For the last three months, the subject of Joe Paterno has been rivaling the GOP primary soap opera for media attention. The upshot, alas, is that Paterno’s legacy will forever include an ugly footnote. Only instead of an asterisk, it will be the imprint left by a societal Bigfoot.
Any involvement, any involvement at all, in a child sex-abuse scandal will do it. We all get it. There is no innocence or guilt with the despicable and disturbing. There is only guilt or more guilt.
For the record, the old guy who died on Sunday at 85 deserved better. I’ll get back to that.
First, full disclosure. I’m a Penn State alum. That doesn’t make me an apologist or moral maverick, but it does allow additional perspective. I also covered Paterno and had a few English-major-to-English-major encounters back in the day on the Penn State campus. Small talk in the lobby of State College’s only movie theater, Twelve Trees, or after a presentation in an arts and letters lecture hall. The topic was never about football. It was about the merits of the movie or the lecturer or Vietnam. There were other venues for Nittany Lionization.
That was then; this is not.
Final “JoePa” Encounter
The last time I caught up with Paterno was before last year’s Outback Bowl that PSU lost to Florida. It was the bowl pre-game press conference, which is really a pro forma exercise in dueling clichés and gratuitous compliments with decent buffets. Frankly, anything to inject a dynamic other than how much each coach respects his counterpart is welcome. I stepped up and took one for the team.
I brought my “JoePa” mask that a Pennsylvania buddy sent me years ago. I waited for the proper moment, when everybody was out of questions about alternating quarterbacks, “scheming” for the opposition, winning the “battles in the trenches” and limiting turnovers. Etc. Etc.
I sprang. I said something to this effect: “After all these years and all these wins, Coach, you’ve now assumed this icon-like status among football fans. So much so, that even your image, your very visage–on a mask–is a marketable commodity in Pennsylvania, not just on campus. My question is what’s it like to look around and see all these complete strangers (all the while reaching for my “JoePa” mask and putting it on) with your face?”
Call it a tedium buster or a cheap-laugh grandstand, but it worked. The room cracked up–and Paterno bought some time for his answer.
“Well, I’m no matinee idol, I know that,” he laughed self-deprecatingly. “So, I’m flattered. But you know what, I hope when they see this mask, they also see what I’ve tried to represent through the years.”
We all got it. It was an honest answer that transcended yet another–his 37th–bowl appearance. No one could have imagined the irony that would ensue.
Paterno’s Plan
Paterno was all about the “Grand Experiment.” Proving that you could run a national-championship quality football program without prostituting the university for sham “student athletes.” Higher education goals were never warped. His graduation rates were consistently near 90 per cent and, no, there was no precipitous drop-off when it came to black athletes–unlike most other prominent programs. He didn’t suffer showboats and wouldn’t tolerate boorish acts from players. There were no decals on helmets or names on jerseys underscoring the theme that it really was about the team–not the individual. And no look-at-me choreography for scoring a touchdown. “Look like you’ve been there (end zone) before,” he would explain like some old-school parent.
He was paid less than half of what Nick Saban, Urban Meyer and Les Miles make. He didn’t need it, and the university had better uses for the money. Paterno never went McMansion. Instead, he stayed in the same house–one that would have fit comfortably in Levittown. When he was at his most marketable, Paterno turned down the big money to go to the NFL–specifically the New York Giants, the Pittsburgh Steelers and, especially, the New England Patriots. He wanted to stay where he mattered most–helping mold lives not just helping run a football business.
Paterno personally funded a wing of the Penn State library. That’s not what football coaches do. On his 44-year (head coach) watch, the university’s endowment, sponsored research and academic standing ratcheted up significantly. It’s what happens when a good land-grant university’s reputation gets ginned up nationally for excellence and renown. Those enamored of football success find out what else you have to offer. It might “only” be football, but its national tide lifts all institutional craft. The Paterno halo effect was that encompassing.
Dishonor And Death
Now for the incident that collapsed his world, hastened his death and bludgeoned the Penn State reputation.
We may never know what grad assistant-coach Mike McQueary told Paterno that he saw in that shower stall that day nine years ago. It matters. Literally. We know it was unsettling, but we also know it wasn’t nearly as explicit as McQueary would tell other authority figures–and a grand jury. We don’t know exactly what the (then) 76-year-old Paterno processed from that account of McQueary’s. But he took it to his superiors, the athletics director and the university president, the next day. He would let them make the call to notify the police.
They didn’t and were held legally responsible. He didn’t and was held morally culpable by the trustees who fired him–hours after he had announced that he would be stepping down at the end of a season that had only three regular-season games remaining.
To his credit, Paterno didn’t pull a (Jerry) Sandusky and duck responsibility, even if he was blindsided by the seemingly incomprehensible and shielded from key details. “With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more,” he lamented on the day he tried to announce his retirement.
Of course he did.
Now the rest of us, with the benefit of hindsight, can be more mindful of context. Paterno was fatally blindsided at the intersection of old age, loyalty, confusion and obligation.
Diagnostically speaking, JoePa died of lung cancer. More specifically, he died of the tragic complications.