He was a child of the Depression who chose football over the objections of his father, who wanted him to be a lawyer no second generation Italian-American parent would have been anxious to see their son pursue a career so far outside the realm of respectability. ![]() He doesn’t really look like the Joe Paterno we saw often on TV over the years, but he inhabits the role so effortlessly that at times you forget he’s acting. Like Paterno, Pacino was born to Italian-American parents and raised in New York City. But Joe Paterno might be the most demanding part he’s ever taken on, and it’s rare for even a great actor to bring so much insight to a character. He has played a breathtakingly wide range of characters, including drug user, drug dealer, Mafia don, Mafia hit man, multiple cops, good lawyers and crooked lawyers, real estate shark, race car driver, bank robber, playwright, music producer, suicide doctor, the devil and even a football coach. Pacino, whose first feature film was 1971’s Panic in Needle Park, has been making films almost as long as Paterno was head coach at Penn State. Paterno is portrayed by just about the only actor who could pull it off, Al Pacino. The answer to that question is that no one would watch if the film was entitled Spanier or even Sandusky – the latter being Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant coach who is currently serving 30 to 60 years after being found guilty of 45 charges of rape and other forms of sexual assault against young boys, many of the offenses committed in the Penn State football facilities. Sadly, it is often the only medicine that works.Of course, what brought down Paterno and led to jail sentences for Penn State president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz, and resulted in, to date, more than $92m in settlements, was much more than a mere sports scandal.īut the many years of disgraceful silence that covered up the crimes would not have been possible if not for the power and prestige the Penn State football program wielded over the university, and Joe Paterno – affectionately known as JoePa – was the football program.Īs a character asks, rhetorically, in Barry Levinson’s searing and emotionally exhausting HBO drama Paterno: “A crime against children happened. I don't blame the NCAA for sending a message that when the crime is so egregious, everybody pays. Punishing the innocent with the guilty is nothing to be happy about, but it is the inevitable price of misdeeds that affect many. That's the attitude that encouraged this tragedy to fester in the first place. ![]() Clinging to ruined legacies of shattered idols shows that too many people insist on looking at the university through the prism of its football team. Promising their own family's "investigation,'' denying the damning evidence of the Freeh report, and decrying all who say the evidence links Paterno to the case is a hopeless, losing proposition.Īll but overlooked is that Penn State is still a premier learning institution. The latest sad chapter involves the understandable but pathetic reaction of the Paterno family, which is howling in the wind to save their patriarch's ruined reputation. As it stands, this is a story with no end in sight. ![]() It can be argued that Penn State would have been better off with the death penalty, and a chance to start fresh. It was that reason, and not any moral compass, that led the school to take the Joe Paterno statue down. The university accepted its draconian penalties meekly, knowing any objection might have led to the "death penalty'' of the football team. Penn State paid an extra price for putting itself above the rest, when in fact it was beneath the rest. Put yourself on a pedestal, and the fall will be doubly devastating. The decision has the look of a backlash against Penn State's longstanding portrayal of itself as not just a great football program but a sanctimonious one. The NCAA's ruling is more than just a statement against child abuse. Is that fair to the rest? Pretending that guilt can be neatly quarantined is comforting but wildly unrealistic.
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