Matt Hayes

Sporting News

STATE COLLEGE, Pa.—The episodes come so often and so random, are so mind-numbing in their frequency, there’s never really an opportunity to reflect on the sheer terror of it all.

Multiple times every day, Jack O’Brien stops breathing.

“I’m always waiting,” Colleen O’Brien says. “Please take that breath. Take that breath.”

A breath of life, a breath of perspective.

“People ask me about pressure in this job,” says Bill O’Brien, Penn State’s new coach. “Really? Pressure?”

Here is Bill O’Brien’s view of pressure: His son, Jack, is 10 years old and has the rare neurological disorder Lissencephaly. He can’t walk or talk, can’t feed himself, can’t do things typical boys can do.

And he has seizures, sometimes 10 a day, and as many as thousands a year. From episodes that last seconds, to those that last minutes. All feel like hours, and every single one takes another piece of he and his wife Colleen’s punctured souls while they wait for their son—rigid and non-responsive—to eventually emerge from the place only he knows.

One man’s pressure, it seems, is another’s perspective.

Someone had to follow Joe Paterno; someone had to sit in that office across from that big stadium and eventually be the first fresh face on the sidelines in Happy Valley in nearly five decades.

Bill O’Brien is the man following the legendary icon that is JoePa. To the degree that football allows, O’Brien is the man helping to heal a community ripped apart by horrific allegations of child abuse by former Penn State assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky. The process of replacing Paterno began last November with the revelation of those unthinkable events.

The Sandusky trial begins Monday in this bucolic burg tucked in the central Pennsylvania mountains. The story, so distasteful and incomprehensible, is irreparably linked to Penn State football.

If ever there was a set up for failure, this is it.

Or is it?

Maybe, just maybe, this is the perfect situation: a cosmic convergence of the untenable beaten back by the unwavering. Who follows a coach who was the face of college football, who was fired in writing after the tentacles of the biggest scandal in college football history reached his office; who died from cancer (or was it a broken heart?) months later?

A man with a vise grip on perspective.

Bill O’Brien looks at his son military crawling across the floor, shimmying his 80-pound body after his 7-year-old brother, Michael, who has bounded upstairs to play. One hand on the bottom step for Jack, another million in front of him that can’t be taken.

“It’s so frustrating for him,” O’Brien said. “He wants to follow him, but he can’t get past that first step.”

The metaphor isn’t lost in the moment.

When O’Brien was hired by Penn State last January, athletic director David Joyner said the university had found a “unique man.”

With a unique life story. A story of perspective, and more than anything, a story of love that’s strong enough to overcome anything.

'OUR LIFE HAD CHANGED FOREVER'

Colleen O’Brien paced through her home that day nine years ago, debating whether to call Bill and tell him news too unimaginable to utter. He was in New Jersey on a recruiting trip as an assistant coach with Maryland, hours from their home in College Park, and the thought of him hearing this and driving wasn’t exactly lining up.

This is the way Colleen O’Brien works. Organized, prepared, proactive. Everything has a place, everything has a purpose. Now, for the first time, nothing seemed real.

Minutes earlier she received a call from an resident intern at the hospital where she took her 13-month-old son who wasn’t acting right and wasn’t developing properly. The neurologist who was supposed to call had left and was out of town for the weekend, so a resident called to inform her that her son had Lissencephaly. The resident then proceeded to tell her not to look it up on the Internet; to wait until the neurologist returned to discuss the disorder.

Naturally, Colleen went straight to the Internet. And saw this:

Lissencephaly, which literally means smooth brain, is a rare brain formation disorder … resulting in lack of cognitive development… seizures… failure to thrive … with modern medication, some children live into their teens.

“It painted the worst picture possible,” Colleen said. “I knew I had to call Bill. When I did, I actually said, ‘You need to pull over.’ He said, ‘No, no, just tell me.’ It was horrible. I remember thinking in that moment that our life had just changed forever.”

Colleen pauses, then explains what has kept her family—her husband, her youngest son, Michael, and Jack—strong all these years.

“Certainly,” she says, “our life has changed forever in a lot of good ways, too.”

THE PATRIOT-NEWS PHOTOS: Coach Bill O'Brien and his family

This is the life of families with special needs children. There are doubts and fears; unanswered questions and unfulfilled expectations. But there is also joy and a pure, unfiltered understanding of life and unconditional love.

How could Penn State have truly known what it had when O’Brien agreed to leave his plum job as offensive coordinator for the New England Patriots—a job that likely would have led to a head coaching job in the NFL—to be the face of a program, a university, a college town, drowning in controversy?

When the O’Briens left Boston, Jack’s former school, where Colleen was a staunch advocate for inclusion, gave him a going-away gift. It was a scrapbook of his years at the school, where he spent time in his special needs class but also had time with typical kids in classroom settings.

All of Jack’s classmates wrote him letters, wishing him luck and explaining how much he meant to them.

“It was unbelievable,” Bill O’Brien said. “I’m reading this thing; you know I’m this big, tough football coach. I was bawling.”

He hadn’t cried like that—he hadn’t wept like that—in seven years. A deep, bowels of your core cry where you have to literally pull yourself together.

Seven years ago, Colleen gave birth to Michael: a nine-month journey full of prayer and hope; of apprehension and eventually acceptance. Lissencephaly can’t be detected in utero, and the only fully researched cause is genetic. In other words, if Jack had it, Michael could, too.

