Most people, myself included, read Sports Illustrated for the articles.  At least until the swimsuit edition arrives.  But other than that issue, pictures are secondary (after the first few pages) to the written word.  The last page has become an audition to see which writer comes as close in popularity to the readers as Rick Reilly.  It might be a stretch to compare him to John Wooden but there seems to be no outright favorite yet even though there have been several very good columns.  It seems that there are many Gene Bartows, Gary Cunninghams, Walt Hazzards, Jim Harricks, Steve Lavins and Ben Howlands (most of whom were outstanding coaches) at SI but no one like Coach Wooden.  For my money, there hasn’t even been a Larry Brown yet.

When SI first asked its readers which of a list of sports, other than football, basketball, baseball and possibly a couple others that currently escape my mind (which shows my particular tastes), they had an interest in, e.g. tennis, golf, auto racing, etc. my choices came down to tennis and golf.  It was a tough choice and if I were younger - and still playing tennis - that would have been what I’d have selected.  Since my back issues eliminated playing tennis about a decade ago, I chose golf.  Now I get additional articles on the sport as well as special extra editions.  A good friend of mine is a scratch (or close) golfer so those issues go to him, after I’ve briefly scanned them.

The one on the Masters that just came out intrigued me enough that as I perused it, the article with their panel of (three) experts (and one anonymous pro) caught my eye.  Opinions abound in sports and I’ve found (through experience) it’s always a good idea to hear what others who are deeply involved in a sport or topic think before you start popping off, or even discussing, issues so as not to look foolish.  Although I’ve read some interesting points in the past, little did I think I’d come across as introspective an explanation as Gary Van Sickle’s regarding Rory McElroy’s approach to his profession.  Van Sickle said of the young star:

“He’s not all golf like Tiger was.  Rory is going to take the time to enjoy his life.  He reminds me of Arnold Palmer a little there.  He’ll be streaky great, and he’s got other interests.  He’ll have a better quality of life, and if that means a couple fewer major wins in the long run, that’s all right.”

In addition to expertly defining the differences between the two golfers, the Van Sickle quote speaks volumes to most everybody who has a job.  If you’ve just entered the working world, those are your choices.  How do you approach your profession?  Do you love it so much that it consumes your every waking minute?  In the business world, that type of an employee is called a workaholic.  Those people often find an abundance of material wealth, yet, frequently, there is something missing in their life in another area of it.  In the field of sports, we call them single minded and driven.  Some (most?) people think a person’s life should be balanced.  We all remember the old adage “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.” 

The times and people (and salaries/purses for sporting events/endorsement deals) have made that quote obsolete.  Now, it’s “get it while you can” and “the window of opportunity is open only so long.”  Maybe not so much in golf where some wise brilliant old golfer had the imagination - or told somebody else - to create a Seniors Tour.  Still, people don’t want to see extraordinary talent not pushed to the ultimate.  Usually parents and agents because 1) nearly all of them weren’t as athletically blessed and 2) they don’t have to do the heavy lifting.

Far too many people have altered the line so that it turned around the original message.  Maybe Rory McElroy has it right but for now it’s become:     

“All work and no play make Jack (or Jill) a champion.”

Ohio State and Arizona played one of those NCAA tournament games in which the cliche “every possession counts” was to be taken literally.  ‘Zona was up at the half but the Buckeyes came storming out of the locker room and quickly claimed the lead.  Now, let’s flash forward to the final two-and-a-half minutes of the game when OSU’s Nick Johnson deflected an Ohio State pass into the backcourt.  He and the Bucks’ Aaron Craft scrambled for the ball.  Johnson did what he’s seen so many of his peers do in similar situations.  He wisely called time out.  Or was it such a smart move?  True, they got the ball - but the time out was the Wildcats’ last. Had Johnson simply grabbed onto the ball and been tied up, the call would have been a “held ball” with the possession arrow going to . . . Arizona.  In other words, there was no need to burn that final timeout, leaving the ‘Cats with zero so late in such a meaningful game.

Anyone reading this blog is undoubtedly saying, “How in the hell - in the heat of such a moment - is Nick Johnson supposed to know the possession arrow in his team’s favor?”  My former boss and current friend and mentor George Raveling started a website about a year or so ago (CoachGeorgeRaveling.com - a site I highly recommend).  To date I’ve contributed a couple articles and I’m currently working on another (”Seating Arrangements and Duties for the Coaching Staff During Games”).  The first was entitled Top 10 Traits of a College Assistant Coach.  Trait #6 mentions “end-of-game situations.”  I encourage anyone who’d like to more deeply be involved when witnessing a game to read it.  The article I’m currently writing will reiterate the answer to the above posed question - as did Trait #6.

