William Mebane; Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries

Published in theJune/July 2012 issue

He's wearing his running uniform, we can reveal that much about the runner.

Shorts, tank top.

A pair of Asics track spikes.

We can tell you that just before he lowers himself into a half crouch at the starting line, he does an odd little skip, shaking out his legs one more time before he calls them into action.

We can tell you that he crouches down noticeably lower than his competitors, the three other young men at the line.

We can't tell you the color of his hair, but we can tell you that it is not its original color, and that he dyes it often, unpredictably, whimsically.

We can tell you that he doesn't even glance at the race official in the fluorescent-orange shirt who's just lifted the starter pistol skyward.

We can tell you that instead he just stares straight down the track, waiting for the report.

I suppose we can tell you that his eyes are green.

And that his skin is pale and that his face, like the faces of so many eighteen-year-olds, is flecked with acne.

We can tell you, in these coiled moments before the gun goes off, that five years ago, when he was just entering adolescence, he had smooth, unblemished skin.

Jay Paterno is in the basement bar of an Italian restaurant owned by a friend of his, pretending he's taking a shower. He's standing purposefully, uncomfortably close to the guy he's talking to, and one of his arms is raised, and he's pretending to soap his armpit, and he's saying that the showers in the football building aren't so cramped, that you wouldn't be forced so close together there. You can take a shower with somebody there and it wouldn't be like you were necessarily invading their personal space. It wouldn't be like that.

And don't misunderstand him, he's not saying that terrible things didn't happen. That kids weren't probably hurt. And that that's not a tragedy.

He's just saying that sometimes taking a shower is just taking a shower.

That sometimes it's not a criminal act.

Guys who play football take showers together. And sometimes older guys take showers with younger guys. And sometimes... but his heart's not really in the argument.

And besides, arguments are just words.

Even a winning one can't bring back what he's already lost.

The doctor hasn't read any of it.

Some of it he's heard on the radio driving to work. Some of it he's overheard in conversation. You can't help hearing a few details here and there. We don't have earlids.

But we can look away. We don't need to see what we don't want to see.

Dr. Wayne Sebastianelli is the head team physician for the Penn State football team.

He's known, or knew, Coach for twenty-four years. He remembers the first time he met him, out on a practice field, sometime in 1988, during Coach's first losing season. Dr. Sebastianelli had played football himself in college, was a nose tackle at the University of Rochester. They had shaken hands, and then Coach had squinted up at him through those famous sea-glass spectacles of his and let loose with his equally famous Brooklyn honk.

"I remember you! Too small, too slow, and too weak to play at Penn State!"

And Dr. Sebastianelli remembers what he told Coach.

"I know I wasn't good enough to play for you, but I'm good enough to take care of you and your team."

And that's what he's done, for decades now.

He's taken care of Coach. He's taken care of Coach's teams.

He provides treatment.

Sometimes he provides prevention.

There's a great picture someone took a few years ago, during a game against Temple.

The picture shows Dr. Sebastianelli tackling a Temple running back who was careening off the field, about to bulldoze Coach.

Dr. Sebastianelli had been on the sidelines, as he always was, waiting for the injuries to happen.

"It's third and six, and so I figured if the play comes this way, they're going right for the stick, so I'm maybe about eight yards from the stick, to the right of it downfield. And so I just turn as the ball's being snapped, and I see Coach standing right by the stick. And all of a sudden, it was a screen play, it broke right to the sidelines, and so I started walking faster. And literally, just as that kid goes for the stick, I just caught him."

He protected Coach when he could, treated him when he couldn't, like when a couple of players ran into him during a game a few years ago, breaking one of his brittle legs.

When this whole thing started, last November, he made the conscious decision not to read about it. He absorbed the general outline, of course: Jerry Sandusky, Penn State's longtime defensive coordinator, arrested on multiple counts of child sexual abuse. Coach drawn into the mess when it came out that a decade ago an assistant had told him that he'd seen Sandusky doing something of a sexual nature to a preadolescent boy in the showers of the football building.

More than that, though, Dr. Sebastianelli chooses not to know. He might be the only person in this town who's never even glanced at the twenty-three-page-long grand jury report, that relentless collection of short stories.

