Two decades ago when I was first starting out as a reporter, I was given a simple assignment: Drive up to State College, go to a spring practice at Beaver Stadium and write a story.
There was probably more to it than that. Chances are I probably was told to write about some lineman or practice-squad guy from Lancaster County. During those halcyon days before the Internet was even a rumor and the business changed irrevocably, mine was a pretty big assignment. After all, to sate the appetites of Penn State football fans in the Pennsyltucky portion of the Commonwealth is no laughing matter. As it is with the football team in Alabama, Penn Staters are downright cultish, and non-believers are noted and monitored.
Think about it: I was going to a practice in a 100,000-seat stadium that was the lead up for the annual spring, intrasquad game in which the tickets were next to impossible to purchase.
So yeah, it was a big deal.
More than that, it was my first time to see the center of the cult, Joe Paterno, up close. Going to that spring practice during the early 1990s provided the chance of possibly talking about football with JoePa.
Even for this non-believer, the cult of Joe and Penn State was respected grudgingly. The wins and the graduation rates were undeniable. You didn't have to be a fan of Penn State or Paterno to understand he got results.
There was another reason I was looking forward to meeting Paterno, too.
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A few years before the spring practice, I read Paternos autobiography and was fascinated with his upbringing in Brooklyn where his father, Angelo, ruled righteously and provided his son with the ethos that became the building blocks for his football program.
Here was a Brooklyn kid, a son of immigrants, who went to an Ivy League school thanks to football. I was enchanted by the coach's description of his grammar school and high school days in Brooklyn and how one specific Jesuit Brother used to make him stay late after to school for special assignments in Latin and literature. In fact, it may have been the most interesting section in any jock lit book I have ever read.
Though his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer, football was just too strong of a pull. Besides, with football, the son reasoned, he could help kids become lawyers. I always wondered what the Jesuits or what Angelo Paterno would think of the life Joe Paterno led.
Those thoughts sprung to mind after that practice when I tried to ask the coach a question and was brushed to the side by a phalanx of security guards, leaving the press to shout out questions as if we were trying to get a wave from the President as he walked to a helicopter on the South Lawn.
All this for a football coach? Undoubtedly Paterno wondered about it himself during reflective moments.
I thought about Angelo Paterno a lot over the past few months when the real world finally infiltrated the cult at State College in the wake of the ugliest scandal in the history of college sports. The father of the famous football coach was an idealist. He loved the opera and worked as a law clerk in order to pay for night school.
I thought about Angelo Paterno when I once heard Joe talk about why he would never quit coaching football. He did not want to be like Bear Bryant, the famous coach at Alabama who died 28 days after his retirement.
What else would I do? I don't want to die, he said.
Paterno died 74 days after his coaching career ended. But at State College, which houses the football program he built and university he led to national prominence, death is a physical phenomenon only. Paternos spirit seems to engulf the folks in the tiny hamlet.
At the very least, that seems like a fitting tribute for a father and a son.
E-mail John R. Finger at jfinger@comcastsportsnet.com