He wasn’t anything to look at, when you stop and think about it. The dark hair, the tie and white shirt and brown khaki pants, white socks, blue jacket and field turf shoes and glasses so thick even Mr. Magoo would have a hard time wearing. Let’s not forget that thick Brooklyn accent too. Joseph Vincent Paterno wasn’t flashy. He tried to follow the Golden Rule to the letter in life and in a football world driven by money and greed.
Recently, while many of us were in church, the sports world learned of his passing away at State College, Penn., today from the cancer that had plagued him earlier this year and after the Big 10 school fired him for the alleged transgressions of former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky in November. Paterno was 85 years old and had just tied former Grambling coach Eddie Robinson for all time wins in college football at 409. He lasted 46 seasons, when teams changed coaches, offenses and sometimes even conferences like a supermodel changes dresses. Joe Pa stayed the course. While most teams had logos on their helmets and names on the jerseys, he chose to be as basic and vanilla as possible. Some chided him for being behind the curve, so to speak, but in the end, he always came out on top. Mount Nittany Medical Center said in a statement that Paterno died at 9:25 a.m. of ”metastatic small cell carcinoma of the lung.” Metastatic indicates an illness that has spread from one part of the body to an unrelated area.
Most coaches would look the other way when a player got into trouble. Paterno was not the case. In one case, when one of his players got into an off-campus altercation, he made the entire team clean up Beaver Stadium on the Penn State campus the Sunday morning after a game. He was no nonsense, but he was also a father figure to not only players but students. He was even accessible to those who wanted to ask for advice or just talk about football and was listed in the State College phone book, a rarity for a person in the public eye. Paterno came on board at Happy Valley in a time when America was dealing with the loss of a president in John Kennedy, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. He was candid, he was honest when speaking to the media and he put on no airs. In his final days, that wide-eyed optimist and aw-shucks success story was gone. The Sandusky scandal had sapped what no opponent ever could.
He sat earlier this month at his kitchen table with, not coincidentally, Sally Jenkins, the Washington Post columnist and Dan Jenkins’ daughter, for his last public words. According to Jenkins, Paterno’s breath was heavy. He sipped on a soda. “His voice sounded like wind blowing across a field of winter stalks, rattling the husks,” Jenkins wrote. He tried to explain how he hadn’t done more to stop Sandusky, how he hadn’t followed up thoroughly, how he hadn’t pressed university administrators for answers.
Paterno said that “I didn’t exactly know how to handle it (the scandal)… 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.” He came from Brown University and had no intention of coaching when he got out of college, he said in a 2007 interview at Penn State’s Beaver Stadium before being inducted into college football’s Hall of Fame. ”Come to this hick town? From Brooklyn?” In his tenure, Paterno’s teams were never under the eye of the NCAA, were never on probation for anything, and that says something about him as a person. While most programs and coaches choose to cut corners and break small rules before breaking bigger ones, Paterno was well above board. Joseph Vincent Paterno didn’t just teach football. He didn’t just teach the x’s and o’s of the game. He taught life lessons that many of his players and those Penn State students that didn’t play football follow to this day.
New Penn State football coach Bill O’Brien, hired earlier this month from the New England Patriots, offered his condolences. ”The Penn State Football program is one of college football’s iconic programs because it was led by an icon in the coaching profession in Joe Paterno,” O’Brien said in a statement. ”There are no words to express my respect for him as a man and as a coach. To be following in his footsteps at Penn State is an honor. Our families, our football program, our university and all of college football have suffered a great loss, and we will be eternally grateful for Coach Paterno’s immeasurable contributions.”
Joe Paterno was a fit for Happy Valley, like ham and eggs. Peanut butter and jelly. Ice cream and cake. You get the picture. He rose above his critics. He was the tough but loveable grandfather you would leave the kids with, a Christ-like figure trying to turn over the tables of the money changers in a world of college football that had gotten too big for its own good. Some loved him. Some despised him. But they all respected him. He did have a sense of humor. It was there but you had to find it. While the scandal that hangs over the Penn State program like the sword of Damocles, Happy Valley, State College, Pennsylvania and the football world mourns his passing. God has called a saint on Earth to coach a football team that is greater than even the one he coached on Earth.