Black Shoe Diaries Podcast: Goodbye, Joe

We’re definitely getting a rehash of the moral grandstanding, hyperbole, misrepresentation of facts, and just getting things wrong from back in November. Brian Cook called Sandusky a “long-time friend” of Joe’s.

This is one of those things where the spectrum of possible opinions is very wide, and that’s fine. But, if you’re going to use your blog, position in the media, etc. as a place to voice that opinion, it’d be helpful to at least try to get some things right.

I also understand that it’s a situation where people who aren’t as attached to this aren’t as motivated to seek out every piece of information so there is going to be some of this. I can’t honestly say how I would be looking at this if I weren’t a Penn State grad, but what I do know is that my judgment of other people’s situations will be forever impacted by this.

Is that the man has always been hyperreal to me, and a lot of people have been treating him as a sort of character, or worse, caricature.

When I was young, I actually thought of Joe as family. And this might seem weird, but I’m full-blooded Italian (and mostly southern Italian, to boot) and Joe was around the same age and basically looked and acted a lot like my grandparents and great uncles and (other Italians will get this) the nebulous network of older relatives that you don’t really know, or know how they’re related to you or to each other, but are always at family reunions and stopping by your grandparents’ for coffee. I would absolutely not have been shocked if, at the age of 8, Joe and Sue walked in and started chatting with my grandparents and fawned over pictures of each others’ grandchildren, trying to politely decline whatever superfluous foods were being cooked at the time. Of course I realized he wasn’t family, but he was like family.

So that’s the context from which I always viewed him. He wasn’t some icon. He was like a lot of people I knew, if they were insanely intelligent and good at coaching football. When I was young, it was awesome that there was this old Italian dude yelling and cheering and leading my dad’s alma mater and favorite football team.

When I got older and read more about him, I found more reasons to respect him. In school, my passion was always for writing and literature. Paterno was an English major? At an Ivy League school? Wow. I went to a small, rural public school, and reading was always one of those things that was considered to be pretty lame. But if Joe loves it and studied it at college, and still talks about classics, then maybe it’s not so bad.

This is all not to mention that his maxims were used by others in my development. I can’t tell you how many times my basketball coach said “as a great man once said: if you take care of the little things, the big things will take care of themselves.” Or how my parents would point to Paterno and Penn State football to teach me life lessons. I was a good player in youth league sports, and at one point started to get to feeling pretty good about myself. “You should strive to be the best you can, but remember it’s a team game. You couldn’t score a single goal or touchdown without every last one of your teammates. When you watch Penn State, have you ever seen any names on the backs of their jerseys? Why do you think that is?”

So years later I ended up going to Penn State, and being an English major. Paterno was a real person, who was in my orbit. Sure, when I’d see him, I’d get a rush of adrenaline and a weird, flustered feeling. Not because I had seen him on television. (Side note: I have run into quite a few celebrities over the past several years, and I’ve always been surprised at how little reaction I have to it: “hey, I just walked past Jake Gyllenhall and Paul Rudd in the lobby” /ex-girlfriend freaks out) But I would react because he was what I wanted to become, and you can never really know what to do or say around someone like that. It’s coincidental, though sort of funny, that I ended up going to law school and I’m trying to live out his other dream, that would have come true had he not been so damn good at coaching football.

Joe Paterno was both a real man and a role model. If your role models don’t seem like real people, then how can you really properly model your life after their example? But for me, Joe was like most other people’s four biggest role models rolled into one person. He was someone I could identify with ethnically – a successful, inspirational Italian guy (bonus: he wasn’t always associated with the mafia), he was the coach of my favorite sports team, he was the most influential person at the university I attended, and he was someone whose passions and family life and grace and virtue and career accomplishments I could look at and find something to strive for in my own life.

I guess that’s just something I’ve felt I needed to express. I’m still spiraling in that weird, emotionless space of reflection, punctuated by moments of happiness and appreciation and sadness and grief. It’s hard to see other people who didn’t know Joe like I knew him (to paraphrase Taliaferro) voicing strong opinions about who he was and what he stood for. Call me an icon worshipper, tell me I’m blinded by bias…I don’t care. I can’t care. I had the best of all possible role models, and now he’s gone. I will forever remember him as a great man.