Orson's Take on Paterno is Worth Reading

My, I mean, Glenn Blockham's take. 

Perhaps my favorite couple of paragraphs penned by a sportswriter in recent memory:

"There was a fixity in Paterno. He had one house in State College. He wore the same shoes on game days, a pair of black Nikes. The roll in the khakis was, I'm guessing, at least three turns of the cuff, and never less or more. The hair stood in an immobile, sweeping bouffant. He spent 60 years of his life in one place doing the same thing every day, running the same route to stay fit, eating the same things, being married to the same woman, and writing the same longhand letters to recruits until 2011, when someone finally put him in front of a Mac and pointed him toward the camera. If he had lived to the age of 115, he would have used this same computer until the age of 115.

This may seem like a satisfying life. This may seem like utter hell. Either way know that this fixity, this centering, is responsible for so much of what is considered the story around Joe Paterno now, here, on January 23, 2012. A 90,000-student university does not rise out of the hills of the Alleghenies without an anchor point, and a tragedy like the Jerry Sandusky scandal does not happen without an institution to shelter it. Build a pyramid around a live pharaoh, and you have a palace. Have the pharaoh die, and it becomes a tomb. Buried with him are his servants and possessions. Among the things found most often with pharaohs: jars of alcohol, sent to keep the king company in the afterlife, presumably on Friday nights when they want one or two cocktails."

He watched Jerry come to work each day knowing kids were raped. He could have had him fired at the least. Sick to put his program ahead of kids. Don't want to bring any negative press to his legacy many of you celebrate.

Thanks for sharing that.  It is quite possibly the best article written on the subject so far.  It sure as hell beats the ESPN about face on the guy.  They went from defending him when the Sandusky thing first broke, to throwing him on the inferno, to now rewriting his life, post-mortem.  Sometimes it's important to step away and seperate the man from the legand.  

On a bit of a tangent, maybe this should slow the rush to memorialize everything with statues and whatnot.  PSU put up a Paterno statue while he was coaching.  Florida has already put up a Tebow statue.  The guy's 25 years old!  We really should exercise some patience before we try to lionize (no pun intended) everyone who's been successful.

I guess I'll be the contrary one and say that column was excessively florid and too devoid of meaning for my taste.  It was saying something, alright, and I think I got the message, but it was hiding behind paragraphs that even Mitch Albom probably thinks are too much.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/01/a-true-story 

The writer was trying to point out something that historians have long recognized. When someone is lionized and has statues erected in their honor when they are still living their image risks taking on a life of its own. Thomas Connelly in book "The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society", looked at the aura which surrounded Robert E. Lee after the Civil War. The Southern Lost Cause movement and their mythos about Lee left a dead statue and the real person, flaws and idiosyncrasies became lost in the footnotes.

Joe Paterno became a marble man - he was suppose to be flawless, perfect and a paragon. It suited many people to have this happen. The administration benefited from having a national spokesman who helped to raise millions of dollars and attract thousands of students. The athletic department liked his appeal to some long lost era of amateur sports. For a democracy and republic, we've strangely always had an attraction for someone who could be a benevolent ruler - a philosopher king - all knowing, all wise, fair and just. Today, that person must also be telegenic and witty.

It may not have been something he wanted in the beginning but as time went on, being told that one is wonderful and wise is quite seductive - so much so that it is easy to start believing it yourself. When coupled with a fear of what would occur once he stopped coaching it is understandable how easy it is to begin acting as if all of the hype and myth were real. The Sandusky scandal actually revealed two tragedies. First and foremost is that despite the homespun bucolic rustic setting of Happy Valley, there can be horrible evil. The second is that no person should become a marble man, no matter how good the original intention.

As a UM fan we have a little of that here with Bo, but luckily he had the good sense to retire when his powers were waning, being frank about his own shortcomings, and showing a sense of humility. He never thought the football coach was more important than the school president.

There are a few who are fortunate enough to achieve lasting greatness in some aspect of their life - winning a major championship, discovering something or inventing something which alters how all people live or creating something of great beauty which moves people across generations. Even then, it was just one part, one aspect, and shouldn't be mistaken for the whole person - who may have many prickly flaws and shortcomings.

A muddled piece.

Orson appears to take issue with the post mortem deification of pop icons that I'll agree is far too prevalent in our culture, all the while comparing Paterno to human deities (pharaohs) or timeless figures (Shakespeare's Prospero). I can see one defending this contradiction by arguing that the purpose of choosing those particular comparisons was to serve irony, but that purpose, if indeed it does exist, was quite lost.

All of this seems especially jarring when considering the conclusion is a rather mundane banality.