Victim 1. Victim 2. Victim 3. Victim 4. Victim 5. Victim 6. Victim 7. Victim 8.

"Everybody felt challenged, everybody felt confused," he says. "Everything's obviously still unclear, what's true, what's untrue, what's fact, what's fiction."

So he didn't try to figure it out, didn't try to make sense of it. He didn't ask exactly what Coach had been told. He didn't ask why Coach didn't do more. He decided, instead, to block it out, to deflect it, to keep it out of his brain so that it couldn't infect his memories, his certainties.

So that he could keep doing what he's always done.

"I think we were all concerned about Coach," he says. "That was the main focus for me."

"Worrying about taking care of the team."

"Taking care of Coach and his family."

"I sort of made that my focus."

"I was so intensely concentrating on what I needed to that the surrounding stuff really was ..."

He trails off.

The pace of it was so fast, so unreal. The Penn State Board of Trustees fired Coach four days after the release of the grand jury report. A few days after that, Coach was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Eight weeks later, Dr. Sebastianelli was in the room when he drew his last breath.

And yes, of course, his eyes get red and wet when he talks about that day.

Then he shakes it off.

"You know," he says, "the root of his name means 'father.' "

Five syllables.

The first two: Joseph.

The father of the son of God.

The next three: Paterno.

Father, no?

Or just two syllables.

JoePa.

JoePa's second son, Joseph "Jay" Paterno Jr., stands at a lectern on a stage in a stadium in front of twelve thousand mourners and asks for everyone to stand and to hold hands.

It's the end of his eulogy, a good speech, one he stayed up late the last few nights composing on his laptop at his dining-room table. He tried to tune out everything that was going on around him, all the well-wishers and the condolences. The White House called at one point, and Jay gave the phone to his mother, and President Barack Obama told her that everyone knew all the good things she and her husband had done.

Now everyone rises.

They rise and they bow their heads and they listen as Jay recites the Lord's Prayer, the Paternoster.

"Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name ..."

William Mebane

We can't tell you the runner's name, of course.

We can tell you only the name that the Thirty-third Statewide Investigating Grand Jury of Pennsylvania anointed him with in its presentment.

Victim 1.

They didn't call him Victim 1 because he was the first victim.

They called him Victim 1 because his story led to the unearthing of all the other stories.

Victim 2. Victim 3. Victim 4. Victim 5. Victim 6. Victim 7. Victim 8.

The gun fires with a feeble clap and a thin belch of white smoke momentarily shrouds the race official's hand, drawing your eye. By the time the smoke dissipates and your attention turns back to the race, a matter of a second or two, the runner is already a stride ahead of the pack.

It's a good stride. Fast turnover, not much head bobbling, shoulders loose, up on his toes.

He's had to work at it, at his form. There are other runners, even here at this meet, who are more naturally gifted than he is. More fluid, more biomechanically sound. But nature isn't destiny, and what you're given isn't all you've got.

Part of it is his training program, that daily mixture of biology and statistics and sweat.

Monday: Three times 500 anaerobic, rest three minutes between each. Two times 1,000 anaerobic, rest five minutes between each. Core.

Tuesday: Alternate 800 for four miles from 75 percent to 80 percent, then back to resting. Warm-up mile and cool-down mile. Plyos.

And so on.

He takes it all seriously, takes satisfaction in it, in how his body responds to the tailored abuse, in how he grows measurably stronger, measurably faster.

But there are other young men here who train just as hard, who have better natural form, who should, you would imagine, be equally strong, equally fast.

The runner enters the oval's first turn, maybe twenty yards from the starting line, and the gap between him and the others continues to widen.

This is the first meet of the season, and there are maybe a hundred spectators, and they're all either lined up along the fence at the northern edge of the track or sitting in one of the two little sets of metal bleachers set back a little ways from the fence. It's a beautiful and sunny day, the beginning of spring, and the sky is light blue with just a few clouds. In the distance there are some of the unintimidating little mountains that dot this part of central Pennsylvania, covered with the thick-trunked trees that used to be part of the economic backbone of this area before the timber industry faded. Now, well, the area doesn't really have an economic backbone.

