HBO’s Paterno leaves you wishing for more insight about a tragedy

HBO’s Paterno is a must-watch movie for anyone interested in the tragic demise of the most revered coach in college football.  Joe Paterno won 409 games at Penn State, which made him by far the winningest Division 1 coach ever.  But it wasn’t just his record, it was how he achieved it.  He was classy, and his players went to class.

I covered more than a dozen games coached by Paterno.  Most of them were bowl games, but some were not.  The most harrowing road trip I ever took as a sportswriter was a drive to Happy Valley on an icy, snowy mountain road.  Being a native Texan, I was ill prepared for such a journey, slipping and sliding on my way to watching the Nittany Lions play a night game against Notre Dame.

But all my memories of Paterno himself are pleasant.  He was warm, affable and quotable.  When President Nixon declared his team unworthy of the national championship, JoePa quipped: “Interesting that he knows so much about football and so little about Watergate.”

Paterno took morality very seriously.  He claimed to be more interested in graduating his players than in winning championships.  He did not want an athletics dorm.  His players loved his informality and they believed in his message.  They would say things like “Joe told me he would prefer I skip a football practice than an English class.”

So I could not have been more shocked when Paterno got himself immersed in the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal in 2011, which is the subject of this Barry Levinson-directed film starring Al Pacino.

Surprisingly, Pacino delivers a very measured performance.  He does not overact, as he tends to do.  

Pacino skillfully presents Paterno as intense and focused but anguished, weary and physically breaking down at 84, trying to hold together the last shreds of his dignity as his empire crumbles around him.

Perhaps his most noble moment comes as his friends and family are planning to protest the Big Ten removing his name from the Stagg-Paterno Trophy that is to go to the league champion.  “Stop it,” Pacino says, in the closest he comes to a scream.  Then softly: “No more.  No more.”

The main problem I have with the film is that it offers little insight on the Paterno-Sandusky relationship.  We learn that Paterno is confronted in 1976 by a youth who says Sandusky molested him.  The response is that “Jerry is a good man, and we shouldn’t talk that way about a good man.”

We do know that Sandusky was Paterno’s most trusted assistant, that they had worked together for 30 years.  How would any of us feel if some stranger tells us that our best friend is a pedophile?

I never met Sandusky, but I’ve talked with people who knew him.  They described him as genial and gracious;  they were utterly shocked to learn he was accused of sexually assaulting 30 boys.  But of course, no one can commit pedophilia on that scale without being exceptionally charming.

One thing Paterno does very well is portray one of the victims, Aaron Fisher (brilliantly played by Benjamin Cook).  As a teenager Aaron had the courage to step forward.  He is shown sobbing in his car when he hears that his name will appear in the Sandusky indictment as one of his prey.

The indictment reads that “victim 1 was 11 when it started.  Sandusky performed oral sex on him 20 times.  Sandusky also had Victim 1 perform oral sex on him one time.”

So Fisher is harassed by fellow students at Penn State.  They chase him down the halls yelling “Faggot.”

In 1998, when Aaron was 11, he had told his mother that Sandusky hugged him while they were showering in the athletics department.  There was much he did not tell her.

She called police, who conducted an investigation that athletics director Tim Curley said Paterno knew about.  The DA decided it was not a crime for a naked man to hug a naked boy in a shower.

The movie shows Paterno being very concerned about the investigation.  But we never see him confronting Sandusky.  Is it possible he never did?

Sadly, Paterno regards the sex scandal as a distraction.  “I got Nebraska a week from today,” he says.  “That’s what’s important to me now.”

Yet he does object when the administration wants to brush it aside or cover it up.  “We want everything run down,” the coach says, “until we know what actually happened.”

Surely Paterno had to wonder why Sandusky, one of the finest assistant coaches in the Big Ten, was never offered a head coaching position somewhere.

In the movie, Paterno acknowledges there were rumors, but he was no gossip-monger.  So he turns a blind eye and a deaf ear in 1976 and again in 1998.

It’s not until 2001, when a graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, haltingly informs him that he saw Sandusky with a boy in the showers at the football facility, that Paterno tells his superiors that he’s concerned.  Paterno admitted to a grand jury that McQueary said Sandusky was doing something “of a sexual nature.”

After JoePa is fired, two months before he dies of cancer, he speaks to the throng of Penn State fans – mostly students – gathered outside his home and chanting, “Joe Pa-ter-no.”

“All I ask, listen to me,” he pleads.  “Pray a little bit for those victims.”

The message dovetails with what we hear now from politicians trying to soothe the students in Parkland, Fla., who saw 17 schoolmates massacred by an assault rifle.  “You have our thoughts and prayers.”

But sometimes, if we’re really concerned about the health of our kids, action is needed, along with thoughts and prayers.  Joe Paterno did much good in his life, but he didn’t do what he should have done to prevent unnecessary suffering by innocent children.