PITTSBURGH, September 2, 2005:
A man born within two months of Joe Paterno still coaches. Like Paterno, this man knows football. He walks into the office one summer morning, a day when few others bother thinking about football and boots up his personal computer. Electronics fire, a screen flashes. John Gagliardi calls this "a marvel," only somewhat because it is, but mostly because he thrives on perpetual astonishment, the antidote to his age.
Gagliardi lives in Collegeville, Minn., where he coaches the Division III football team at Saint John's University and orders his players to call him "John." He has done this for 53 years, without a losing season since 1967. With 421 career victories, he's the winningest coach in college football history, counting those at all levels, and now, he's also one of the oldest.
The average American lives to 77, and Gagliardi, like Paterno, is 78.
So what's a man to do when he turns 78?
Just to get there, still with a career, still with a passion, at a time when most American males are already buried -- my goodness, Gagliardi gasps.
Seventy-eight refuses an easy definition, because men die at 78 and retire at 78 and fall in love at 78. But boil it down -- stick such an age on a man with a job -- and 78, above all, is undefined and unfair.
We don't know what to do with 78. Reach that age, and sometimes it inspires respect, sometimes it delivers scorn. Right or wrong, 78 shades everything -- every action, every trait.
Joe Paterno is Penn State's football coach, as he has been for 40 years. He has won two national championships and fathered five children and coached thousands of athletes, but his title, for the 2005 season, is this: "the 78-year-old football coach."
He is 78 and ornery: Paterno spits back at a question and says, accusingly: "You want to make me an old man. I don't feel like an old man."
He is 78 and stubborn: "If I could coach 10 more years, I'd coach 10 more years."
He is 78 and vulnerable: "I have friends who are dying. That starts to take away your ability, at my age, just to concentrate on football."
Here, age is the one thing that counts, but it counts differently for everybody. Gagliardi's computer finishes booting up, and within seconds, he's launched an Internet browser. He scrolls through his list of favorite Web sites, commenting on the clutter.
Finally, he finds a Web site dedicated to college football statistics. A database. He calls up a list of college football's most experienced coaches. He's simply seeking some numbers to back up his point. Thousands and thousands of coaches, Gagliardi says, have tried coaching college football. Fewer than 25 individuals have lasted more than 30 years. Usually, such coaches require a tolerable personality, contentment with their lifestyle and a winning percentage above .700. They also need the blessing of age.
"The biggest marvel of all is the fact that all these people want to get rid of Joe Paterno," Gagliardi says. "People say the game has passed him by. Those who have no imagination use that refrain. But they never say that about all the guys who get fired at 30 or 40. [Paterno] won for so long -- my God, he didn't suddenly get any dumber.
"Of course, that's my greatest fear; that's every coach's fear. At some point, that roadblock of losing hits everybody. Coaching is precarious. The more you do, the more you're expected to do. And that keeps happening, until you're expected to do the impossible. Now, after all this time, people expect the impossible of Joe Paterno."
A MAN BORN within one month of Joe Paterno still works too hard, sometimes 80 hours in a week. Like Paterno, this man knows aging, but he acknowledges, "I don't think I'm as good a football coach." Dr. Robert N. Butler is the CEO of the International Longevity Center, which researches the aging population. That's what Butler always has done -- albeit through different outlets. He studied gerontology, worked as a physician and taught classes. When he wrote a book designed to stimulate -- and somehow reinvent -- society's perception of old age, he won a Pulitzer Prize. The difference now? Butler, too, is 78.
Butler calls it a revolution, the way aging has changed in America. "Think about it," he says. "Something extraordinary has happened in the last century. The average life span grew by 30 years. It was 47 in 1900, and then it was 77 at the end of the century, That was greater than was gained in the previous 5,000 years of human history! This was unheard of!"
So now, the aging population soars -- according to the latest U.S. statistics, 6 percent of Americans are 75 or older -- and the increase incites more debate than consensus. Revolutions always do. Some fear age. Some revere age.
"It works two ways," Butler says. "When old people were rarer, it was far easier to venerate them. Now, I think, it's easier to see them as a burden."
During this time, culture swapped muscle power for brainpower. Fewer people spend their careers drilling or laboring or sweating; instead, many hold jobs where age never might interfere, so long as health and passion are maintained. By extension, Butler guesses that in the next generation more and more Americans will work into their later years, even their late 70s. Retirement won't be a question of when, it will be a question of why. And Paterno, retrospectively, might look like a trailblazer.
