Bernard Fernandez: Paterno was the last one of his kind

Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

There will, of course, be those who will claim that the passing of legendary former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was not so much from the effects of the lung cancer that weakened his 85-year-old body as from a broken heart. And there probably is some truth to that.

No doubt, the manner in which Paterno's 62-year career at the university with which his name became synonymous, the last 46 of which he served as head coach, took a more devastating toll on him than would have been the case had he been gently nudged into retirement by Penn State's Board of Trustees. But his late-night firing on Nov. 9 could not have been interpreted on his part as anything but a personal repudiation of JoePa the man more so than as a coach, and with that shocking dismissal came a flood of other veritable slaps to the face in the form of the removal of his name from various awards.

Perhaps no one in the history of American sports had fallen so far, so fast from the near-universal esteem in which the public had held him. So the frail, fragile icon retreated inside the walls of his modest State College home, wondering what, if anything, could be done to preserve the legacy he had painstakingly crafted over so many years. But fairly or not, a wrecking ball had been taken to that legacy, proving if nothing else that it is always easier to destroy than to build.

You wonder if Joe Paterno is going to his grave wishing he had never heard the name of Jerry Sandusky, the defensive coordinator of his 1982 and 1986 national championship teams whose Nov. 5 arrest for child sexual abuse set into motion a chain of events that brought down not only the Joe Paterno era, but possibly his legend as well.

Then again, Paterno had frequently spoken of the possible consequences of a time when the coaching of football, and the mentoring of those who played the game for him, was no longer an integral part of his life. It was almost as if he dared to believe that by refusing to step away from his sideline duties he could somehow cheat death.