A tale of two Paternos

"The last 10 years there's been a mysticism about Joe Paterno. I don't want him to think he's really God."

- George Paterno, 1997

They were the "Gold Dust Twins." Joe Paterno and George Paterno. I believe the oft-used nickname was first penned by Brooklyn Eagle sports columnist Jimmy Murphy. Jimmy wrote a weekly notes column on school sports. He gave me my first newspaper mention under the subhead,

"Chip off the Old Block," after I won a Brooklyn CYO swimming title in seventh grade.

The Old Block was my dad. Bill "Turk" Conlin was a three-sport star at Brooklyn Prep in the early 1920s and was still playing semipro football when I was born in 1934. I mention this because he took me to all Brooklyn Prep's games to see my cousin, Bill Dagher, play end, which was the Old Block's position. In 1944, the stars of a powerhouse team were the Gold Dust Twins. Actually, Joe was a year-and-a-half years older than George, who was accomplished beyond his 16 years.

They lined up next to each other in the Pop Warner double wing. Joe tailback, George fullback, with a wingback lined up outside the ends, all behind an unbalanced line. The wingbacks were fleet kids named Imbornoni and Weiss. The coach, Zev Graham, had been a star lineman at Fordham, and also coached the baseball team and was a part-time Dodgers scout.

Joe Paterno liked to tell the story of how he was an usher at Ebbets Field a couple of summers. He never tells about when he went out for the baseball team. Zev Graham watched his promising tailback take a half-dozen swings and said, "Paterno, I think you better stick to football . . . "

My dad explained the difference in the football styles of Joe and George. "Joe is a hipper-dipper," he would say. "He's slick. Very clever with the football." (Prep ran a lot of reverses, delays and plays that required the tailback to display superior ball-faking ability.) "But George is a better football player. He runs right through tacklers. He's the toughest guy on that team. And they're both better on defense than offense."

Joe was a spectacular safety and punt returner. He hid his lack of speed with a double-jointed, gear-shifting, dime-turning running style. It was hard to put a helmet on him. George was a gap-plugging linebacker who loved to hit.

When Joe graduated with the Prep class of 1945, he was drafted into the Army and was discharged just in time to join George as a Brown University freshman in 1947. The Gold Dust Twins nickname came with them. As a war veteran, Joe was eligible to play as a freshman. George had to play for the freshman team. Both starred for Rip Engle's 1949 team that went 8-1. Joe was the QB under center. George was the fullback.

The bread-and-butter play for both Brown and Penn State under Engle was the same play interim coach Tom Bradley called Saturday in a touching homage to an Engle/Paterno continuum that was shattered by the catastrophic events that have sundered a community and an entire sport. On their first play from scrimmage against Nebraska, with about half the crowd of 107,000 in Beaver Stadium still blinking away tears after the midfield prayer offered by both teams and about 300 former Paterno players, the Lions came out in that winged-T set of yore.

Fullbacks don't carry the ball much anymore. They now mostly play the blocking-back role once reserved for single-wing "quarterbacks," who were really converted guards, points of the blocking spear. But George Paterno averaged 5.5 yards per carry his senior year at Brown. He gained most of them on the fullback blast that Joe Paterno ran as the first play in at least half the games he had coached since 1966, the same play Paterno should have called on the 1-yard line in the 1979 Sugar Bowl against Alabama with a national championship on the line.

On Saturday, the symbolic dive play went to Michael Zordich, also the son of a former Penn State star.

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People close to the Paternos in 1950 already knew that George was Joe's smarter brother. "Joe was an overachiever," he told Sports Illustrated years later. "I was an underachiever."

Joe went with Rip to the growing Cow College in the geographic center of Pennsylvania. The one year he was going to try as an assistant coach before law school became 16. He was in his 30s when he courted and married a bright coed named Sue Pohland. They have lived in the same modest home just off campus for nearly 45 years. Joe bought the beachfront place in Avalon mostly for his sons and their families.

During the 61 years that saw him become the heart, soul and shaman of football-centered State College, he drove his roots so deep, he struck Appalachian bedrock. Nothing could move him. Not New England Patriots millions. Not the lure of a political career that could have led to Harrisburg and beyond. He was Penn State.

George Paterno came out of the Marines and seemed to be leading the life of diversity Joe often preached but rarely practiced. His first job was as an insurance-company investigator. "I got tired of dealing with all the deadbeats filing phony claims," he told me once. Then he joined the NYPD. That's right, George was a cop. A New York cop who had a little Serpico in him, it turned out. And, irony of ironies, he wound up in Brooklyn's tough juvenile division.

A former Brooklyn Prep teammate was coaching the football team. He asked George to join his staff. He not only helped coach a couple of unbeaten teams, but he joined the elite faculty and taught history. Through it all, George, handsome and articulate, a man who dressed in Ivy League tweeds and spoke with considerably less Brooklynese than Joe, was enjoying a great social life. He was smelling the roses and the scents of the young women the confirmed bachelor was dating. He liked a life of uncommitted freedom. At the same time, he was able to look in on his aging, widowed mother and to play doting uncle to the kids of his sister, Florence.

