Joe Posnanski's tome Paterno hit the bookstores yesterday. From the opening Prelude story in Flatbush about William Blatty of The Exhorcist fame to the end it is the best work I have read that presents the man we have known in Central PA, warts and all. He covers the story all the way through Joe's death. Posnansky firmly asserts that the only thing that JoePA asked is that Giuseppe,(Joe's name for Posnansky), "Tell the Truth." He says that neither Joe nor anyone in the family ever asked him to alter anything in telling Joe's story and he doesn't pull any punches along the way. We can only hope that we will get a full telling of Geno's story of this quality someday. Posnansky's writing style is very comfortable story telling. He is very gifted at his craft. I am about halfway through but admittedly jumped to the end to see how Posnansky handled the last few months of Joe's life. From one of Amazon's reviews: "Let me first point out that Joe Posnanski's style is such that you forget you are reading a biography of the most hated and/or loved person in America, right now. I wanted to read this book, but not to learn more about Joe Paterno; I've read it all; "No Ordinary Joe," "The Lion in Autumn," etc. And to be honest folks, there isn't much new about Joe Paterno, the human, in this book. But, Mr. Posnanski has a way with words to make us realize that Mr. Paterno was a person. He had a mother and a father; his own children, and grandchildren. And then he had his football team, which was his life. Football is ultimately what made Joe tick. If the various biographies written about him didn't drill that point, Mr. Posnanski did, whether he meant to or not." .... "Why 5-stars? Because this book is extremely well written and I was able to read about all the good times. Still, I realize that as of today, outside of Nittany Nation, Joe isn't going to be remembered for any of that. He's going to be remembered for the last 100 pages of this book. And that makes me incredibly sad. So I wept for Joe. I wept for the victims. And I wept for PSU. Because none of what Jerry Sandusky represents is what any of that place has been about; and those kids lives are ruined--forever. And it all makes me very sad."
LOL. Posnasnski was my favorite sports writer on the planet. Read Alan Berra's piece in the Atlantic to read him get skewered. The book is a joke in every way shape and form. An embarrassment to Posnanski. When your employer turns down the right to except a preview (Sports Illustrated) it's clearly a disgraceful disaster. How anyone can possibly publicly defend Paterno is one of the strangest outcomes of the situation. It's like you people are brainwashed. Someday you'll all realize how ashamed you should be. Your subject says it all. You didn't know him - you could not be more wrong. To the other thread - it's nonsense like this that is condemning the whole community. They deserve it.
So if there is a SINGLE PSU fan who is also disgusted by JoPa, Sandusky and the rest of the guilty leadership at PSU. That person should also be condemned? There are more of them, by far, than fans who defend those people. Using absolutes like "everyone" and "never" and "always" is the sign of a weak mind. You are an idiot.
LOL. Yeah I'm saying the handful of rational PSU fans should be condemned. That's the sort of the point. - there aren't too many. They certainly are in a distinct minority on the internet. It's funny when you post that in a thread started by an apologist who quotes other apologists.
Let me tell you about the Paterno I know. I wrote about it a lot after Dave Gavitt passed. Joe Paterno, a man who's entire life was about football, in one swift act of activism in the changing landscape of intercollegiate athletics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was instrumental in effectively cutting off the revenue streams of dozens of major academic institutions of higher learning across the Northeast, through a useless clause called "public support" that was included into the new NCAA division 1-A football classificationat the time, a regulation that has changed many times over the years, since - because it was found to be ridiculous - except it did have a very specific purpose for JoePa - it was part of the master-plan to rebuild a northeast college football elague after the Ivy's de-emphasized. He knew full well, what northeast college football culture was like, it's not like other areas of the country. You don't get 100,000 people going to a dozen different college football games happening in New England on a particular saturday.....for a large number of reasons, that I won't list now, but have before, many times. But with a single clause, all the recruiitng competition, all the high revenue athletic departments arournd football.....all the great academics programs available at schools sponsoring football and scholarships............only Yale, Syracuse and Boston College were at the same level of NCAA classification as Penn State in 1979 because of hat public support clause. WIth Yale bowing out, forcefullly by the Ivy's, by 1982. Talk about ruthless recruiting tactics. Joe Paterno wins the cake hands down. A graduate of Brown. A Providence guy. An Ivy league QB in the Ivy league powerhouse days prior to de-emphasizing the money and revenue streams of football by the late 1950s.....a guy that lived football