The runner's never had much. Single mom. Housing-project home. Very little money.

Father? No.

His deficits, the holes in his life, his vulnerabilities, would have stood out stark and clear to any man tuned to notice things like that.

By the time the runner rounds the bend, his competitors look like they're in a different race, racing against one another, not him, and he's out there all alone.

William Mebane

Jerry Sandusky doesn't say a word.

He's sitting next to his lawyer, facing the judge, his back to his audience. It's April, and his trial isn't scheduled to begin until June, but this pretrial hearing has been called to settle a few routine evidentiary matters, such as whether the prosecution can use the secretly recorded audio of a telephone conversation Sandusky once had with Victim 1.

A big, neckless head covered in white hair rises like a mushroom from the collar of Sandusky's swollen blue blazer. You might be wondering what's going on inside that head, what thoughts rattle behind that anthropologically interesting brow.

He won't tell you.

His lawyer hasn't allowed any interviews since the pair of disastrous ones Sandusky gave early on, when he said things like "I didn't go around seeking out every young person for sexual needs that I have helped."

You can read what other people have written about him, although that might only make you more confused, since there's such a disconnect between how he is perceived today and how he was perceived before his arrest.

For example, in an old file on the Penn State campus, you'll find an old letter, written by Sandusky's old boss, supporting his nomination for a state insurance-industry association's "Humanitarian Award":

"Jerry Sandusky," Joe Paterno wrote in 1986, "is a tireless, determined, and loyal individual that has pledged a large part of his life to many neglected youngsters in need of assistance... . Jerry is a humble man of great integrity and is only interested in what he can do for others, not what others can do for him."

Or perhaps the closest you can come to some sort of truth is in reading what Sandusky has written about himself.

He wrote a memoir in 2000, and since his arrest a lot of people have mentioned it, since its title — Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story — is basically a punchline in itself. But when you actually read it, you'll wonder whether anyone made it far past the title, and not just because the writing is so bad. The bulk of it is so saccharine and platitudinous that it reads like a novelization of The Family Circus, but it is also clearly, despite the treacly gloss, the work of a strange and disturbed individual.

In between poems about his mother — "She's prepared me for life by the Golden Rule; / My mom, for sure, is nobody's fool. / She cleans the house both day and night; / Everything around her is shiny and bright" — and a meditation on watching one of his best friends bully a disabled child, Sandusky inserts passages of such startling, not-just-in-retrospect oddness that they demand to be quoted in full. For example, here's Jerry Sandusky describing what happened after he picked up two boys who had run away from the group home that his organization for disadvantaged youth, the Second Mile, managed:

"The houseparents were mean," Bobby said as he sulked with his big blue eyes. "They made us eat all the food on our plate, and they made us clean our room."

"Boy, that's pretty terrible," I said with my best mock sympathy. "You guys are really having it rough out there."

"The guy [Elliott] grabbed me around the back of my shoulders," Bobby continued. "And he made me do something when I didn't want to do it. Do you ever grab your kids like that?"

I didn't want this running away to become a habit, so I thought of a possible solution — at least an experiment to make them think twice about doing it again. "No, Bobby, I don't grab my kids like that. I grab them like this."

With that, I put my hands gently around his throat. By now, I could tell they were totally confused. Both boys had a scared look in their eyes. Bobby didn't want to go back to the Second Mile home, and Steve didn't want to go to my house, so I sat at a red light at 4:30 in the morning debating with myself on where to go. Finally, I told them we would compromise. We would go to the Second Mile home that night, and another night they could come to my house. That was just an example of the organizational structure we had in the early days of the Second Mile.

But maybe trying to understand Jerry Sandusky is a loser's game. Maybe there's no easy way to reconcile the distance between a hero and a monster, or to grasp how one man can have been both simultaneously. Maybe you're better off just trying to understand the aftermath, the consequences, the effects rather than the causes.

Today's hearing is brief and inconclusive — the judge adjourns after seventeen minutes and forty-three seconds, announcing that he'll be mulling things over for a few days before making any decisions — and when it's over, a thick scrum of reporters coalesces into a horseshoe shape around a podium that somebody's placed at the bottom of the courthouse steps. Soon, the lawyers for both sides will emerge and take their turns at the podium, answering shouted questions.

