_In late July 2012, the NCAA announced that its punishment of Penn State for the Sandusky scandal would include the vacating of all wins by the football program dating back to 1998. Nobody knew it then, but that was the last game Joe Paterno would coach.ġ. The reporters’ questions sounded tired too. 1 President Graham Spanier and athletic director Tim Curley showed up to give him a plaque. It wasn’t an official record, but it gave Penn State the opportunity to celebrate Paterno one more time. But he had passed Grambling’s Eddie Robinson for the top spot on the Division I list for victories. He already had the record for Division I-A so this wasn’t exactly a record. When Penn State beat Illinois on October 29, it was Paterno’s 409th victory as a coach. He was 84 years old, but he announced to anyone who would listen that he had not felt this good in years. "You need a ride, Joe?" they would shout through the car window, and he would wave his hand, smile, and keep walking, as he had as a young man, focusing on the road ahead. During the previous two seasons he had been ill and looked gaunt now he had the strength to walk again, and he walked all over State College.
Joe Paterno began the last football preseason of his life feeling great. As a result, GQ has inserted footnotes at various points to contextualize facts that had not yet come to light at the time. The Freeh report-former FBI director Louis Freeh’s July 2012 inquiry on behalf of the Penn State board of trustees into why Sandusky’s crimes were not reported earlier by Paterno and other senior university officials-is addressed elsewhere in Posnanski’s biography and adds vital new information to the recollections in this excerpt. What follows is the story of Paterno’s final days as head coach, and of how he presented himself to his family and intimates during that period. This afforded Posnanski access to Paterno and his inner circle as the Jerry Sandusky scandal engulfed the campus and the nation. For instance, Spielberg’s directed movies in the last decade included Oscar-nominated Bridge of Spies (2015), animated fantasy The BFG (2016), Oscar-nominated The Post (2017), blockbuster Ready Player One (2018), and Oscar-nominated West Side Story (2021).Editor’s Note: In the summer of 2011, Penn State football coach Joe Paterno allowed the journalist Joe Posnanski, then a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, to join him in State College, Pennsylvania, to spend the upcoming season writing his biography. Spielberg has been an incredible example of this pattern, as the director is able to boast Best Picture nominations for prestigious films in one year while putting out more widely accessible sci-fi or action-adventure blockbusters in the next. It’s well-documented that once a director achieves a certain level of status and acclaim, they’re better able to work in passion projects or genre pursuits amidst their more highly-anticipated award winners. While Spielberg has been in the game a lot longer, the Indiana Jones director is similarly remarkable for his split filmography of sci-fi or action blockbusters and dramatic Academy Award winners. Ever since his film debut in 1998, sci-fi director Christopher Nolan has been notable both for the awards acclaim and grandiose blockbuster pull of his 11 movies. Christopher Nolan’s upcoming movie, Oppenheimer, sets up the director to repeat a notable pattern in the career of accomplished director Steven Spielberg.