The last two months have told me more about Joe Paterno than all the years that came before. I have to preface that statement by letting you know that I’ve never followed college football in my life. I know about Paterno only in passing, through the praise that’s been showered upon him by the national media. Paterno was a football legend. He was a leader of men. He was the esteemed head coach of one of the most legendary football programs in North America. In many ways, not following the game really made no difference in what I knew about Paterno from any college football enthusiast.
But his death this weekend raised moral questions that I feel are individual to each and every one of us. When you have a legendary head coach who allegedly didn’t act upon known information that one of his coaches was sexually assaulting children, the entire situation dissolves into a grey area where our opinions lie.
Paterno’s legendary status has protected him in some circles from being completely faulted for allowing such crimes to go on. In other circles, his football legacy has made him a greater villain. How can someone who we held in such high esteem commit a huge error? The greater you build a legend whose reputation is impenetrable, the harder it is to accept that he’s only human.
And humans like us all make mistakes in life. Some are harmless, some leave a much greater impact. There are mistakes that we move on from as lessons learned, as a by-product of our innocence. That’s life. Other mistakes we make not only affect us, but also other people who become collateral damage in our wrong-doings. They alter lives, they change the way we’re viewed, but no matter what, there’s always a chance for redemption. There’s always a chance for forgiveness. Very few of us have been entangled in a situation as harrowing and damaging as Paterno’s, but the emotions felt are still the same.
That’s why the passing of Paterno complicates things so much more. Given his age it was unlikely that we would’ve been able to reconcile and move on from his mistakes before he passed. It likely would’ve taken a long time for the shock and pain to dissipate. But death is an absolute. And when a man passes it’s difficult to hold onto anger, to hold onto judgment. To look down on Paterno and assess him for his errors means that we believe we would’ve made a better decision under the same circumstances. It’s not something that we can say absolutely. To view the situation as black and white would be hypocritical of us. This is not a defense of what Paterno did and didn’t do, but to say that every individual does or doesn’t do things based on their own thought process and circumstances.
And for choosing our own paths, we deal with the consequences of our mistakes. But Paterno will no longer have to to deal with that part. He’s gone. And he leaves behind a legacy that polarizes him amongst the masses. The one extreme has people who will forever vilify him as a bystander to one of the most painful sports scandals in history. The other extreme will forever deify him as a football god who simply made a human error. I understand where both sides are coming from, but I also understand that the truth lies somewhere in between. To accept that there is an in between is probably the hardest part.
If Paterno made this mistake forty years earlier, he would’ve been a tragic figure who spent the rest of his years trying to repair his stained reputation. Mistakes happen. Time passes. We always learn to forgive. But because this is the last trait that we found out about Paterno, it’s the one that’s going to stain him the most. The timing of it doesn’t matter to the victims and to everyone else who’ve been affected by this. But it does in the way that we can really never reconcile our anger and disappointment at Paterno.
The football records stand, but not in isolation to everything that he did wrong on the field. Paterno is no longer with us, and while we won’t forget what did and didn’t happen, the important thing is for us to reconcile how we feel about him, and remember him as a villain, a legend, and above all, a human being just like any of us. Whatever opinion we hold about Paterno and his mistakes, we should hold onto that, but also understand that this may be the appropriate time to lay them to rest.
