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• Video: Paterno at 2011 Big Ten Media Days; fans gather at Paterno statue at Nebraska-Penn State game
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Football coach. Teacher. Human being.
Joe Paterno wore all of those hats to extremes. That's how I'll remember him.
Mostly, what I'll remember is how Paterno, even in the darkest days of his career, even in death, was still teaching.
Legacies are in the eye of the beholder. All any man or woman can do at the end is lay out his or her life's work — the facts — and let the members of the jury render their judgment.
Paterno died Sunday morning, and already there was the rush to capture his legacy. Put the man in perspective. There appear to be three groups.
There are the Paterno supporters. The former players, the assistants, the fans of Penn State and staunch fans of Paterno. To them, Joe will always be solid gold. A great man who made an error in judgment.
Then there are those who say they can not look at Paterno the same way again because of his part in the sordid Jerry Sandusky story. Joe looked the other way. He allowed countless more young men to be victims of sexual abuse. They see something far less than greatness in that.
There is also a group that sees Paterno as both. Moreover, a complicated man who did great things and has that really horrible stain on his record.
Glen Mason, the former Minnesota and Kansas football coach, once said of Woody Hayes' controversial exit: "It's a chapter in the book. It's not the entire book."
That's how I feel about Paterno.
He was both saint and sinner. He impacted young men's lives, both in positive and negative ways. He was a brilliant leader and football coach, then turned out to be a rather clueless, or devious, CEO. He was a man of culture and the classics, and yet in the end said he had never heard of "rape and a man," a quote that will go in his life's book, too.
In the end, Paterno was but a mere mortal. Great man. Flawed man. And that goes back to the teacher's greatest lesson. His final lesson.
Paterno was the last emperor. His dismissal in November truly marked the end of an era, and not just one born in the days of Lombardi and Sam Huff, tough guys and basic fundamentals and old-school, mud-caked football.
No, Paterno was not just the Penn State football coach. He was the King of Happy Valley, defacto president of the school, bigger than the governor. Back in the day, when Paterno took the throne in 1966, coaches were like emperors.
Because the game of college football meant so much to communities, the coaches were allowed to collect power and assert said power as they saw fit. As long as they won, they were seen as the face of the school. In some cases, bigger.
Paterno embraced this status, as he did his image as the patron saint. Once in a while, he would let it slip out, like the time he turned down the New England Patriots job because he "couldn't leave college football to Jackie Sherrill and Barry Switzer." Super Joe to the rescue.
That was then. This is now. The emperor is becoming an extinct species in college sports. Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, Roy Williams at North Carolina and Jim Calhoun at Connecticut are big men on campus, but they better keep scandal away. Syracuse's Hall of Famer Jim Boeheim still has a job, but the Bernie Fine story is still being investigated.
The point is, they don't make the emperors, the power brokers in one place for life, like they used to. The tenor and shape of today's media is entirely different, entirely aggressive and less forgiving. And, today's icons, like Urban Meyer and Nick Saban, move around and are less likely to coach into their 60s or 70s. The job has more pressure and double the scrutiny. The cocoons are gone.
That's a good thing. While there can be a comfort in having a larger-than-life legend at the wheel, it's a bad idea.
These are mere mortals. They aren't Gandhi. They aren't curing cancer. They aren't school teachers. They are football coaches. And their popularity is tethered directly to winning football games.
That's it. Paterno has a statue and his name on a library because he won football games.
It's too simplistic to say Paterno was corrupted by power. Why didn't he do more than pass the Sandusky accusation to his superiors? Was it because he was a man from another generation, a more innocent time when scandal was swept under the rug? Or was he protecting his legacy and hoping it would go away?
Either way, the fact that the Sandusky stories took years to come out show that the emperor fortress is a flawed concept for college sports, or anything else.
I had one brush with Paterno. It came the night before Nebraska's game at Penn State in 2002. The school had a cocktail party for the media from Nebraska, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, etc. It was an old-school gesture from Penn State.
And old-school Joe showed up. He had a couple of pops and hung out with the writers. He told a great story about Bear Bryant, and yucked it up about some of the great Penn State-Nebraska games, including one controversial catch.
He was less of an icon that night, and every bit the regular Joe, a hard-working football coach letting down his blue collar the night before a big game.
I'll miss that Joe Paterno. I won't miss the idea of a Joe Paterno. No football coach should have that much power. Coaches should be held accountable.
In his final shame-filled months — or years, that he let this story go untold — Paterno was teaching us that one final lesson. There are no patron saints in college football. Unless they go 14-0.
Contact the writer:
402-444-1025, tom.shatel@owh.com
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Paterno at 2011 Big Ten Media Days
Fans gather at Paterno statue at Nebraska-Penn State game
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