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Health & Fitness

The Legacy of a Lion?

How will Joe Paterno be remembered, and who is qualified to judge him?

The recent death of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno has generated an onslaught of emotional responses across Pennsylvania and the entire nation. The reaction has been both raw and varied, as people struggle to reconcile the achievements of the iconic coach with the disturbing cloud of the sexual abuse scandal involving former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.

For the record, I did not attend Penn State, and although I never wanted to see them lose, I never really considered myself to be a diehard Penn State football fan. But for me, the appeal of Joe Paterno’s coaching legacy didn’t really have too much to do with the week-to-week product on the field. It was more about this little somewhat curmudgeonly man standing at the center of an institution, week in and week out for nearly five decades.

He was vintage. He was retro. He had been uncool for so long that he became cool again, a walking contradiction in pop culture. When I was born, JoePa had already been the head coach at Penn State for a dozen years. In recent years, the public and media began to speculate when he would step down from coaching, and although many people had their theories on how Paterno’s storied career would end, no one would have predicted that he would have been fired in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal. If you had gone to Vegas a year ago and tried to get a casino to give you odds on the proposition, you would have been dragged out in the desert and left for crazy.

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Public opinion was split on Paterno’s firing before his death; the chasm of opinion has widened considerably in recent days. There is no consensus on how Paterno and his achievements should be properly recognized; no one doubts his record on the field, but some people believe sports is irrelevant if you believe Paterno was culpable for failing to do more in the Sandusky scandal. Others believe he was treated harshly and unfairly, and his firing was inappropriate.

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, and the subject is ripe for speculation because despite everything we know about the Penn State scandal, there is still much we don’t know about what happened. It could be years before we know exactly who knew what, when they knew it, and how they acted on what they knew. With criminal prosecutions looming, the Penn State brand to protect, and clear political ramifications for many, there are no shortage of people who would rather deflect questions about the past instead of answer them directly.

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For those who would indict Paterno’s involvement in the Sandusky scandal, realize that a truly independent review of the investigation (or potential lack thereof) could cast a wider, more devastating net than we may be able to imagine right now. This could get a lot uglier for a lot of people before we know the truth, and we need to reconcile ourselves with the possibility we will never really know the full story. Paterno himself said, “This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.” While such a statement doesn’t imply any legal culpability, it clearly shows a palpable level of regret over the situation and its outcome. Anyone who tries to declare Paterno as strictly either a victim or villain is doing so based primarily on personal opinion and belief.

Personally, I can appreciate Paterno’s coaching career and the empire he helped create in Happy Valley, while simultaneously acknowledging that he may very well have fiddled while the empire burned. Joe Paterno wasn’t some mythical being; he was a guy who found he enjoyed coaching football and did it well for an exceptionally long time. Like all of us, he made mistakes, and while we may never know the totality of those mistakes, human nature will not prevent people from passing judgment based on their own beliefs. The only comfort for Joe Paterno and his supporters is that he no longer has to worry about our judgment- his fate is in the hands of a higher power now.

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