Joe Paterno’s regularly-scheduled weekly news conference on Nov. 8, 2011, was canceled by the Penn State University’s Board of Trustees.
Sixty-five days later, the 85-year-old Paterno – riddled by cancer, aching from a broken pelvis – finally spoke with the media. With one reporter, anyway.
At special invitation, Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post was the chosen one.
She went to Paterno’s house last Thursday and, as she was surrounded by Paterno’s big-time attorney, his PR guy, his children, his grandchildren and his wife, she got Paterno’s side of the worst story in Penn State’s 156 years.
Jenkins ate a raucous dinner with the family and Joe’s entourage, listened carefully to the Hall of Fame coach, observed his life and surroundings over the course of two days, and took in who he is now as much as what he said he did then.
And two days after that, at 4 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012, on the Post’s website, she delivered Paterno’s scratchy-voiced message:
“I didn’t know exactly how to handle it…”
Those were eight of the 721 words of direct quotation that Jenkins used in framing Paterno’s sparse message. (By contrast, in the final Tuesday news conference of his 46-year head coaching career, on Oct. 25, 2011, Paterno offered 2,309 words.)
Mostly, though, the piece in the Post was up to Jenkins. She did what journalism instructors from Dear Old State implore their students to do. Rather than tell, she showed what life is like for an aging and seriously ill icon in a Pennsylvania winter of discontent:
“Joe Paterno sat in a wheelchair at the family kitchen table where he has eaten, prayed and argued for more than a half-century. All around family members were shouting at each other, yet he was whispering. His voice sounded like wind blowing across afield of winter stalks, rattling the husks. Lung cancer has robbed him of the breath to say all that he wants to about the scandal he still struggles to comprehend…”
So why Jenkins? Why had she drawn the assignment?
One, Joe’s “people” from around the Beltway reached out to Jenkins, a seasoned columnist and former Sports Illustrated writer of the best pedigree.
She graduated from Stanford, has penned scads of books and is the daughter of octogenarian Dan Jenkins, perhaps the best damn football writer ever in these United States, as evidenced by his own “Semi-Tough” days at Sports Illustrated.
Witness what Father Jenkins wrote about Paterno in the Nov. 11, 1968 issue of Sports Illustrated:
“…and while the youthful keeper of all these characters, 41-year-old Penn State Coach Joe Paterno, should be fretting about his team’s possible climb toward No. 1 or an Orange Bowl bid, he stares at the boutique-colored leaves of the pastoral Alleghenies, thinks about romantic poets and longs to drive his kids over to Waddle or Martha Furnace or Tusseyville so they can sit down and talk to a cow.”
Daughter Jenkins, 51, wrote two books with Lance Armstrong, providing the anti-cancer-crusading, Tour de France-winning cyclist with the pen to use against the swords of legions who have alleged Lance may Livestrong but he’s a doper.
So she is well-versed in dichotomies, incongruencies and conundrums.
But does she know Joe? Not so much.
“I’ve only talked to Joe Paterno twice in 25 years,” she told a pair of enterprising Penn State student radio journalists, Willie Jungles and Patrick Woo, on Saturday. “This was the second time.”
Jenkins’ personal invitation came from one of two sources on Team Paterno. It was likely extended by PR expert Dan McGinn of TMG Strategies, employed since the wee hours of Nov. 9 to handle Paterno’s image rehab and resetting. McGinn is, according to his company’s website, “one of America’s most influential and successful communications counselors and trend analysts.”
The invite was likely done in concert with Washington, D.C., attorney Wick Sollers, who represented Paterno’s pal former President George H.W. Bush in the Iran-Contra investigations and is now Paterno’s counselor.
“I was told (it was) because I had written one of the few sensible columns about the Jerry Sandusky grand jury and all the events that then followed the tumultuous days,” Jenkins told Jungels and Woo. “They had felt I had taken a more measured tone in a column that I had written and that I had thought things more rationally than some people.”
Jenkins’ column was titled, ‘Blame for the Penn State scandal does not lie with Joe Paterno,’ and it ran in the Nov. 8, 2011, edition of the Washington Post.
Its appearance was three days short of 43 years after her father’s aforementioned praise-filled piece about Paterno.
Jenkins’ interview on Saturday, aired originally by the university’s ComRadio Internet radio station, took place literally minutes before Jenkins’ story was posted on the web by The Post. ESPN, on both television and radio, also did interviews with Jenkins, but having heard and seen all three, the students’ version is the best and most complete. To listen, click here.
Jenkins was handpicked by Paterno’s handlers, of course. For good reason. They knew where Jenkins stood – it would be very difficult for her to contradict herself at this juncture, especially since she’s written nothing on the subject since.
Also, she had:
Great name recognition and legitimacy; the backing of a huge news organization that could easily disseminate the story across several platforms; a great history with Armstrong, controversy and all; the Jenkins name; the title of 2010 Sports Columnist of the Year, as voted by the Associated Press Sports Editors; and written books with such revered coaches as Dean Smith and Pat Summit (two, in fact).
She did not have: A history of contradiction in regards to Paterno or a problem with the final ground rules.
“We had a lot of talks about the circumstances would be because coach Paterno is going through chemotherapy and lung cancer,” she told the ComRadio interviewers. “So there was quite a bit of negotiating, and I had to talk to my editors about what the terms would be, and so on and so forth. That took a few days to hash out.
“And then I got a call that said they felt they wanted to go ahead and do it, that he felt he wanted to go ahead and do it.”
In the old days, Paterno might have done the interview with someone he truly trusted, like Bill Lyon of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Or the New York Times’ Gordon S. White, Jr., who co-authored the early 1970s hagiography of Paterno, “Football My Way.”
White was so close to Paterno that he would give Joe’s mother a car ride in from New York on football weekends and, in later years, stay at Joe and Sue’s house with his wife. Now, the New York Times – for several reasons, all related to the past two months — is verboten on McKee Street.
What were once friends are now enemies.
Jenkins said she has no dog in the fight: “My job here was not to decide to whether or not I believe him or not. (It is) to give him a format and a forum to tell his side of the story or to say what he wanted to say, neither sympathetically or unsympathetically.”
For her part, in contradiction to what others close to Paterno say, Jenkins said she sees no big plans for Paterno to continue to get his side of the story out.
“I think this is pretty much it,’ she told ComRadio. ‘I don’t think he has a great deal more to say than what he said to me.’
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