in the northeast, that ended up a podunk cow college in rural PA, instead of his dream of coaching big time football in the Ivy league, and built a shining university, using football money.......... THat same guy effectively, put dozens of entire universities forcefully into the "cost-containment" model of intercollegiate athletics which is the dying 1-AA experiment of the past 3 decades, to help him build his empire through recruiting. Dave Gavitt's basketball league born in 1979, helped him, and then shut him out, when he wanted to re-form a northeastern football league after eliminating the majority of schools down to 1-AA. He knew exactly what he was doing. Dave GAvitt's basketball league sent Paterno to the mid-west. The man was ruthless, even moreso after that, in his goal, of elevating Penn State as both an athletic and academic institution at or above the Ivy League peers, who said that football wasn't that important to a university. His fund raising and growth interests in the university as a whole academics and athletics, were indeed legendary. It was all fueled b/c the Ivy league decided to stop playing big time football, and he wanted to prove them wrong. It was six decades of that ruthlessness, that allowed for a guy like Jerry Sandusky to roam in a pedophile shangri-la......because he was a Penn Stater and a highly respected footbal coach and there was no room in the penn state public image, for Sandusky. You know what question, I would have loved to see answered, in that book, and would have been asked by a football guy? Why did Jerry Sandusky retire in the prime of his football career? Everyone in football outside Penn State, knew something ugly happened, and ruthless Joe put the lid on it. Nobody, outside could actually have any idea how ugly until the proper authorities finally were able to open the lid.
This has to be a joke thread. The book is an abomination. One freaking chapter on Sandusky? Penn State fans still continue to deify Joe Paterno after all of this. It makes me absolutely sick.
Hold on the guy who posted the Penn State bathroom comedy called me an idiot? Arguing about the comedic value of sexually abusing children... But I'm an idiot?
by no means do I lump ALL penn state grads/fans in this category, but having been around them in both pre- and post-Sandusky days the Paterno thing is such a cult of personality it would make Mao Tse-Tung blush. My most recent contact I actually felt sad for them. The Paterno worship has taken on the characteristics of a cult. Said this before, but Paterno put himself and his program ahead of the victims. The right thing would have been in 1998 to turn him into the cops combined with a press conference announcing his "leave of absence" from the program to fight the charges. Bottom line is JoePa gave him 13 more years to molest kids.
All that good stuff Paterno did was for nothing the day that he decided to look the other way over child rape.
As a group they are completely unappealing. Eagles fans got a rep for cheering when Michael Irvin was temporarily paralyzed on their field. This is alot worse than that. This taint will stain them for a very long time. Taking umbrage of the truth and lashing out isn't helping them turn the page either.
Bingo. I've been wondering the same thing. How does a Penn St lifer, and obviously someone who wanted the job, get forced into a "retirement" for "no reason?"
At the risk of starting another epic thread on this - for the record - the 1998 ugliness, was about an adolescent boy that sandusky was wrestling with on a mat - anybody ever seen Sandusky in person (this is a big guy...)....and then showered with him. The kid told his mom, and the mom understandably went berserk. Authorities were notified, and Sandusky was investigated. Paterno knew he was investigated. An undercover cop, sat in that mom's house, and listened to Sandusky tell her, that she would never be able to forgive him for what he did to her son, and that he wished he was dead. No charges were ever filed. The DA closed the case. That's a question that should be pursued - why that DA decided there was no case. The layers of the rotten onion that start to peel away rival any fiction. Sandusky retired from football at that time, I believe in his early 50s, in the prime years of his coaching career, without moving on to another coaching job, one of the top defensive coordinators in the country. Bang. Gone from football. But given an office and a title at Penn State, and allowed access to the facilities - continued access to the facilities, with his kids from the Second Mile, even after the next reported ugliness with a child a few later - allowed access to the facilites right up through 2011. All in a matter of months, though in 1998. McQueary walked in on him in 2001, three years later. That incident was handled internally. Unlike 1998, where it was investigated by the cops, and then shut down eventually by higher ups in the legal/political community, nobody in 2001, tried to do anything to identify the victim, and determine what the hell happened. They approached Sandusky and the Second Mile organization (of which there was a politica figure - whoe died in 1993 of AIDS - Savitz - who was a board member, that was also a serial pedophile - known.).......and told them the Second Mile leadership, and Sandusky they needed to stop. It didn't stop.
