As he so often does, Spencer Hall sums up a overwhelming event in college football with wit, style, and substance.
If I could add anything, it would be that the legend and the man became one toward the twilight of Paterno’s career, even perhaps in his own mind.
Joe had absolute power in Happy Valley, and as we all know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even for a man of Paterno’s iron will, corruption’s pull wears away at the hardest resolve. In the end, Joe Paterno succumbed to the temptation of absolute power and those around him enabled that downfall by indulging an old icon and allowing him to become a tyrant of his own making. It could happen to any one of us, and in most it probably would have happened much sooner.
And it’s a shame. Not just because his legacy is tarnished, but because all of the good that he did for thousands of student-athletes, for Penn State as a place of learning, for college football as a whole- is now colored by what he did not do. He did not live up to the high moral standard asked everyone else to live up to.
In the end, I don’t believe that one wrong act can nullify decades of good. I think Paterno really did wish he could take it all back and do the right thing, not because it would make him and his legacy untarnished once more, but because when it came time for him to live up to the legend he had made himself to be, he found himself just a flawed old man, unable to do the right thing when it mattered most.
