Joe Paterno, who won more football games than any major-college coach but whose legacy was tainted by his response to child sex-abuse allegations against a former associate, died Sunday of lung cancer. He was 85.
For more than six decades at Penn State, Paterno made a name for himself as an educator and a humanitarian. A tenured professor who had a class on the University Park campus named after him, he raised and donated millions to the university’s library and endowed a chair in the English department, where he was known for wandering into colloquia and asking tough questions of scholars.
“He represents the end of an era, where coaches were members of the faculty, earned tenure like every other faculty member, and often taught courses,” said John Nichols, an emeritus professor at Penn State and co-chair of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics. “He was the last of the major football coaches who were truly integrated into the university.”
His nickname, JoePa, evoked a grandfatherly presence, and he won legions of followers for his old-fashioned ways. His home phone number was in the campus directory, and he sometimes walked to work from his modest, four-bedroom ranch a few blocks from campus. To discipline players, he once made them clean the stands of the 107,000-seat football stadium.
Students, faculty, and supporters turned out in large numbers on Sunday to mourn the coach’s death. Malcolm Moran, a former sportswriter who now directs the university’s John Curley Center for Sports Journalism, watched as fans gathered for a solemn tribute near a statue of the coach on the stadium’s east side. Many others expressed their sorrow through social media.
“His loss leaves a void in our lives that will never be filled,” said a statement from his family.
As Paterno’s coaching empire grew—he won two national championships and 24 bowl games, the most of any coach—so grew the university’s reputation. Penn State’s football prowess helped it gain entry into the Big Ten Conference in 1990. The league affiliation, which includes membership in the powerful Committee on Institutional Cooperation, has helped boost the university’s national academic profile.
“A lot of us owe our jobs to him, in a sense,” Russell Frank, a Penn State journalism professor, told Sports Illustrated last year. “He grew the university so much, and that’s attributable to how high-profile the football program has been.”
During his time, the university’s endowment grew to nearly $2-billion, with Paterno serving as fund raiser No. 1. The former Penn State president Graham Spanier, who sometimes accompanied the coach on donor visits, liked to brag about how well Paterno could close a gift. On more than one call, a $1-million ask turned into a $5-million or bigger donation.
A graduate of Brown University—an unlikely starting point for one of the game’s most iconic figures—Paterno built his legend on doing things the right way. He backed up the program’s motto, “Success With Honor,” by demanding hours of community service and regularly turning out teams with high graduation rates.
He could have left for the professional coaching ranks, where he would have undoubtedly made more than the $500,000 or so the university paid him, but he famously said he didn’t want to leave the game to coaches with lesser moral standards. “I felt this is where I would be happier and I could do more good,” he said during an ESPN interview last July.
Although his teams had their share of disciplinary problems over the years—including allegations of knife fights and players’ beating up fellow students—the university stayed out of NCAA trouble on Paterno’s watch.
Sorrowful Departure
But it was the coach’s final eight weeks of life—during which he faced questions for his role in a child sex-abuse scandal, leading to his dismissal after 61 years of service—that form the complicated coda to his story.
About a week after notching win No. 409, where he passed Grambling’s Eddie Robinson as the game’s winningest coach, Paterno faced criticism as a former Nittany Lions’ assistant, Jerry Sandusky, was charged with 40 counts of molesting children, including violations said to have occurred on Penn State’s campus. While not charged in the case, Paterno was seen as not having done enough to stop the coach’s purported abuses.
Days later, Paterno himself even acknowledged the lapse in judgment. “It is one of the great sorrows of my life,” he said in a written statement. “I wish I had done more.”
In his final comments on the scandal, published this month in The Washington Post, Paterno described himself as someone who didn’t understand rape by a man, expecting those above him to do the right thing.
“I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was,” Paterno told The Post. “So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did.”
Those comments further complicated the legacy of one of the game’s biggest figures.
As ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap said, in a remembrance of the coach:
“That such a career should end in such ignominy, that such a man should be shamed so late in the game, that such a legacy should be so tainted can only be viewed as terribly sad—but ultimately not as unjustified and not as tragedy. Something tragic took place at Penn State, but it wasn’t the fall of Joe Paterno.”
Correction (1/23, 12:11 p.m.): This article originally reported incorrectly on the circumstances in which Mr. Paterno announced his retirement. He initially said he would retire at the end of the football season, but he was dismissed before that. Also, in his interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Paterno said he didn’t understand rape by a man, not sodomy. The article has been updated to reflect those corrections.
