By Robert Chambers
Joe Posnanski, named best sportswriter in America this year by the Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame, agreed to pen Joe Paterno’s biography just a few months before the notorious Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal, in November 2011, obliterated Paterno’s carefully built pristine image, as well as that of his employer, Pennsylvania State University.
As the scandal was unfolding before all of us, Posnanski came more and more to view the great football coach’s remarkable life story as a riveting soap opera in which an apparently profoundly moral man was suddenly brought low by human weakness, carrying down with him the now celebrated institution that he had done more than anyone else to build.
The eventual shape of Paterno, in fact, took on that of an opera, with Posnanski dividing his book into five acts, complete with arias, intermezzos, a beginning overture, a closing finale, and even an encore. Its flowery chapters are also melodic and dramatic, bearing such titles as “The Grand Experiment,” “Sainthood,” “Mountaintop,” “Evil and Good,” and “To Be or Not to Be.” In the end, such bombast seems fitting to Posnanski’s task. His subject, after all, was anything but an ordinary man.
Posted on November 17, 2012