JOEPA’S MIXED LEGACY
JOE PATERNO ACHIEVED GREATNESS, BUT LIFE STORY WILL BE STAINED
Joe Paterno, Pennsylvania’s most recognizable citizen and a Hall of Fame football coach whose golden resumé was tarnished by a child sex- abuse scandal that beclouded his final days, has died at 85.
His death, 2 ½ months after he was diagnosed with lung cancer, came as an eerie fulfilment to a prophecy he had made often in the final decades of nearly a half- century as Pennsylvania State University’s head coach. When Alabama’s Bear Bryant succumbed to a heart attack in 1983, just 28 days after his 1982 retirement, a shaken Paterno absorbed the lesson.
“What else would I do?” he responded whenever the subject of retirement arose. “I don’t want to die. Football keeps me alive.”
In what undoubtedly will be a disconcerting sight for many Penn Staters who knew no other coach, this autumn will be the first since 1950 without Paterno on the Nittany Lions’ sideline.
The length of his tenure and the successes that filled it might never again be equalled in a col-lege-football world increasingly marked by a headlong rush for financial gain, a trend Paterno both decried and mastered.
His Penn State teams won a record 409 games, 24 bowls, two national championships, and a following so large and loyal that in his last seasons the football program regularly produced annual profits exceeding $ 50 million.
An Ivy League graduate who made his team’s motto “Success with honor,” he graduated an astounding percentage of players, constantly stressed the role of academics in the college athletic experience, operated a program that was never punished by the NCAA, and donated a considerable portion of his relatively modest salary to Penn State’s library.
But a career notable for its integrity and tranquillity ended suddenly in an almost unimaginable scandal.
Like a play whose three cheery, uplifting acts conclude with a bombshell horror just before the curtain falls, Paterno’s noteworthy tenure ended amid accusations that he did too little to stop a former colleague from surrounding himself with and — if the sordid accusations are true — abusing boys.
In his final days, the university that he helped transform more than any other individual into a research institution that rivals the best of the nation’s state schools was beset by perhaps the gravest crisis in its 156- year history.
On Nov. 9, 2011, just four days after the arrest of his longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky on child- molestation charges touched off a storm of criticism of Happy Valley, the university’s board of trustees fired Paterno.
Though he had been accused of no crime, the coach was widely condemned by those convinced he had somehow ignored or, worse, covered up crimes against children in order to preserve his program.
But in grand jury testimony and in a Washington Post interview published a week before his death, Paterno insisted he had been unaware of Sandusky’s alleged behaviour until 2002. And at that time, as university guidelines required, he notified his superiors.
For those who had been urging the octogenarian coach to step aside and permit an orderly transition — a group that, at least as far back as 2004, included Penn State’s top administrators — the incidents surrounding his dismissal confirmed their worst fears: Paterno had lost control of the program.
In the immediate aftermath of the charges against Sandusky, Paterno seemed not to grasp the seriousness of the matter, issuing a statement that appeared to ignore the victims and then leading “We are ... Penn State” cheers on the lawn of his home, where a crowd had gathered.
His many supporters, meanwhile, saw it all differently. They blamed the trustees. They wondered how a coach who had done so much for the school could have been treated so callously, so hastily, and so harshly, especially since he had already offered to step down at the end of the 2011 season.
The night of the firing, thousands of Penn State students took to the streets of State College to protest the decision. Their reaction and the shock, dismay, and round- the- clock media coverage the scandal had generated was stark evidence of the prominence of Paterno, not just in his adopted state but throughout the nation.
With his death, the lingering questions about what he knew, when he knew it, and how he might have acted differently likely will remain unanswered.