There are eight TV-news trucks parked around this picturesque old town square. The one with the letters WTAJ on the side had to make an hour-long trip from the station's Altoona bureau last night, because the station still hasn't replaced the local truck, the one that was lost in the riot that took place the night the Penn State Board of Trustees fired Joe Paterno. One of the reporters here today remembers watching it go. He remembers running after a knot of police officers as they ran toward College Avenue, a video camera jostling on his shoulder, and getting there just in time to see the truck take its last breaths, balanced for a long moment up on two wheels, right before its center of gravity shifted and it toppled over. On the radio, during an emergency broadcast of a program called Radio Free Penn State, a former member of the Board of Trustees who had flown in that day from his home in Florida lamented the firing of Joe Paterno, his voice thick with anger and grief: "It is such an incredible tragedy... . They wanted to wipe the slate clean, but they wiped our honor off the slate, too! They wiped our pride off the slate, too! They wiped our hero and our idol and our epitome off the slate, too!" One of the rioters threw a lit cigarette in the direction of gas spilling from the gas tank.

The reporter remembers how the chants came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

"Hell, no, Joe won't go! Hell, no, Joe won't go! Hell, no, Joe won't go!"

Rocks and bottles started showering down all around him then, and he remembers thinking that this is what it must be like to be on the losing side of a battle in wartime.

William Mebane

We can tell you that the runner is wearing his racing uniform, but we won't tell you the name of the high school printed in white letters across the front of his shirt.

We'll tell you, though, that the high school on his shirt is not the high school where he currently attends classes, where he's currently finishing up his senior year.

The high school on his shirt is his old high school, the one he transferred out of when too many people in this small town told too many other people what they'd heard about the runner. He still runs for his old high school, but he never again wants to walk its halls.

Faggot.

It's your fault JoePa's gone.

The adults, the school administrators, well, they weren't as rough as the kids. Not quite. They didn't drop epithets or invoke gods, at least. But they didn't bend over backward to help him, to support him. It was a small-town school, with a small-town football team, but for several years it had been basking in the voluntary coaching assistance of Jerry Sandusky, a hero descended from the Penn State pantheon, a man so great people had once even thought he would eventually take over for Joe. It's hard to lose the attentions of a great man, and perhaps that's why, when the runner came forward four years ago to tell his story, to put an end to it, according to his mom, one of the top administrators at his high school had a quick and devastating retort.

"Jerry has a heart of gold."

As the scandal exploded, as its impact expanded, the news that the runner was Victim 1 spread on the unstoppable breeze of rumor.

Let's spread another rumor here.

Let's say that it's rumored that before the runner left his old high school behind, he visited a different administrator's office on a matter unrelated to the scandal.

He visited to complain about the dismissal of an assistant track coach, an assistant coach who had clashed with the head coach, but whom the runner and all the other members of the team admired.

"What," the school official replied, "are you sleeping with him, too?"

Is the rumor true?

The runner doesn't want to talk about it.

He doesn't want to talk about any of it, really.

Some things don't need to be said.

He left his old school behind.

Some battles aren't worth fighting.

Jay Paterno remembers the blur of well-wishers, coming and going for hours after he got home from his father's memorial service. He remembers people complimenting him on his eulogy and he remembers having to stifle the instinct that kept on welling up inside him, the instinct to call his dad and ask him what he thought of the speech. As he remembers it, he may have even spoken the question out loud, a couple of times, in the snatches of privacy he found during that long evening.

Hey, Joe, what did you think?

Some people find it strange when he calls his dad Joe, but it makes sense. It was a habit he picked up after he started working for him, seventeen years ago, when he hired on at Penn State as an assistant football coach. He'd be in these meetings, eight or nine guys sitting around a table, and he could hear what it sounded like when he'd pipe in. "But Dad, what about ..." "But Dad, why can't we ..." It sounded like he was twelve years old. So in public, he began calling his dad what the other men called him. Coach. Or just Joe. Soon that habit began creeping into their private conversations, too.