Joe was still an assistant in Lion Country when George was hired to fill the head-coaching vacancy at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y. That was where he became the most successful coach in the history of the federally funded and administered Division III college. It's also where, during his second tour of duty there - split by a 2-year interregnum as defensive coach at Michigan State - George Paterno became a whistle-blower.

To have his contract extended and maintain his academic position as an assistant professor of physical education, George needed to be granted faculty tenure. Ah, but in 1977, in a letter to Secretary of Commerce Juanita M. Kreps, Paterno had exposed a number of "improprieties" he said were impeding his ability to recruit.

Like West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy, Kings Point admission is by congressional appointment. Paterno informed the secretary of the existence of an "assistant secretaries special list" whereby a candidate could be admitted without appointment. That was fine by George, but he claimed that earmark, intended for athletes, was being used to admit other cadets.

The assistant secretary of commerce was Harvard-educated attorney Robert J. Blackwell. An Inquirer investigation published on Dec. 10, 1978, under the byline of Beth Gillin Pombeiro detailed Blackwell's alleged attempt to run off Paterno. With his firing imminent after the required tenure was denied, George won two appeals, only to have both revoked by Blackwell.

So he did the only whistle-blowerly thing: George filed a $10 million civil suit against Commerce, Blackwell and a number of Kings Point officials, including his director of athletics, William Lai.

Mark Felt, Watergate's anonymous "Deep Throat" whistle-blower, would be proud of this paragraph from George's lawsuit: "[Blackwell] in an unprecedented action [reversed the academy's grant of tenure to Paterno . . . with the aim of silencing Paterno] and any other employes who may have considered 'blowing the whistle' on improprieties at the academy."

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By the time all this went down, George was doing game re-creations on the Penn State Radio Network. Even after an undisclosed settlement of his suit against the Commerce Department, he remained on the Kings Point faculty as a part-time assistant professor of physical education.

He eventually became color analyst with play-by-play man Fran Fisher. They were an instant hit and became a college version of Harry Kalas and Rich Ashburn. JoePa was frequently harpooned, lampooned and, on occasion, ridiculed by the less glittering of the Gold Dust Twins. Any other college analyst in America would have been tossed after either the first second-guess or the second third-guess. Even though he had run that staple fullback dive play so many times, George thought Joe's offense was far too conservative for the talent at his disposal. The arguments in the Paterno living room had to be classic renewals of the dialogues their attorney dad, Angelo Paterno, encouraged while his sons were growing up in Flatbush.

When George retired from the booth in 1999, his brother had won two national championships and was about to enter a college coaching pantheon whose members were named Bryant, Stagg, Warner, Blaik and Wilkinson.

Through his years as a broadcaster, George was a weekend warrior. No midweek State College bar-hopping for him. He was too smart to be out among 'em in a town as colorless as Hollywood's "Pleasantville." "I've told my brother nobody should be as big as he's gotten, and the whole staff has stayed here with him forever, or most of forever," he said over beers one night. "I loved coaching the defense at Michigan State, but Lansing was just too small a place for me. I missed New York. This is like a fish bowl." He laughed. "A bachelor like me who likes a little night life would never make it living here . . . "

George would write a book in two parts, published in 1997, titled "Joe Paterno: The Coach from Byzantium." The title gives me chills today. Byzantium was once the center of learned civilization, an unrealized ideal in which all accomplishments in literature, sculpture and philosophy would converge in perfect harmony. That is the basic Happy Valley symbiosis Joe Paterno envisioned when he articulated what became known as The Grand Experiment: great football played by scholar-athletes who would become accomplished in all areas of education and lead the way for the student body in all things. (Trustee Dr. Dave Joyner, an early exemplar of that overreaching JoePa dream, was introduced Thursday as acting athletic director.) When I read that title, I knew George had nailed the essence of his more famous, more centered, but no more gifted brother.

On the evening of March 1, 2002, Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary went to his Lasch Hall office to pick up some recruiting videos. He heard the showers running and a strange slapping sound . . . a little more than 3 months later, with the lid still tightly on what would become the college-football scandal of two centuries, George Paterno suffered a massive heart attack and died on June 23, 2002, at age 73, leaving his much more famous brother - his polar opposite in so many ways, a man George Paterno was never afraid to confront or criticize - to fend for himself. Left him adrift in what William Butler Yeats called in the poem, "Byzantium" . . .

"That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea."

The last paragraph of George Paterno's "Joe Paterno: The Coach from Byzantium" could not be more eerie:

"If Joe had one final wish, he would like to replace St. Peter at the gates of Heaven and be present at the 'Last Judgment.' When the final decision of Heaven or Hell is made, Joe would like to run a two-minute drill for all those souls who might not get into the 'Big House.' "