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Some time ago, Joseph Vincent Paterno transitioned from man into myth. It is a process that has been repeated over and over since time began, a great public figure becomes heroic. We are so hungry for heroes. Bob Dylan once complained in song, “I’ve got nothing to look up to.”
We crave perfection in our heroes, even if we have to invent it. The ancient Greeks tended to make their heroes gods and place them on Mount Olympus. In this part of the country, we turned Paterno from flesh and blood into a bloodless statue and Mount Olympus became Penn State.
We can’t be bothered by complexities. People are either good or bad. When confronted with the complexity of our heroes, we take sides. We idolize them or castigate them as phonies. We can’t understand a Frank Sinatra, so generous to some and a bully to others, or a Thomas Jefferson, who could write so eloquently about our inalienable rights while owning slaves. We never entertain the idea that a person is a combination of the good and the bad. So it is with Paterno, “St. Joe” to many, a total fraud to his detractors.
The thing about heroes is they can never live up to their image. For the last 46 years as the iconic head coach of Penn State, it seemed “JoePa” would evade the usual fate of heroes. Yes, he has his critics, who said he is brusque and arrogant at times. His players began to look like the players at all the other big-time colleges with occasional brushes with the law. His teams no longer win national championships.
Football has passed him by, some said. He is too old to effectively recruit big-time athletes, but each year would pass and Paterno would stubbornly resist the calls to retire. After all, he is Joe Paterno. He is Penn State. He not only built great football teams; he built libraries. Hell, they even named a flavor of ice cream for him. Joe Paterno would leave on his own terms.
When you live in Happy Valley as a demi-god, you begin to believe Happy Valley is the world. But Happy Valley isn’t the world. It is an insular place where it is easy to believe in myths. At some point Joe Paterno began to believe in his own myth. And this past week, we saw that myth shattered.
My initial reaction to the child-abuse scandal that has ended his storied coaching career was if it were true that he had not acted aggressively in the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal, then he would have to go. But I also felt and still do that a lifetime of good works had earned him the right to be heard. I want to hear Joe’s side.
Why had he believed that by passing the report on to the athletic director he had done all he could to rid the campus of Sandusky? Why hadn’t he followed up? Perhaps even more importantly, had he known about Sandusky’s alleged predatory activities as early as 1998? Had he forced Sandusky to retire the following year at age 55 when Sandusky had been assumed to be his apparent heir? And why hadn’t Sandusky been offered any other head coaching jobs? Had Paterno gotten him to agree to a deal to keep Sandusky out of prison while protecting Penn State’s pristine reputation?
Early last week, through his son Scott, Paterno let it be known he would not only hold his scheduled press conference, but answer any and all questions surrounding his involvement in the scandal. That was when we found out Paterno was no longer all powerful. Penn State president Graham Spanier pulled the plug on the conference. Penn State was ready to cut its losses. Paterno’s usefulness to the university — he is 84 years old and now carries the whiff of scandal — was through.
Paterno couldn’t accept he no longer called his own shots. He clung to his own myth. He announced, in a self-serving statement, he would retire at the end of the season. He even appeared on the practice field preparing for the next game against Nebraska,. The proud lion thought he was about to weather his biggest storm. The board of trustees ended the myth of Paterno’s invincibility. Joe Paterno is a man after all, not a myth. Happy Valley is not Mount Olympus, but a college town. And they can always change the name of “Peachy Paterno” ice cream to the name of the next head coach.
We can always hope something good comes out of this, that out of this wreckage we will find important lessons, we will come up with a way to better protect our children, we will find a way to treat sex offenders who may sometimes operate in the guise of friend or family member, that institutions will do the right thing and the right thing is not thinking about its own image first and foremost.
You don’t have to be an apologist to hope, at some point, Paterno gets a chance to tell his side. Not to excuse his actions, but to provide insight into why a man above reproach failed to do the right thing when it counted most. We rightly reserve our deepest compassion for the victims, but I hope in our hearts we find a little compassion for Paterno. Compassion isn’t a finite thing.
If Paterno had lived in the time of the ancient Greeks, Sophocles would have had himself a helluva another tragedy to write. SPR
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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