By Bart D.
Co-Founder

Follow the author on Twitter @Bart_cfn or the site @bestdamnpoll

There’s a theory that I believe has been researched a time or two, but I’m too lazy/indifferent to go research something so morbid right now.  It shows something related to the passing of a couple who has been married a long time in very similar time spans, almost giving credence to the term “dying of a broken heart.”  It sounds like something out of Every Country Music Song, USA, but there’s truth to it, I think.

Dually noted, and again, I believe researched, there’s a correlation to one’s passing after they retire, and I’ve read too many times that the key to living longer isn’t necessarily to stop drinking or eat only natural foods…but to keep busy, mentally, physically, and emotionally.

Coach Joe Paterno passed away this morning, not two solid months after he was relieved of a position he’d held for 41 years.  One could argue that, though he was also a devoted husband, he was married to football.  He was married to molding young men aged 17-23 through a kid’s game that asks for toughness, discipline, consistency, and above all, heart.  I never got the privilege to be in the same room as the man, and really don’t know anyone who has known him on a personal level, but the impact the man they call JoePa made is ever lasting.  I don’t think I really understood it until this morning…

Yesterday, in a bitter cold that breeds desolation of the mind, it ended for my team, just the way it’d ended for Joe’s 41 times.  Sports teaches lessons, and one of them is that complacency is the devil.  Nothing is guaranteed, nothing given, everything temporary from the anguish of the loss to the elation of the win.  One way or another, the eulogy will be read, the only finality up for grabs being whether or not it’s read in front of smiles or frowns.  As I walked from the court to the car, glazed over eyes after the last speech I’ll give a team I couldn’t do enough to help win, I left the same broken heart and shattered dreams on that floor inside, to be locked away in a dusty Midwestern gym with the ghostly clang of a missed free throw turned one point loss ringing in my head.  Forty-one times Joe Paterno felt this.  Forty-one times as a head coach, Paterno had to deal with “the end.”  Forty-one times, he probably thought he’d get another, better shot at it next year.

There’s something about coaching that’s just different.  It’s a feeling that grips you in a way playing never would.  There’s a joy in watching others succeed that you helped get there, on a field or court, or off of it.  There’s a happiness in standing in the shadows knowing you did right by someone else.  That’s who Joe Paterno was.  A man, a coach, who molded individuals to successes as a life’s work.  Too much time is always spent focusing on mistakes instead of successes, when in reality mistakes are just a way of reminding us all that we’re human, not anything divine.  What we do can be, but the breaths we take are nothing more than a myriad of poor decisions meshed with great ones.  

Paterno will be called a lot of things over the next few days.  Father, husband, leader, and coach.  Only in hindsight do we really realize what this game meant to Paterno.  He couldn’t live without it, and that isn’t a cliché comment or an understatement.  He really couldn’t, which will testify to the greatness that became Penn State football.  Paterno beat the odds, with the passionate drive at 85 years old of a 22 year old hitting New York right out of college, with glossy eyes and impossible dreams.  More than once, PSU wanted him out.  More than once, Coach wanted to fix this program.  More than once, he most certainly did.  The obituary was written on this man’s career over a decade ago, only the man himself decided it wasn’t getting published.  

Paterno forever beat the odds.  At football.  At life.  But in the end, “Time” is an opponent that has yet to meet a worthy foe, and “fate” is an excuse people use to justify why they didn’t do enough to succeed.  When I met up with my mother for church and to see my team, the wounds of yesterday still fresh in my mind and the nightmares of “what I should have done” having danced through my head to the point of cold sweats last night in bed, I thought of Jay Paterno.  I thought of Scott Paterno.  And Sue.  I thought that for them, it was a given that Penn State Saturday’s in the fall would be with Joe leading young men on the sidelines under the watchful gaze of the football gods.  I thought how they probably felt as though this was a rite, and it’d never end.  The same way I feel about meeting up with Mom every Sunday, like I always.  I realized that I need to enjoy it while it lasts, because in the end, Time will have other ideas.

Time had them yesterday, the way that they had for Joe 41 times.  At some point, I’ll walk back to the gym where lies my greatest personal failure as a coach, maybe the way JoePa felt.  At some point, I’ll pick up those shattered dreams and pieces of heartbreak and stick them in a box for next year.  Which will be year 4.  I only pray to have this feeling 41 times.  Because in the end, the stains of what you’ve done for others will define you, and little more.  When Penn State fired Joe Paterno, be you think it right or wrong, they laid the seeds for the broken heart.  And though medically not a reason for perish, the ink was put to the paper there, later than anyone expected.  Paterno loved this game.  He loved coaching.  He loved his family.  Coach gave Time one hell of a fight.  Always out ran it.  Until he didn’t really need to.  Celebrate him, because there will never, ever be another.