Ok, I wasn’t really being naive when I took this printout to the shi**er for my afternoon puhp. I figured it was gonna be a sad read, and would make for a different experience than my normal sports-related content. But, dag. I never before found myself with my pants around my ankles bawling my eyes out (thank gawd I’ve got no American History X stories in my past). Man, and thinking of JoePa as you laid out above, while reading about old Harry just doubled the emotion—definitely a unique visit to the stalls. I’ve read Weingarten before (I’m also in DC), and he is a great, great writer, and this is an amazing piece. I sure fell in love with Harry, and now miss him as if he were my own.

And I think I’ll also buy some of your speculation that perhaps old coaches are the best ones, too. There has been plenty written about Joe that references the ego he must have to continue on like he has, but it could really be the opposite. Weingarten writes that ‘unlike us, old dogs lack the audacity to mythologize their lives.’ Maybe this is Joe. He certainly is unlike us. We all want to mythologize him, and he won’t have any of it. And Joe’s health, until very recently, has been famously good to him that he also appears as if he is not, like dogs and some of us, ‘battling ceaselessly against the merciless onslaught of time.’ He just shows up every year and keeps doing what he does: coaching Penn State football.

The only place I think the comparison falls off, and I really, really wish I had more time to devote to thinking and writing about this, is in the acceptance department. Weingarten believes that Old Dogs, ‘as as they age, they comprehend the passage of time, and, if not the inevitability of death, certainly the relentlessness of the onset of their frailties. They understand that what’s gone is gone.’ But I have to believe that Joe’s (I’m picturing him thinking of Bear Bryant) life may be more ‘shaped and shaded by the existential terror of knowing that all is finite,’ as Weingarten explains Kafka’s description of the meaning of our human lives. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has been driven by a natural fear of the end. But, I suppose we’ll find out here in these next few years, as his frailties, like Harry’s, continue to make themselves more and more apparent.

We’ll see how much of Old Dog JoePa really is.

jp