this is a different and interesting way to look at the book and the author. i couldnt burden myself with the discipline required to wade thru all those "good old st joe" chapters to experience what this reviewer has seen, but I recognize a lot of what he says in the chapters i did read, which had to do only with the sandusky problem. ( i can only take so much "good ole joe" talk.) personally i would not want this reviewer (Mr. Marchman) on my tail if I specialized in disingenuous information dissemination, for whatever reason
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444443504577601093829708820.html
A Sad Story of Happy Valley
The former Penn State coach comes across as a sort of stuffed mascot, monstrously indifferent to all around him..
By TIM MARCHMAN
Within a few days last fall, Joe Paterno, who had coached football at Pennsylvania State University for 62 years, lost his reputation and his job and then learned that he was dying. Joe Posnanski was there. Then a writer for Sports Illustrated, Mr. Posnanski had been in Pennsylvania's Happy Valley for months working on a book about the 84-year-old, for which he had been given unique access to the man, his family and his archives. At worst his biography would be the sort of life-lessons-from-the-coach book that well-known sportswriters seem compelled to write at some point; at best it would be a defining work, the perfect meeting of a legendary subject and a writer admired for celebrating what is good and right about American sport.
There are traces of these other books in the one that Mr. Posnanski finally wrote, which has come out nearly a year ahead of its original publication date in order to take advantage of public interest in the events that destroyed Paternoa child-molestation scandal involving longtime assistant Jerry Sandusky. "Paterno" is mostly, though, the story of the coach as confidence man, and what you think of it will probably depend on how badly you think the author was conned.
In 1998, Mr. Sandusky, then Penn State's defensive coordinator, was investigated for showering with a young boy. No charges were filed. Three years later, a young coaching assistant saw him showering with another boy. The assistant went to Paterno, who reported it to the appropriate campus authorities, but the case wasn't followed up on, and nothing was heard of any of this for an additional 10 years.
There is little fresh information in "Paterno" about the scandal, and what there istales of how Paterno and Mr. Sandusky never really liked each other, for instanceisn't revelatory. In interviews before his death in January, Paterno would claim that he knew nothing about the 1998 incident. This appears not to be true, as the author documents, citing an email to the school's vice president from the athletic director of the time. Paterno would also claim that he didn't understand the gravity of what Mr. Sandusky was said to have done three years later. Given that Paterno admitted that he understood the shower incident to have been "of a sexual nature," this claim seems impossible to believe.
At best, Paterno was a sort of stuffed mascot, monstrously indifferent to everything around him. At worst, he orchestrated an active conspiracy to protect Mr. Sandusky. Probably the truth is closer to the former, as Mr. Posnanski argues, but nothing he offers will change anyone's mind.
The most interesting thing about "Paterno" may be that, even leaving the scandal aside, the coach comes across as a self-mythologizing monster, consumed by his legacy of winning on the football field. I'm not sure that this is what Mr. Posnanski was going for, given the amount of space he spends on the inspiring life lessons that various players learned from the coach. If not, though, it's a tribute to his reportorial commitment that he lets the facts tell the story.
Paterno's myth went like this: A street-wise Brooklyn kid with a Brown University education, he accidentally fell into coaching at a "cow college" and ended up becoming the winningest coach in NCAA history, despite an insistence that education and integrity mattered far more than athletic success. Most of this is false. Paterno had ambitions to coach from a young age, and for all his sanctimonious pieties, he arranged scholarships for bad students like Rich McKenzie, a linebacker who played in the early 1990s. He even, according to Mr. Posnanski, had his coaches beat the players with Wiffle-ball bats on the practice fields.
More than that, Paterno was something more than unfeeling to his own family. As a middle-aged assistant coach, he courted his future wife, an undergraduate at the time, then took her on a short recruiting trip for their honeymoon. Her birthday fell on Valentine's Day; he routinely ignored the date and once called her from the road claiming that he had gotten her a great presenttwo new recruits. He seems to have spent much of his children's lives either ignoring them or humiliating them over trivial things like sharing a cucumber from an all-you-can-eat plate.
It's odd, given all the stories that Mr. Posnanski tells, how much of the myth he seems to believe. He repeatedly invokes Paterno's love for the "Aeneid" as a sign of how cultured he was, when most big-city Catholics of his age and aspirations would have known a bit of Virgil. More to the point, the author buys Paterno's comparison of himself to Aeneas, drawing a causal line between Paterno's success and the rise of Penn State as an institution. In fact, the university's rise had to do with enormous Cold War-era military spending. The school didn't build a nuclear reactor in 1955 because of Joe Paterno. Today the program he built brings in tens of millions of dollars per year; the institution has an annual budget of more than $4 billion. Giving Paterno credit for building the school is like crediting legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach for Boston.
Mr. Posnanski's belief comes through most in certain asides, as when he describes students standing quietly around the campus statue of Paterno on the night he was fired. "This silence," he writes, "weighed down the air, made it heavy and stifling, the quiet you might feel at the Vietnam Memorial." In such moments, Mr. Posnanski seems trapped not just by the myth but by his desire not to be like the meat-faced pundits who now compete with one another to see who can be most indignant over Paterno's failuresjust as avidly as they once competed to see who could do most to build the myth of Saint Joe in the first place. It's a laudable instinct on the author's part but leads him to see gray where there is only black.
Still, if "Paterno" will satisfy no one who wanted Mr. Posnanski to write a document full of damning details about what the coach knew and when he knew it, the book is, intentionally or not, a devastating blow to Paterno's legacy.
Mr. Marchman writes about sports for the Journal. Follow him on Twitter at @timmarchman
