Saturday, January 14, 2012, marked the publication of Joe Paterno’s first comments on the record since the Jerry Sandusky scandal exploded and led to the end of his career as he, and everyone else, knew it. Sally Jenkins’ piece reads like a prologue to an obituary, with the necessary exposition to put the past two months into some sort of context.

Removing the descriptive language, though, reveals the quotes from both Paterno and his wife, Sue that shape Jenkins’ story. I pulled a few that I found particularly jarring:

1) “You know, it wasn’t like it was something everybody in the building knew about. Nobody knew about it.”
— Paterno, on his insistence that he was unaware of a 1998 police investigation into the report on the boy who has come to be known as “Victim 6”.

Analysis: The same thing was said about Tiger Woods’ inner circle when questions of “how much did they know and when did they know it” came about regarding his serial philandering. Jo Becker’s report in the New York Times from November 10 of last year provides insight into this notion. Becker spoke to several investigators who doubted Paterno’s assertion of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, know-no-evil.

An excerpt from Becker’s article:

“You have to understand those statements in context — there is nothing that happens at State College that Joe Paterno doesn’t know, or that Graham Spanier doesn’t know,” one person involved in the investigation said. “Whether or not a criminal case went forward, there were ample grounds for an administrative inquiry into this matter. I have no evidence that was ever done. And if indeed that report was never passed up, it makes you wonder why not.”

Joe Paterno was the most notable and powerful man at Penn State. According to the anonymous investigator, he was the most powerful man in State College. In 13 years since that investigation took place, Paterno’s assertion leaves us to interpret his involvement in one of two ways: either a) he knew what happened and was responsible for organizing a broad cover-up, or b) like Pete Rose has done every day since he was banned from baseball in 1989, Paterno crafted an alternate version of the events that he believes so passionately, it has become truth. This second supposition aligns with one definition of truth listed as “conformity with fact or reality.”

2a) “He didn’t want to get specific. And to be frank with you I don’t know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man. So I just did what I thought was best. I talked to people that I thought would be, if there was a problem, that would be following up on it.”
— Paterno, describing Mike McQueary’s call to him after witnessing Sandusky having sex with a boy in the showers of the Penn State Football facility in 2002.

2b) “I had no clue. I thought doctors looked for child abuse in a hospital, in a bruise or something.”
— Sue Paterno, when asked if she knew anything about Sandusky’s alleged child molestation.

Analysis for 2a: Paterno’s recollection that McQueary didn’t want to be specific in his description of the actions is consistent with the original report of McQueary’s statement. Numerous reports since November, and the grand jury report, confirm that Paterno did, in fact, run it up the chain. But another quote from Paterno is particularly revealing:

“I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was. So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”

Again, we come back to Paterno’s power. He could have easily told the administration and the Board of Trustees about the McQueary call and the accusations and said, “Do what you have to do.” He also could have cleaned house. Expertise and knowledge of male rape had nothing to do with it. Neither did procedure. Many of Paterno’s players have called him a father figure and have said he taught them how to be leaders. Do true leaders back away from a challenge or shrink in the face of adversity? That’s what Paterno did. He did not practice what he’s preached.

Analysis for 2b: Sue Paterno added that we will become a more aware society as a result of this. That’s a nice thought, except millions of people both inside and outside Happy Valley have been aware of child abuse for years. When similar salacious charges ravaged the Catholic Church several years ago — this was international news — awareness heightened to the nth degree. Sue Paterno’s statement does not reflect well on the cultural awareness and intellectual faculties of either her or her husband, despite their ability to recant the Classics or demonstrate their love of opera, as Jenkins noted.

3) “Right now I’m trying to figure out what I’m gonna do, ’cause I don’t want to sit around on my backside all day. If I’m gonna do that I’ll be a newspaper reporter.”
— Paterno on his current state of affairs.

Analysis: Before saying, “If I’m gonna do that I’ll be a newspaper reporter,” Jenkins observed that Paterno grinned and smiled; an obvious attempt to try to rankle the veteran reporter. Paterno should know, though, that the enterprising work of reporters not sitting on their backsides and exposing his role in this mess are part of the reason he is out as Penn State’s head football coach and is no longer a tenured professor there. One reporter in particular, Sara Ganim, could very well win a Pulitzer for her work on this story. Paterno demonstrated in both nonverbal and verbal terms why he kept Happy Valley in such a hyper-controlled bubble. He hated reporters.

None of Paterno’s comments should come as a shock. There is no new information. From this interview, it’s clear Paterno believes that we are naive enough to think his story is the truth. Should we believe he was naive enough to have never heard of male rape or child molestation? Paterno may believe we as the public, are that stupid. What if, based on everything that has come out since November, we believed the same of him?

Got a treat for you from the good people at Harper’s Magazine. They’ve taken Edwin “Bud” Shrake’s classic piece “In the Land of the Permanent Wave” out from behind the pay wall and made it available for all. If you’ve never read it before, do yourself a favor and check it out:

For about five hours I had been drinking Scotch whiskey and arguing with a rather nice, sometimes funny old fellow named Arch, who was so offended by my moderately long hair that he had demanded to know if I weren’t actually, secretly, a Communist. “Come on now, you can tell me, hell, I won’t hate you for it. Wouldn’t you really like to see the Communists take over this country?” Arch had said, placing his bare elbows on the table and leaning forward to look trustingly at me, as though he was certain that if I had one virtue it would prove to be that I would not lie to him about such an important matter. Arch was wearing a jump suit; swatches of gray chest hair, the color of his crew cut, stuck out where the zipper had got caught in it when last Arch had excused himself from the table. We were in the guest lodge of a lumber company in a small town in East Texas. Arch is an old friend of the president of the company. Sitting around the table or nearby were my wife, a State Senator in town to crown a beauty queen at a “celebration” the next evening, a U. S. Congressman who had come down from Washington to make a speech between the parade and the barbecue the following noon, a lumber lobbyist who is mayor of still another town owned by this same lumber company, and I think one or two more people but my memory of that evening has a few holes in it.

