Bernard Fernandez: Bittersweet 85th birthday for Paterno

TODAY IS JOSEPH Vincent Paterno's 85th birthday. But this latest anniversary of his 1926 arrival on Earth is unlike any the longtime and now former Penn State football coach has ever experienced, and not seemingly much of an occasion for celebration.

By all rights, the winningest coach in Division I college football history should be doing what he had done 37 previous times at this time of year, which is preparing his Nittany Lions to play in a bowl game. That has become a near-annual rite of winter for the school he built into a perennial national power after he succeeded Rip Engle in 1966. But JoePa, who surpassed the late Eddie Robinson, of Grambling State, when he won his 409th game on Oct. 29, a 10-7 squeaker over Illinois in Beaver Stadium, won't be in Dallas on Jan. 2, when the 9-3 Lions take on 12-1 Houston in the TicketCity Bowl. He'll likely be in the same place he has been for most of these past 6 weeks, behind closed doors of his unpretentious McKee Street home in State College, within walking distance of his campus office.

Maybe Paterno would have been on the sofa in his living room anyway, given his Nov. 18 lung cancer diagnosis, and the refractured pelvis he suffered in a fall at his home only 23 days later. Maybe his longtime defensive coordinator, interim coach Tom Bradley, would be filling in for his mentor and role model in "historic" Cotton Bowl Stadium, which opened in 1929 and is 3 years younger than Paterno.

And, just maybe, JoePa's advancing age and declining health would have meant an end to his 46-year head-coaching career in Happy Valley, and to his 62 years in the program he has served since 1950, despite his expressed desire to lead the Lions into his 90s. No one, probably not even Paterno, expected him to last forever on the job with which he for so long has been instantly identifiable.

But no one - certainly not the throngs of admirers throughout the nation who celebrated the teacher and the humanitarian as much as the established winner - could have anticipated that his departure from that job would come under a cloud of scandal.

Just 5 days after the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse bombshell fell, Penn State's Board of Trustees fired the legendary Paterno. Thousands of students poured into the streets of State College to protest, even as some commentators and pundits were chipping away at Paterno's "Saint Joe" as fraudulent.