Those last years, working under Joe, were a blessing. Growing up, he didn't always have the time with his dad he would have liked. Unlike some of his friends' dads, his didn't fish, didn't hunt, didn't coach Little League. And he was busy, always. But football brought them together. Some of Jay's earliest memories are of sitting on the floor of his dad's study while his dad studied tapes of games on the projector. And soon, while he was still really young, Jay began to absorb some of what he saw there, began to understand some of the delicate and intricate strategies at play underneath the brutal surface of the game. Eventually, Jay chose to make coaching football his career, and whether or not this decision was itself part of some delicate and intricate strategy of his own, it did succeed in bringing him closer to his father than he ever was as a child.

The day after the memorial service, Jay found an e-mail in his in-box. A Web site called American Rhetoric was writing to let him know that they planned to include his eulogy in its list of important speeches of the twenty-first century.

Jay remembered the question he'd asked the night before.

Joe, what did you think?

Okay, he thought to himself, I got your answer.

A lot of people believe that when you're dead, you're gone, and that there's no way for the departed to influence the world they've left behind. Jay doesn't believe that. He believes in signals, in signs, and he believes his father has been sending lots of them.

Like at a basketball game Jay's twelve-year-old son played in a few weeks ago.

His son had written his grandfather's initials, JVP, on one hand and the word ALWAYS on the other.

He was a good basketball player, his son, solid, but not necessarily a superstar. In these games, the final point tally wasn't usually much more than twenty points, and his son would usually score maybe five or six. Halfway through this particular game, though, Jay called his wife.

"There's something going on here," Jay told her.

His son ended up scoring thirteen points.

The next game, once the ink had worn off, he went back to scoring his usual five or six.

Jay received another sign in Brooklyn.

It was two weeks after his father's death, and he'd been in Manhattan for a Penn State fundraising event. On Sunday morning, he decided to get up early so he could attend the 8:30 mass at his dad's childhood church, St. Edmund Parish in Sheepshead Bay.

The priest stood up and began his sermon, and Jay almost couldn't believe his ears.

"Today," the priest said, "we're going to read from the Book of Job."

Okay, Dad, Jay thought, sitting up straight-backed in his pew, I hear you.

He'd already been thinking about Job a lot, and about the parallels between Job and Joe.

God broke Job down piece by piece, stripped Job of everything, to test his faith.

And Joe, despite everything that happened, despite all he'd lost, never got bitter, never got angry.

During some of the worst, early days of the scandal, when Jay looked out at the satellite trucks squatting in front of his father's house, he sometimes felt like just rushing out there and raging into the lights and the lenses. He knew what they'd be asking, that same trinity of questions cycling endlessly on television — what did Joe know? when did he know it? why didn't he go to the police? — and he knew that nothing he could say, or scream, would be enough. But the impulse to confront them was almost uncontrollable.

His dad would calm him down.

"They're just doing their jobs," he'd say.

Another thing Jay's been reading and thinking about a lot recently is The Crucible, that old play about the Salem witch trials. It makes him think about something his father always used to say, which is that human nature never really changes. It makes him think about the reactions people have when confronted with hysteria. It makes him think about the McCarthy hearings, about the immediate aftermath of 9/11, about the Duke lacrosse scandal. About what happens when the mass of public opinion gallops in one direction and how tough it is to counter that.

Jay's a history buff, just like his dad, and one of the last movies they planned to watch together was Robert Redford's The Conspirator, about a woman who got swept up in the hysteria following Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Her name was Mary Surratt, and she owned the boardinghouse where John Wilkes Booth planned his crime. A wounded nation, shocked by the tragedy and hungry for vengeance, assumed Surratt must have shared in her tenant's guilt.

But just because something happens on your property, in your domain, doesn't make you responsible for it, does it?

Evil, like virtue, can be all around you, and you might not see it at all.

William Mebane

The runner admires Usain Bolt, though of course he's not that kind of runner.