Willie Morris ran Harper’s during the magazine’s heyday in the Sixties. He said that Shrake’s story, along with Seymour Hersh’s devastating account of the My Lai Massacre, were his two favorites.

In his memoir, New York Days, Morris recalled Shrake as:

…a large, tall Texan with a blunt exterior that disguised a lyric but misdoing heart. This piece was infiintely less ambitious than “My Lai,” but struck a chord in me that I have never quite forgotten, having to do with how clean, funny, and lambent prose caught the mood of that moment in the country and mirrored with great felicity what we were trying to do at Harper’s. To me few finer magazine essays have ever been written.

The genesis of “The Land of the Permanent Wave” was itself a germane story of the magazine business of that era. Sports Illustrated sent Shrake down at his insistence to do a piece on the beautiful and haunting Big Thicket area of East Texas. This was about the time a Texas lumbering company was becoming a major stockholder in Time Inc. Shrake’s story on timber choppers and developers ruining the Thicket was not happily greeted at SI. Andre Laguerre, the managing editor later to be dismissed by the money men, broke the news to the writer at their daily late afternoon gathering in the bar around the corner from the Time-Life Building where many of their editorial decisions took place. It was the only SI story Shrake ever wrote that the magazine would not print and Laguerre embarrassed. Shrake got his permission to rewrite it and give it to Harper’s. He sat down and changed the main angle of the story from the mercenary destruction of the Thicket to his and his young wife Doatsy’s travels through Lufkin and down to the Thicket, about permanent waves and long hair in the Sixties and cowboy hats and rednecks and cops and the fumes from the paper mills.

This story speaks to that time and place as well as a movie like Easy Rider, but it is not at all dated (the same can’t be said for Easy Rider).

Shrake was part of a wonderful group of writers to come out of Texas, including his high school buddy Dan Jenkins, Gary “Jap” Cartwright and Larry L King (not the talk show host but the prolific writer who wrote the brilliant Confessions of a White Racist and later struck it rich with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas). Shrake, Jenkins and later Cartwright got their start under the expert tutelage of Blackie Sherrod at the Fort-Worth Press in the Fifties. In his winning account of that era, Texas Literary Outlaws, Steven L. Davis describes Shrake’s introduction to the Fort-Worth Press:

When Shrake walked into the Press it was love at first sight: “I looked around at all the people, and the state editor was over there eating a can of sardines at his desk at six o’clock in the morning, and the bowling writer was back there drunk and had set fire to the waste basket, and the one-legged city editor was threatening people with this crutch…All of the sudden I walked into a world I knew I belonged to.”

The Fort-Worth Press wasn’t low budget, it was no budget, but it proved to be a terrific learning ground for Shrake, Jenkins, Cartwright and others. At one point, Shrake wrote about 50,000 words each week. He moved up in the world as a columnist, first at the Dallas Times Herald and then the Dallas Morning News. Later, he followed Jenkins to New York and Sports Illustrated where he was a feature writer in the Sixties and Seventies. He also tried his hand at screenwriting but had his greatest artistic success as a novelist. Strange Peaches is regarded as one of the finest books about Dallas in the Jack Ruby days (Shrake was dating a stripper in Ruby’s club when he shot Lee Harvey Oswald).

“When anybody asks me what Dallas was like during the time of the Kennedy assassination, I always refer them to ‘Strange Peaches,’ ” said Don Graham, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who knows more than a thing or three about Texas literature.

Blessed McGill is also a classic of Texas literature. Shrake co-wrote several autobiographies–with Willie Nelson and Barry Switzer–and is the co-writer of Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, which just so happens to be the best-selling sports book of all-time…Oh, by the way.

(The full interview can be seen here.)

Shrake died last year and was remembered in this touching tribute by Sally Jenkins:

Bud was always looking left — while everyone was staring at the main event, he would notice the things on the sidelines, in the margins. In the Best Sports Stories edition of 1963 you can find a piece he wrote about Arnold Palmer at the Masters, only it wasn’t about Palmer, it was about the ordinary stiffs in his gallery, the members of “Arnie’s Army,” who marched “under a dull aluminum sky” with their binoculars and umbrellas, “Ladies in pink tennis shoes standing on canvas stools. Men in muddy golf shoes with raincoats tied around their waists. Women in big straw hats decorated with golf balls and tees.” Arnie’s Army smelled “like grass, like beer and a freshly mowed lawn, like mustard and damp laundry.”

…His approach toward writing came partly from Bundini Brown, Muhammad Ali’s assistant cornerman, and an amateur philosopher. It was Bundini Brown who would get Ali mentally ready to fight, and who came up with “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee; the hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see.”

Bundini Brown told Bud that only 15 percent of the world was visible, the remaining 85 percent was dark matter and energy, and contained in that matter was “all the knowledge of all the stories that ever happened.” The molecules of words were just floating out there, captured in the ether, and if you attuned your mind properly, the words would just flow into you. Bud believed that, but he also believed what Harvey Penick said to him: “Life consists of a lot of minor annoyances and a few matters of real consequence.”

Bud took other writing advice from Mark Twain, who said, “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug.” And from Rudyard Kipling, who insisted that to write meant being patiently ruled by the subconscious: “You wait, you listen, you obey.”