Joe Paterno, Pennsylvania's most recognizable citizen and a Hall of Fame
football coach whose golden resume was tarnished by a child sex-abuse scandal
that beclouded his final days, has died at 85.
His death, 2 { months after he was diagnosed with lung cancer, came as an
eerie fulfillment to a prophecy he had made often in the final decades of
nearly a half-century as Pennsylvania State University's head coach. When
Alabama's Bear Bryant succumbed to a heart attack in 1983, just 28 days after
his 1982 retirement, a shaken Mr. Paterno absorbed the lesson.
"What else would I do?" he responded whenever the subject of retirement
arose. "I don't want to die. Football keeps me alive."
In what undoubtedly will be a disconcerting sight for many Penn Staters
who knew no other coach, this autumn will be the first since 1950 without Mr.
Paterno on the Nittany Lions' sideline.
The length of his tenure and the successes that filled it might never
again be equaled in a college-football world increasingly marked by a headlong
rush for financial gain, a trend Mr. Paterno both decried and mastered.
His Penn State teams won a record 409 games, 24 bowls, two national
championships, and a following so large and loyal that in his last seasons the
football program regularly produced annual profits exceeding $50 million.
An Ivy League graduate who made his team's motto "Success with honor," he
graduated an astounding percentage of players, constantly stressed the role of
academics in the college athletic experience, operated a program that was
never punished by the NCAA, and donated a considerable portion of his
relatively modest salary to Penn State's library.
But a career notable for its integrity and tranquillity ended suddenly in
an almost unimaginable scandal.
Like a play whose three cheery, uplifting acts conclude with a bombshell
horror just before the curtain falls, Paterno's noteworthy tenure ended amid
accusations that he did too little to stop a former colleague from surrounding
himself with and -- if the sordid accusations are true -- abusing boys.
In his final days, the university that he helped transform more than any
other individual into a research institution that rivals the best of the
nation's state schools was beset by perhaps the gravest crisis in its 156-year
history.
On Nov. 9, 2011, just four days after the arrest of his longtime
assistant coach Jerry Sandusky on child-molestation charges touched off a
storm of criticism of Happy Valley, the university's board of trustees fired
Mr. Paterno.
Though he had been accused of no crime, the coach was widely condemned by
those convinced he had somehow ignored or, worse, covered up crimes against
children in order to preserve his program.
But in grand jury testimony and in a Washington Post interview published
a week before his death, Mr. Paterno insisted he had been unaware of
Sandusky's alleged behavior until 2002. And at that time, as university
guidelines required, he notified his superiors.
For those who had been urging the octogenarian coach to step aside and
permit an orderly transition -- a group that, at least as far back as 2004,
included Penn State's top administrators -- the incidents surrounding his
dismissal confirmed their worst fears: Mr. Paterno had lost control of the
