A hero's life, a mortal's end: JoePa's 'grand experiment'

IN 1943, the Jesuit priest who taught Latin at Brooklyn Prep introduced a book-loving 17-year-old kid named Joe Paterno to the Roman epic that would change his life: Virgil's Aeneid.

But the young Paterno - whose ability to throw a football as adeptly as he translated Latin earned him a scholarship to the Ivy League's Brown University - did more than merely fall in love with the heroic exploits of Aeneas, who preached duty and battled the fates to build an "empire without end."

With his disarming mix of a lofty diploma and Brooklyn-bred blue-collar grit, Paterno showed up in the central nowhere of Pennsylvania in 1950 seemingly determined - perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not - to reinvent both the exploits and the ideals of the ancient Roman hero, but on the modern battlefield of football.

The tumultuous last plot twists and tortured final days of Paterno - who succumbed yesterday in a State College hospital to lung cancer at age 85 - left little doubt that the remarkable life of the winningest coach in major college history was an epic for a new millennium, worthy of the classic poets.

But will Paterno's odyssey be remembered for its long trail of heroic exploits that included not just gridiron glory but his one-of-a-kind commitment to the philosophy of the scholar-athlete? Or did the final shock of the child-sex-abuse scandal of his longtime assistant Jerry Sandusky rewrite the ending as a Greek tragedy, its hero undone by the prideful flaw of hubris?

Paterno and his huge following never doubted that his approach to both football and life encapsulated ancient virtues of honor, channeling the brutality of war into sport.

"The adventures of Aeneas seeped into far corners of my mind, into my feelings about what is true and honorable and important," Paterno wrote in his 1989 autobiography. "They helped shape everything I have since become" - including his insistence on keeping his Nittany Lions in plain blue-and-white uniforms with no name on the back.

Paterno became head coach at Penn State in 1966, just in time for the flood of upwardly mobile baby boomers who swelled America's public campuses, and he built on undefeated seasons in 1968 and 1969 to practically invent a new world in which the communal values of football became the vessel for a diverse university to unite in common purpose.