Why, Paterno frequently wonders, should he retire when he still loves his job? He still hasn't thought of a reason. Since his earliest teenage years, he has devoted almost every weekend of every autumn to football. The sport roots his existence. Critics see the last half-decade at Penn State -- an unprecedented stretch of four losing seasons -- as testimony to a coach who has lost his ability, undone by static methods and years of power. Paterno sees it differently. For him, the last half-decade is a prelude to his final coaching challenge.
At times, this juxtaposition lends him a defiant look. He snorts at questions about his age. He says: "I'm not interested in what you think of me ... To think you know all of a sudden more than I do about how to run a football program, that makes no sense to me." A disconnect, largely borne by his age, separates Paterno from the media members who cover him, the fans who follow him, even some of the Penn State administrators who work with him.
Seventy-eight, for some, is too old. It's a limit. Seventy-eight, for Paterno, is a green light, so long as the brainpower still roars.
"I agree with him," Butler says. "There is no reason to despair. We should celebrate the human achievement.
"Besides, you can only spend so much time on a golf course."
A MAN BORN within nine months of Joe Paterno still wears a robe. Like Paterno, this man knows national fame, though that is where the common threads mostly end. In 1953, Hugh Hefner set off on his own revolution, stretching America's boundaries -- a direct affront to his Puritan upbringing -- by establishing Playboy magazine in 1953. He's stretched these boundaries so convincingly that now, Hefner's long-standing sexual candor receives more celebration than criticism.
Hefner proves it. A man this age can turn into almost anything, given enough luck and health and Viagra. Somebody born in 1926, like Paterno and Hefner, can live by doing what they love, be it football or women. Fidel Castro, born in 1926, rules a country. Marilyn Monroe, born in 1926, died too young. Zig Ziglar, born in 1926, travels the country delivering 100 mph motivational speeches, during which he says, "I'm not going to give up, let up or shut up until I'm taken up." Alan Greenspan, born in 1926, serves as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve; his words hold so much power that he declines all interviews. The market fluctuates every time he speaks.
"The big surprise for me is that age is just a number," Hefner says. "It's a number without meaning. A person who dies at 40 -- through cancer, a car accident, what have you -- how old is that person, really, at 38? He's near the end of his life, whether he knows it or not. And what about a person who dies at 100? How old is that person, really, at 78?"
Limitless fantasy surrounds Hefner. Though Hefner traces his vitality to a combination of work and play, most of the work at Playboy now belongs to his daughter, Christy, named CEO in 1988. That leaves Hefner with time to play. During his lifetime, he has been with 1,000 sexual partners. He lives in a mansion where beautiful women purr for his attention, and because of his shamelessly hedonistic image, Playboy has recently spawned a video game, a reality show and a merchandise line.
"In many ways, I'm younger than I was 20 years ago," Hefner says. When Hefner's 10-year marriage ended in 1998, he slid into a brief depression. "But then," he says, "I discovered that another generation of women had grown up and was waiting for me to come out and play.
"I always say now that I'm in my blonde years. Because since the end of my marriage, all of my girlfriends have been blonde."
So maybe this is old age, redefined. Paterno, unlike Hefner, values traditionalism and conservatism, and, in most ways, they seem like magnetic opposites, pushing against one another. Yet, in the manner that they share a birth year, they also share a mission. They both loathe the same phrase -- "too old." They both fight it.
For Paterno, a legacy is at stake. Ignoring "too old" will either burnish his image or tarnish it. History is rife with examples of old age's tragic potential, because happy and ending don't always walk in step. Penn State missed bowl games only four times in Paterno's first 34 seasons. The Nittany Lions, though, have missed four bowls in the past five seasons, and as a result, the failure highlights the one encumbrance Paterno never faced before -- his age.
At 78, Paterno has assumed an oversized persona of classic literature: that of a leader insistent on following his convictions. That age doesn't matter. That he ought to coach for as long as he feels healthy. And in this way, he shares a bond with the others of his generation who are still working, pushing the boundaries of their age and, sometimes, feeling the boundaries push back.
Age can stand like a barrier. It can fall like a barrier broken.
How does it fall? Says Hefner, "You stay in touch with the boy who dreamed impossible dreams."
By Chico Harlan, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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