Until last November, one of the undisputed highlights of my career was getting the opportunity to sit next to Joe Paterno at the annual Big Ten media days in Chicago and watch him hold court. I was close enough that I could try to peer those impossibly-thick glasses and, on more than one occasion, the thought crossed my mind that I might one day see them at a place like the Smithsonian. Here was an American icon, sitting in the seat next to me. If I wanted, I could reach out, tug on his sportcoat and grab his attention. I never did, but I did speak up at the end of one session to ask him what he remembered about my favorite college football game of all time — the snowy matchup between Penn State and Notre Dame in 1992.
“At my age, you don’t remember much from 20 years ago,” Paterno said in a quiet Brooklyn accent as recognizable as his glasses.
Whether his memory was truly failing him or he was simply looking for a laugh-inducing way to avoid being drawn into another long story as lunch beckoned is up for debate. His lucidity was always a topic for referendum over the final decade of his life, first after tough losses and then over moral matters much more important and grave.
But any shame I might have felt over testing an octogenarian’s sense of recall was quickly erased by what had just happened. I had asked Joe Paterno — the same paragon who strolled the sidelines on every fall Saturday of my youth — a question. And, no matter how brief the reply, he had answered it. I felt like I was the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting.
In over fifteen years of writing about sports, I’ve only been hit with that feeling of awe on a couple of occasions. The first was when I dialed John Wooden’s phone number out in California and the old coach answered it to field a question about an old coaching acquaintance in the suburbs of Kansas City.
The second was with JoePa.
Why did I get that feeling with the two old coaches and not, say, after going from Alex Rodriguez’s locker to Derek Jeter’s press conference at a World Series game? The key, of course, lies with longevity and position. A-Rod and Jeter are stage players that have been introduced within my lifetime and the entirety of their careers will play out during my lifetime. In addition, they are but members of the awe-inspiring institution and their usefulness as athletic entities comes with an expiration date. No one was fired up to see Joe DiMaggio hawking coffee machines in the ’70s.
But with Wooden and Paterno, they were the institution. They were a font of knowledge that only grew with age and a tie from one generation to the next. They were American history, sure, but also part of our personal history. JoePa was a way to measure the time it took to go from that game against in Notre Dame in 1992 — when my grandmother made us bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches that we nervously set aside until Rick Mirer found Reggie Brooks for that two-point conversion — and a routine newspaper assignment in the early days of my sportswriting career.
If that last paragraph sounds ridiculously schmaltzy now, it’s because it was. Any notion of Paterno as the incorruptible figurehead disappeared when his decade-long vow of silence in the horrific Jerry Sandusky case was brought to light this past fall. As the details began to unravel, the Paterno I saw during that Big Ten media session started to be erased in my mind. In its place, an embattled man in his mid-80s took up residence, made all the smaller through controversy, an unceremonial firing and a deadly disease.
For Paterno, staying silent meant that we’d never get to see his mortality in a more flattering light. Until he died, Wooden was the man who mourned the loss of his longtime wife on a daily basis, ate breakfast at the same diner everyday and was eager to take calls from unknown reporters eager to seek a good word about a former coaching colleague. Those qualities — once used to tout and build him up as the “Wizard of Westwood” — were used in a reverse manner to make him just a man.
Today, on the day of his death, Paterno is getting none of that treatment, nor does he deserve it. The first paragraph of his obituary in the New York Times mentions the scandal of the past few months and takes the tack of most rememberances in attempting to weigh the good with the bad.
Some sendoffs, of course, are much less forgiving.
Meanwhile, I’m left to consider what that life experience of coming in close contact with Paterno really means to me now. I can’t consider a hardline stance as Paterno is far from the first or last person to undergo a moral failing when faced with the realities of an unspeakable act like child molestation. Plus, any judgment is unnecessary in the wake of his death because he’s now facing the only judgment that really matters.
At the same time, I can’t continue to cherish it. I can’t tell my children about it while using the same tone that I used to describe the story it to my grandmother.
So what will I take from that short time with Paterno? Perhaps it will change over the years, but for now I feel it’s become much more of a life lesson than I ever thought it might. Joe Paterno became a giant by presenting himself as a regular man, someone who valued unimpeachable values like education, integrity and hard work.
But as an adoring press and public took that handoff and ran with it for almost half a century, we lost sight of the fact that plenty of shortcomings come with being human. Despite being placed atop those pillars of virtue, Joe Paterno never stopped being a man that was faced with the same struggles and issues that we all do. His infallibility was never guaranteed, nor should we have participated in implying it.
I should have seen it then.
I definitely see it now.