So when Michael was born, doctors conducted an MRI scan to check for Lissencephaly. After the MRI, they brought Michael back to Colleeen’s room, where they waited as a family for the news. Colleen in the bed, still groggy from the delivery—and Bill next to her in a chair, holding his newborn son.

“They came in a said it was negative,” Colleen said. “All of this emotion and fear came pouring out of us at once. We were so happy for Michael, and there was so much of an understanding—even though we had it before—that Jack was given to us for a reason. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bill so emotional. People always ask me, ‘Tell me something about Bill that no one really knows.’ He’s a great dad, that’s what’s most important.”

A few weeks ago, Michael met some new friends in State College. If anyone in the family was having a rough transition to his new home, it was Michael. He had friends in Boston, and days earlier admitted to his dad that he “missed his buddies.”

Neighbors from the O’Brien’s street came over with their sons and asked if Michael could play. The son O’Brien says is all boy, who can’t stop dribbling a basketball or playing in and out of the house; who doesn’t stop until his head hits the pillow, introduced his brother in the wheelchair.

“I heard him say, ‘This is my brother Jack, he doesn’t talk because he’s handicapped,’” Bill O’Brien said. “It’s like a preemptive strike. Jack loves him; he changes completely when Michael walks in the room. I don’t think Michael understands it totally. Jack’s his brother, and that’s all that matters to him.”

SPREADING THE WORD

Rain is falling on an unseasonably cool mid-May morning, and the bus is loading up for another leg of the Penn State Coaches Caravan. They’re traveling throughout the state of Pennsylvania, and other hot spots outside the state, to spread the word of O’Brien.

At the front of the bus sits Gottfried Fodor, a 66-year-old Pennsylvania native and longtime Paterno driver. He and Joe were close; how could they not be?

He drove and Joe would talk. All those trips, all those miles, all those memories.

“A great man,” Fodor said.

And already, he says he has connected with O’Brien, the son of a hardscrabble New Englander, who grew up in Boston and went to an all-boys high school before going to Brown and playing football for the Bears. If it wasn’t for his high-profile shouting match with All-World quarterback Tom Brady during a Patriots game last season, who would’ve known O’Brien before he accepted the Penn State job?

Who would’ve known that he had coached 13 years in college football as an assistant at five different schools? That he was, for a few days, the offensive coordinator at Notre Dame before George O’Leary admitted he lied on his resume and lost the Irish job.

Those who know him swear he’s one of the game’s best teachers of offense, and that he reaches high school players as well as any recruiter.

“I’ve always thought that whoever got Billy,” said former Maryland coach Ralph Friedgen, “was getting one of those rare guys.”

It’s late in the day after a morning trip to Altoona, where Paterno’s first captain, Mike Irwin, showed up to meet the new boss: “I like everything about him,” Irwin says. Later O’Brien meets with big-money boosters at the Duquesne Club in Pittsburgh. On another stop, O’Brien’s jacket is off, the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up, and in front of a packed hotel ballroom in downtown Pittsburgh, he’s going line by line through his overhead presentation of how to succeed at Penn State.

In the back of the room is Fodor, a man who once drove a bus 30 hours through the rough, gravel and rock mountain roads of the Yukon Territory and back to Fairbanks, Alaska, because that was his job. He’s road hard Pennsylvania, all right.

He’s sporting khaki pants and black Nike sneakers and suddenly looks a whole lot like the man he drove around all those years—the friend he drove with down College Avenue during the funeral procession four months earlier.

“I know this much,” Fodor says softly. “I wish I could be around another 40 years to watch this guy here.”

CARING AND PERSEVERING

Late last month, weeks after his first spring practice ended, Bill O’Brien made his first major announcement as head coach at Penn State. Matt McGloin, a streaky senior and former walk on, would be the team’s starting quarterback.

O’Brien waited weeks to make the decision, studying practice tape from spring drills and making the decision based on “who gives us the best chance to win.”

Meanwhile, Colleen was busy dealing with another significant decision. For years she has stayed home and been the primary caregiver for Jack. Bill helps as much as he can, but it’s Colleen who wakes every morning with Jack; who feeds and dresses him; who takes him to school and works with him when he returns from school; who bathes and feeds and changes him. Who makes sure he gets his medication at the specific morning and night times so those gut-wrenching seizures won’t be, if it’s possible, worse.

For years Colleen has resisted getting help, only getting breaks when Bill comes home at night or when he takes Jack and Michael to the football offices on the weekends and lets them play in his office while he works. After researching companies that provide caregivers, Colleen called a group she thought could help.

Instead, she heard this: The company can’t be responsible for the people they send out. Some employees steal medicine; others steal from the home. So, her search continues.

“They told me we screen them as well as we can, but sometimes things change when they get into your house,” Colleen said. “That put the fear of God in me.”

Not long ago, Jack had a bad seizure early one morning, one that shook both Colleen and Bill.

“Bill looked at me and said, ‘What a terrible thing to have to deal with,’” Colleen said. “Sometimes I have to remind Bill that it’s not terrible for Jack; it’s his life and he’s a happy boy.”

The metaphor isn’t lost in the moment.

What a terrible thing Bill O’Brien has to deal with at Penn State.

What a truly blessed thing to have the perspective to deal with it.

--Story originally appeared on SportingNews.com.