A sad ending for Joe

I never met Joe Paterno or particularly cared that much about him as a football coach, but his death this weekend was particularly sad. Like anyone who watches college football -- and I watch a lot of college football -- I knew who Joe Paterno was and tended to agree with my husband that he seemed a little old to be coaching. Okay, a lot old. He was older than my grandfather when he died and he was trying to stay in touch with a group of college students (jocks) and keep them in line while planning winning football strategies. It seemed like a tough task for a much younger man, but in the end it wasn't his players that caused trouble, it was one of his fellow coaches. When the allegations came to light last fall about his assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, I was struck by how lost Paterno looked trying to process it. I imagined the great gulf between how my generation views the world and reacts to situations and how my grandfather would have reacted. I understood how he might have failed to make the right decision and produce the amount of rage against Sandusky that we would have preferred. Unlike those of us raised on the horrors that are now so commonplace, he had trouble imagining that his coworker and friend could be a monster. Any of us would have some trouble with that idea. Penn State, where a lot of people apparently underreacted to the allegations, overreacted when it came to Paterno's role. The governing body of the college fired him, not in a decent conversation in someone's office with the doors closed, but by phone. They began trying to erase what had happened, as though by giving up the good they could get rid of the bad. Photos of Paterno after he was dismissed showed a man who appeared to have aged a decade in a few short hours. A much beloved coach lost one of the things he really loved getting up for each day and had to sit powerless and watch as his legacy not only came to an end but was tarnished with ugliness of the worst sort. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer, it should come as no real surprise that he didn't have the will to fight it. While many cancers are now treatable and beatable, doing so requires physical and mental strength and determination that he no longer had. While his family still surrounded him with love, the game he loved was lost to him and his place in history was blurred and unclear. I hope the earthly powers that be will forgive his shortcomings and take no further action to erase his memory from the college program where he was so important for so long. Whatever failure he may have had has already been forgiven by the one who took away his pain. RIP Joe Paterno.