Usain Bolt is a stick of dynamite, a mutant, this massive Jamaican sprinting machine who just obliterates every sprinter who's come before. Usain Bolt is also, to be honest, not all that tough. He runs the 100 and the 200, and people who know about runners and running are pretty sure that if he chose to run the 400, he could dominate it as well. But the 400 requires something that either Usain Bolt can't take or just doesn't want to: pain. Real pain. The pain that happens when your body exhausts its initial anaerobic reserves and has to start actually producing and burning new fuel, sucking in massive amounts of oxygen, converting it on the fly, pushing through that suffocating sense of swimming up for air and finding ice above your head.

The runner, that's where he lives.

He runs the 800, the 1600, the 3200. He runs those races in which, in order to excel, you've got to find your limits and feel the pain that finds you there and keep on going.

Eventually, the rumors that he was Victim 1 spread outside of his high school, outside of his town, and reached some members of the national media. He lived with his mom and some siblings and some dogs, and at first they tried to use the dogs to keep them at bay. They'd let them out one at a time, from smallest to biggest, and eventually that would do the trick. But the press can be relentless. Here's another rumor: A reporter for one of the nation's biggest daily newspapers provided the runner's neighbors with free cell phones in exchange for their stories. After a while, the runner couldn't stand it, this feeling of being trapped inside his mother's home. So he moved out, found another place to live, and gave his address only to the people he trusted the most.

He's just a little stick figure now, way down at the opposite end of the track, about 300 meters into this 800-meter race, and though there's no visible change in his form, though he's still cycling his stride smooth and sharp, lifting his feet off the ground almost as soon as they strike it, you know it's found him now, that it's caught up with him, that his tank is empty, that the pain's begun.

The grand jury presentment reads like fragments from a destroyed adolescence.

Sandusky and the runner met on the Penn State campus. They met when he was eleven or twelve years old at a camp that Sandusky's group, the Second Mile, organized. They met there, with all the other kids and all the other counselors around, but eventually they started meeting elsewhere. Sandusky started taking the runner places, just the two of them. Penn State preseason practices. Eagles games in Philadelphia. Swimming excursions at hotel pools.

Sandusky's house. The basement of Sandusky's house.

You can't imagine what it's like for a fatherless boy to have a man, a hero no less, suddenly come into his life and lavish him with paternal attention.

And you can't imagine what it's like when the boy realizes that the man is not really a hero at all.

There are things that happened, and those things will come out in court.

"With Victim 1 lying on top of him, face to face, Sandusky would run his arms up and down the boy's back and 'crack' it... ."

"Sandusky then began to blow on Victim 1's bare stomach... ."

"Victim 1 testified that ultimately Sandusky performed oral sex on him more than 20 times through 2007 and early 2008... ."

There are things that happened, and so one day the runner went home and he was on his computer — Sandusky had given him all sorts of gifts, including a computer, golf clubs, clothes, cash — and he called out to his mom and asked if she knew the name of a Web site he'd heard about, some sort of online registry where he could go to look up the names of "sex weirdos."

"Who are you looking for?" she asked.

"Jerry," he said.

An 800-meter race constitutes exactly two laps of the track, and as the runner approaches the halfway mark, the beginning of his second lap, he's not crouched down at all, as he was at the start, but is running so straight and so upright that he looks taller and bigger and stronger than he actually is, and even though you know he must be in some sort of agony, it doesn't show.

William Mebane

Let's agree that Joe Paterno was a good man.

Let's agree that he was decent and generous and loyal.

He began coaching football at Penn State in 1950 and stayed until he was fired sixty-one years later, even though he had frequently been offered much more money to leave and coach in the NFL. During his tenure, he built up one of the most successful college football programs in history, and personally oversaw 409 victories, more than any other major college football coach. He tried to mold his players not only into superior athletes but also into respectable human beings, insisting that they maintain high GPAs, that they keep their facial hair shorn short, that they dress conservatively even when off the field. He was an English major in college and believed deeply that the life of the mind was as important as the life of the body. He flexed his fame to raise massive amounts of funds for the university and personally poured millions of dollars of his own money into various university endowments and building projects.

He was a good man.

