He pops up now at the oddest moments, like every ghost in this place so crowded with them.
And now Joe Paterno goes, and let his epitaph be this: He deserved better.
If you take a man's life in full, then Paterno left his a giant, for all the diminishment of its unbearably bitter endgame. His accomplishments as the winningest coach in the history of college football are well chronicled and need not be repeated here, but those likely will not be the first line in his obituary. Inevitably, it will be the endgame that comes up first.
And that is the true sadness of this day.
That someone who gave so much of his life to Penn State University should have failed it when it most needed him most lends his death a pathos that goes beyond mere grief over an immense loss. It is tragic in very nearly the classical sense, this failure of a great moral compass at the very moment when it should have been most unerring.
It was one enormous miscalculation – Joe Paterno? Passing the buck? – in a lifetime that had very few. Had it happened 20, 25 years ago, it might have been a mere footnote.
In the end, though, timing was one more thing that wasn't on Paterno's side.
And so the stain darkens more than perhaps it should, here at the end. And not just Joe Paterno.
This needs to be said, too, after all, on this day: As sad as Paterno's failure was, sadder yet is how the university failed Paterno with the clumsy manner in which it jettisoned the man who was its greatest living embodiment. Cover Your Ass can scarcely be played any more cravenly; if anything that went down in the wake of the horrific Jerry Sandusky scandal was more shameful than the university's unwillingness to act, it was the way it made its most loyal son the sacrificial lamb.
Perhaps if the university had acted with as much dispatch in dealing with Sandusky as it did in making Paterno pay for his longtime assistant's alleged sins, we wouldn't be talking about any of this now. Food for considerable thought.
And then there's this, of course: While it's doubtless unfair to say that the way Penn State excommunicated Paterno may have hastened his death, there will be no shortage of alumni willing to suggest as much in the next few days. The targets of this will get no sympathy here. They've earned that particular injustice.
And now? Now will come a rampant hypocrisy fest in which the same university hierarchy that nearly broke its legs trying to distance itself from him extols the virtues and greatness of Joe Paterno. The stench of it all will be nearly unbearable, leavened only by the sorrowful reality that Paterno, without football and without Penn State, was a man bereft of everything that mattered to him at the end. And whose last days were clearly filled with an enormous regret.
That is a fate no one deserves at his passing, no matter how great or small or rare the failing.
And that's especially true if your name is Joe Paterno.
Photo gallery
