Sports

Paterno wasted every chance to stop this

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Joe Paterno wanted to coach his football team Saturday afternoon, wanted one more day when Beaver Stadium and State College, Pa., felt like the biggest stage in America. He wanted to hear 107,000 people cheer for him one more time.

He didn’t want to walk away from all of this, not yet. He wanted to retire later, not sooner, said he didn’t want Penn State’s Board of Trustees to “spend a single minute discussing his status” because “they have far more important issues to address.”

They did. For once, somebody in State College told Paterno he wasn’t allowed to make the rules. His firing late last night brings to a conclusion a glorious coaching career and brings to a head one of the most inglorious weeks in the history of college athletics.

Of course Paterno wanted to coach the Nittany Lions on Saturday, because Beaver Stadium will be stuffed with acolytes, with well-meaning but wrong-headed Paterno supporters who believe the sainted coach was railroaded here, screaming their defense so loudly that maybe it could obscure the memory of all the little boys after 2002 who were forced to endure Jerry Sanduskys alleged sick proclivities firsthand, because nobody in authority thought to do what was necessary to stop the madness in its tracks.

This was the truth about Penn State for the last 41⁄2 decades, though: When Paterno wanted something, he got it. There was a time when we laughed naively at that, when the idea of Paterno running his own personal fiefdom in Center County, Pa., seemed almost charming, a pure sporting place in a cynical sporting time.

But we needed to remember something: One of the reasons Penn State finds itself in the middle of this fiasco is precisely because Paterno was all-powerful, precisely because he had ascended to a place beyond the football office. Paterno answered to no one for decades, because there seemed no reason: He was Joe Paterno. And far more often than not, he knew what the right thing to do was.

Just not in this case, and that’s the truth no matter how much Penn State students want to scream and yell and keep from studying.

Look, one bad decision made at age 75 doesn’t erase the 51 years of positive examples that preceded it. Paterno, now 84, wasn’t the repository of evil who allegedly stole the childhoods from who-knows-how-many-victims over the past 20 years; that was Sandusky.

Nor is he as culpable as Mike McQueary, who was 28 years old when he allegedly saw an encounter between Sandusky and a 10-year-old boy. McQueary wasn’t some pimply-faced student manager, who absolutely should have physically broken up what he saw, called the cops himself, maybe delivered a right hook to Sandusky’s jaw to spice the message with a little extra meaning.

McQueary should be nowhere near the sidelines Saturday either. If he wasn’t part of the initial horror, he absolutely was part of the long conspiracy to cover it up.

But the first order of business was what happened last night, removing Paterno from his press box throne. If he wanted this to be his call then he should have made the right call. He should’ve realized what an insensitive punch to the gut it would’ve been to the victims and their families if the camera would have found him every few minutes in the Beaver Stadium box after this week.

He should have realized on his own that even if the Nittany Lions win by six touchdowns, there wouldn’t have been a journalist worth his laptop who would have asked him even one question postgame that didn’t involve the mess that litters his university.

Is he sorry? He said he is. In a statement released yesterday, he issued what amounted to a public Act of Contrition.

“I am absolutely devastated by the developments in this case,” Paterno said. “I grieve for the children and their families, and I pray for their comfort and relief.”

If he told that to his priest in the privacy of a confessional, he would be told to do a penance: 10 Hail Marys, 10 Our Fathers. Doing so in the public forum brings consequence, too, and it’s one Paterno himself should have understood on his own.

The fact that he didn’t leaves you to wonder if he learned anything at all this week.