And there's no greater monument to his goodness, nothing he was more proud of, than the Paterno Library. It's right in the middle of campus, and he raised millions of dollars to bring it into being. It's beautiful, austere and solid without ostentation, like the simple blue-and-white uniforms he insisted his football players wear. Among other things, the library houses the Special Collections Library, where archives covering Pennsylvania's labor and literary history share space with millions of documents related to the university's own history, including the history of its football program. The Paterno Library manages the personal archives of Joe Paterno himself. You can pore through boxes full of primary-source materials related to his extraordinary career, and get a small sense of his devotion to the university and to the football team, his single-minded passion and drive. Even in the off-season, his appointment book was full, and he racked up thousands of miles visiting potential donors and recruits.

But yes, even here, in Paterno's archives in Paterno's library, there are some things that raise questions.

According to the grand-jury indictment, the first time Jerry Sandusky was investigated on suspicions of sexual abuse was back in 1998. On May 13 and 19 of that year, detectives from the Penn State and municipal police departments hid in the home of the mother of an alleged victim and listened in on conversations she had with Sandusky, conversations in which Sandusky admitted that his genitals might have touched her son, and that he felt terrible about it, saying "I wish I were dead." Then, on June 1, they interviewed Sandusky in person. Shortly afterward, for unclear reasons, the case was dropped.

Would Joe Paterno have been told about that investigation? Would any Penn State police officers or administrators have informed Joe Paterno that they were investigating his heir apparent on suspicion of heinous crimes?

We don't know.

Paterno himself said he never knew about the 1998 investigation, and nobody has produced evidence contradicting him.

You won't find any such evidence in Paterno's archives.

You will, though, find something curious, and perhaps, depending on how you interpret it, troubling.

You will find, if you dig into his archives from 1998, that he was a very busy man — he wrote in one letter that he had "committed all my free time to" and was "really stretched" by the ongoing fundraising campaign. You will find that he was a very reliable man as well. When he planned to do something, he would do it. In fact, if you look at his agenda from 1998, you'll see that he almost always kept to his schedule, and that his only cancellations fall within a very narrow window of time.

The first cancellation is on May 15, two days after police listen in on Sandusky's half-confession to the mother of a young boy. That evening, Paterno cuts short a fundraising trip to Valley Forge, then cancels a four-day-long personal vacation he had been planning to take from May 16 to 19, to his summer home in Avalon, New Jersey. He resumes his scheduled fundraising trips in June, about a week after the investigation against Sandusky is dropped. He doesn't miss any more events for the remainder of the year.

The following season, Sandusky abruptly and unexpectedly announces his retirement.

Did Joe know?

Who knows. The files raise questions but provide no answers.

And regardless, it doesn't change the basic fact, testified to by almost everyone who's ever met him or worshiped him: Joe Paterno was a good man. But let's just agree on one more thing.

Joe Paterno did precisely what school regulations required him to do in 2002, when a graduate assistant came to his home to tell him he had just witnessed Jerry Sandusky molesting a preadolescent boy in a shower stall at the football building.

Joe Paterno notified another Penn State administrator.

Joe Paterno did not do anything more than that.

There are lots of words you could use to describe Joe Paterno's behavior.

Managerial. Bureaucratic. Lawful.

Heroic?

Let's agree that if you are going to look for any real heroes in this story, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

Newscom

Jay has a deep rumbling burr of a voice, but he does a good impression of his father's famous high-pitched squawk.

And he still hears it in his head, all the time.

"Don't stop. Keep moving."

That's what it's been saying lately, the voice. Almost a physical thing, that bray, that spur. Don't slow down. Not now.

When they fired Joe Paterno, Jay wasn't sure whether he should keep going to work himself. Should he keep working for the university that had just fired his father?

He talked with his dad about it, and his dad told him, Look, you've got responsibilities. You've got responsibilities to the other coaches, to the players.

Of course you go.

So he went. He kept going to the practices, and he coached from the sidelines of the first Penn State game in sixty-one years that his dad had no part of.

And even since then, after the season ended and his dad passed away, after the university didn't renew his own contract and he found himself suddenly unemployed for the first time since college, he hasn't really stopped. It's been one thing after another.

