Joe Paterno: A Legend After the Fall

Paul Smith - View From the Midwest

Tuesday, 07 February 2012 11:17

Chesterton, Ind. -- He was a stranger in a strange town, seemingly as out of place as a humanities professor in a gym full of 250-pound grunts finding new ways to add outrageous muscle to their finely tuned Herculean frames.

It was a searing hot late July afternoon in Chicago some twenty years ago. Unremarkable in most respects. For 99% of the sporting community, the topics of conversation were two: Cubs and White Sox.

While the visiting media hordes picked the brains of Michigan's Lloyd Carr, John Cooper of Ohio State, Wisconsin's venerable Barry Alvarez and slow talking, down-home Hayden Fry of Iowa, this professorial figure stood off on the side, almost unnoticed, away from the thickets of Big Ten alumni wearing Scarlet and Gray, Maize and Blue, Spartan Green...

For most, despite the fact that 13 months from then, Penn State would be a major player in what arguably was America's most visible conference, Joseph Vincent Paterno might as well have been Penn State's sports information director for all the attention he was attracting.

But when one individual mentioned a mutual friend in introducing himself to Paterno, it was like a reunion of lifelong friends.

For ninety minutes, Joe Paterno poured forth his feelings about his school's decision to join the Big Ten, his relationship with other schools, the media, his then-42 year affiliation with Penn State University, its academics, its uniqueness on the college landscape.

Joe Paterno. An American original. It was an image not even a social earthquake that rocked the gorgeous, always-welcoming campus tucked away in the Allegheny Mountains could change for me.

One of his most trusted longterm staffers, Jerry Sandusky, needs little introduction here. Because of an apparently acquired behaviorial disease, pedophilia, he had been discovered allegedly having inappropriate sexual contact with campers at his own facility, one designed to steer kids away from troubling social and family environments.

It is not a story that needs retold here, because daily papers and local electronic media from Eastport to East L.A. and told the tale in full. And somehow, particularly outside the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, some of the profession's cockroach element went on a feeding-frenzy connect-the-dots indictment of Joe Paterno. He absolutely had to know.

Always ready on the front lines, accusatory announcers like Mike Francesa at New York's WFAN, print media from everywhere were ready to take 61 years of the very embodiment of Christian ethics and hurl it into the Hudson River, LaBrea Tar Pits or the Great Lake of your choice.

Joe Paterno, tragic figure, nearly 86, ending a brilliant run of human service, illustrating how utterly exhilarating and rewarding running a squeaky-clean college football program could be, fired by a bunch of c.y.a. suits over the phone, no less.

May God have mercy on their souls. There are enough pathetic, sad figures in this tragedy to cast a Shakespearean epic.

The Joe Paterno I knew -- not well, I hasten to add, but through my own contacts and following him from a distance over much of his virtually pristine career -- was, by his routinely honest, forthright and exemplary presence on the college sports scene for over half a century...a sitting target.

These same media, who take great joy in reporting the personal impurities that bedevil the Roman Catholic Church of the 21st century, revel in the American tragedy that has enshrouded the gorgeous community of State College, Pa.

In doing their best imitation of talking hyenas, Dan Bernstein and Terry Boers of Chicago's WSCR-AM, "The Score" seemed to take great delight in ripping into Paterno, Penn State. The Chicago Tribune's usually-witty Steve Rosenbloom took time out from sanity to twit Paterno, attaching lowlights of the past two months to what he called Paterno's "legacy."

Pick your city. Pennsylvania wasn't immune. There are plenty of enemies within who eagerly awaited the chance to take down a legend.

When I heard of Joe Paterno's passing Sunday morning, I touched base with that mutual friend I'd mentioned to him that Thursday afternoon in Chicago 20 years ago. And I'm not ashamed to say, as I listened to the sparse Sunday morning accounts, each of which contained the obligatory overplay of Paterno's role in not reporting what he had allegedly learned in a more timely manner, my eyes welled with tears.

It's a moral compass that has been listing out of control ever since human stinkbombs like Hugh Hefner, may he roast in hell, politically-correct anti-Judaeo-Christian educators and a cast of thousands of other social miscreants steered us toward the edge of the cliff.

And college athletics loses a conscience. The media? They lost theirs a generation ago.

Sad beyond words. Matt Millen, who played on some of Penn State's -- and college football's -- greatest teams, had to battle his emotions each and every time he discussed his college mentor's role in his life. Said he died of "a broken heart." Same with Franco Harris, Lydell Mitchell, and scores of others.

For anybody with worthwhile perspective, it is an unassailable fact we've lost one of the great moral voices on the American horizon.

Joe, thank you. You're up there in the Happiest Valley now. Bask in the glory of your life on earth. We won't see your likeness any time soon.

Rest in peace. And again, thanks for the memories and gifts that will keep on giving.

About Paul Smith

Paul Smith covers the Big Ten, Notre Dame and the rest of the national college football scene with his View From the Midwest.

About Paul Smith

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