a blanket, surrounded by pictures of his children and grandchildren, in the modest stone-and-plate-glass home he bought for $9,000 in 1966. The home, and the fact that his address and phone are still listed in the State College phone book, have oft been cited as evidence of his regular-Joe values. A good deal of what he earned has gone back to the university, in the form of donations to a library that bears his name and a campus spiritual center.
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