The eulogy got him lots of attention. You wouldn't believe the amount of mail he's received, requests for interviews, speaking engagements. He's earned forty thousand new Twitter followers since this thing started. And people have started talking with him about the same thing they used to talk with his dad about. Politics. He likes politics. He likes campaigns, the energy and excitement of them. The clear goals.

And this thing with his dad, the aftermath, it's sort of like a political campaign, too. You've got dueling narratives, different messages, and you want to make sure your side is the strongest. The family has hired a crisis counselor named Dan McGinn, whose clients are usually major corporations like General Motors and Texaco. In the first days of the crisis, McGinn advised the family to be very circumspect and cautious, to maintain a dignified silence during the initial volleys levied against them. Now the reins are loosening. The family has begun to respond with sharply worded statements to what it views as the most egregious insults against them. In March, when the Penn State Board of Trustees publicly rehashed its reasons for firing Paterno, the Paterno family, with McGinn's help, drafted a quick and blunt rebuttal. When, in April, a pair of journalists from Pittsburgh put out a hastily written book full of anonymously sourced knocks against Joe Paterno's reputation, the Paternos issued another statement within a day.

And the truth is, the Paterno family doesn't really have to defend itself much, not around here. The community's abiding certainties and loyalties have never much been in doubt. Although the university has severed its licensing deal with the Paternos, the family continues to market its own products independently, and those products continue to sell very well. Jay can't walk down College Avenue without seeing his father's face on dozens of T-shirts, under slogans like WE ARE ... BECAUSE HE WAS and MORE THAN A MAN. There's a large movement under way to rename one of the major streets in town Paterno Way, and some particularly fervent believers, like Travis Reitnauer, the ringleader of the group that flipped the news van during the riots, suggest that the renaming shouldn't stop there, and that the university should be rechristened Paterno State University. At one of the busiest intersections in town there's a local landmark, a huge, decade-old mural that depicts dozens of Penn State luminaries. A few days after the scandal broke, the mural artist returned and painted over Jerry Sandusky, who used to sit in a big easy chair near Joe Paterno. After Joe Paterno died, the artist returned again and painted a golden halo over his head.

Not long ago, Jay adopted a dog. They named her Penelope, after the wife of Odysseus, who stayed eternally loyal to her absent husband. Jay takes Penelope on long walks and tries not to let his mind wander too far. Keeping busy has been essential, Jay thinks, to his own peace of mind. He worries about what might happen if he stops and rests for too long. He worries that all his emotions would catch up, hit him like a nose tackle.

When things are quiet, when he doesn't have fundraising events or speeches, when he's not walking Penelope or playing tennis or basketball with his friends or cooking for his family or teaching his kids the rudiments of football, like his dad taught him, he escapes into books. Reading and writing them. He's working on a novel. He's got the outline all mapped out. It's a mystery set at a fictional university. Something terrible happens within the football program there. A coach is murdered. It becomes a national scandal. Dozens of satellite news vans sprout overnight.

Jay's protagonist, his hero, is a football player.

A long time ago, the runner wrote a brief essay about heroes.

Heroes, according to him, save people's lives. "I'm glad I'm a hero. I save myself all the time."

He saved himself.

He came forward, he told his story.

He saved himself, and in saving himself, he saved others as well.

And yes, in saving himself, this fatherless boy unwittingly brought down JoePa.

He put an end to something.

And he's suffered the consequences.

Soon, though, it will be over. He's going to testify at the trial, and then, perhaps, he'll never have to tell his story again. He's planning to leave this whole state behind once he graduates from high school, plans to start over somewhere new, won't look back at the reckoning and the wreckage, at the people trying to salvage what honor they can from the rubble.

But that's the future.

Today, let's watch him race.

Let's watch him run circles around this lined green football field.

High-school football games around here routinely draw a thousand people, watching and screaming, instead of the barely one hundred who've come out for this track meet.

But he's not looking at the crowd.

He's coming out of the final bend, and his competitors haven't even entered it yet, and he's looking straight down the track, toward the finish line.

He's letting the pain show now, during this finishing kick, his face stiffening and contorting.

This last bit, it's hard and it's painful, but the worst is behind him, and there's something particularly sweet about a victory you achieve all by yourself.

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