JoePa and Me

First published January 22, 2012

JoePa irritated me for years. He just hung on long past his time and that got under my skin. Couldn't he see that his day had passed and his role was to gracefully retire and allow a fresh outlook and youthful vibrancy to take over Penn State football? Not that it kept me up at night, but any time I came across an article or reference to Paterno, that little spark of indignation popped into my psyche. Since the aging coach and PSU football are matters on the periphery of my radar and hardly appear on my top 100 things that matter in the world, the question arises as to why the subject kindled even a mere wisp of passion. I suspect that with my own advancing age I see, around the corner, my own reluctance to release affairs in my purvey to the better care of others. Admittedly, even at its relatively low rung on my own passion hierarchy the Penn State football program, a multimillion dollar enterprise involving hundreds of people, is exponentially larger than anything entrusted to my judgment and actions. 

           Still and all, to the egocentric such levels of scale are negligible and the leap is accomplished quite easily. So I suspect my emotions were due to my own fear and resentment of aging more than actual anger at Joe. Coach Paterno was in fact a hero of a hero of my own. A former Penn State quarterback who played under Paterno was my high school football coach and biology teacher, two realms that, outside of Kathy Klinepeter, occupied much of my passion back in the day. This fellow, Harry (Skip) Finkelston, taught me more about self discipline and ignited my ambitions more than anyone previously in my adolescent life. Whatever I accomplished academically (my athletic talents showed distinctly less promise) could never have occurred without his influence. Perhaps this single degree of separation raises Joe Paterno's fate to an importance level it would not otherwise achieve. At least that proximity makes me, in the end, look upon JoePa with more than a little compassion.

         JoePa's sin was one, or perhaps two, of omission. Most glaringly he failed to act beyond a meager dump into the hands of others, a horrendous problem on his own staff. His excuse was that he was old-school. Such perversions didn't occur or weren't spoken of in his day. This rationale brings to mind the Iraqi president's ("Imadinnerjacket" Maureen Dowd calls him - certainly closer than I will come to the real spelling, and the prospect of looking it up requires more ambition than I can muster at the moment) assertion that there are no gays in his country. One who is that unaware of reality has no business running a large college football program let alone an entire country. This raises Paterno's second error of omission: his failure to release the reins well after the time when someone else could have steered better. How quickly events move! [Another story  broke in the news as I was writing this] Paterno's lame excuse has already been superseded in outrageousness by the luxury cruise liner captain who prematurely abandoned his ship, run aground and capsized by his egotistical incompetence, and explained to questioners that he accidentally fell into a lifeboat. But I am seriously digressing. 

         In my final reckoning JoePa's errors are human and understandable. In his situation would I have done better with Mike McQueary sitting at my kitchen table relating a horrific tale? Yes, Paterno failed, but others failed even worse. They all share the responsibility for even more children being sodomized, and that issue is hard to overstate and even harder to rationalize. So, I won't try to. But at least allow me my sympathy toward a fellow who rates higher in my judgment than his ignominious end warrants to many. If we are looking to place blame, and our society always does, then let's focus our attentions on Jerry Sandusky whose sins of commission devastated so many lives and brought about the entire mess. And I'll bet there's a therapeutic counselor somewhere who, if given access to Sandusky's motivations, would find in his or her own heart a measure of sympathy for him. Life is complicated.