An assistant coach should have made everyone - coaches and players - aware of 1) how many times out the team had left and 2) which team had the possession arrow.  Some may think, “oh that’s easy to say.”  No.  It . . . really . . . is.  It’s just part of your practices.  Maybe not every day in October, November or December but as the season moves on (and the majority of your defensive and offensive sets or plays have been implemented), there is more time for special situations and incidents exactly like the one that occurred in the UA-OSU contest.

Arizona’s head coach Sean Miller was speaking about the final Ohio State possession when Aaron Craft passed the ball to LaQuinton Ross who buried a three-pointer with a couple of ticks left.  What he said was their plan was to switch the screen on the ball but didn’t.  He lamented (not a direct quote):

“In the pressure of the NCAA tournament, as the pressure mounts, it’s difficult for guys to do what you want them to do.”

Full disclosure: I haven’t wrestled since fifth grade PE.  When it was my turn, I didn’t like it.  Yet, when I heard the news that, of all sports, wrestling was going to be dropped from the 2020 Olympic Games, the first thought that came to me is that wrestling has to be the sport most discriminated against.  Maybe it’s because the nature of wrestling is that the athlete requests so little.  They train in nasty conditions, ask their bodies to perform complicated moves but have to “make weight” in order to compete. And you get one shot at making weight.  Miss and you’re out.  No letters from mom, no excuses, no blaming others.

As with every sport, or for that matter, anything that involves extraordinary skill, constant, intense practice is mandatory.  People, in general, have no idea exactly how good the highly skilled “player” is.  During my time at Tennessee in the early-to-mid ’80s, coaches would get passes for grand openings with the free drinks and hors d’oeuvres.  One year several of the UT coaches went to Bennigans.  Four of us were sitting at one of those bar tables, the kind that are higher than regular restaurant tables.  We kidded each other about the weirder parts of the other’s sport.

Sitting next to me was Gray Simons, our wrestling coach and a former Olympic silver medal winner.  Being a wise ass, I said, “I never really understood a sport where the purpose was to stick your face in the other guy’s armpit.”  Gray chuckled, reached over and playfully grabbed the back of my neck.  Within about a second and a half he had me in a headlock and I realized that if he flexed his arms, he’d snap my neck.  All I could think of was, “How much has he had to drink?”  (That story was from my book Life’s A Joke).

The past ten years, prior to my retirement last June, I taught high school math.  Without exception, I taught a minimum of three wrestlers each year.  I would tell them about Gray (leaving out the choke hold story) as well as another silver medalist I had in class (Theory of Coaching Basketball at Fresno State) - Stephen Abas.  The more I thought about wrestling, the more positives I could see in the sport so it became a talking point.  I taught life lessons as well as algebra.  Wrestling’s positives were:  1) Accountability - it’s all on you.  You can’t blame anybody else - coach, teammates, fans (except the ref but that’s supplanted baseball as the great America past time).  2) No times out - suck it up.  3) No substitutions - suck it up.  4) Discipline - first and foremost, making weight.  With whatever the percentage of overweight (obese) people as we have in this country, wrestlers get disqualified if they are one ounce over their weight class.  And you don’t get to bring your own scale.  5) Hard work - usually early morning workouts, followed by sessions in the weight room.  And no cheating at meals or it’s all for naught.

A sport with all those positives is being eliminated from the 2020 Games?  The earliest Olympics had wrestlers as a segment of its population.  And they’re doing away with wrestling?  I remember Gray Simons leaving Tennessee to take the wrestling job at Old Dominion and me asking him why he’d take what seemed to be a lesser position.  He told me he’d heard from reliable sources that UT was going to drop wrestling.  In a year his sources proved reliable.

I was at Fresno State when rumors would swirl on an annual basis that wrestling’s head was on the chopping block.  Dennis DeLiddo, a legend in the wrestling community in this area, used to always fret the love of his life was going to be taken away.  When he was assured wrestling was safe, he felt comfortable retiring.  He did and a couple years later, wrestling was no more at Fresno State.

What always astonished me was how little it took to field a wrestling team.  Their practice facility would have been condemned - if the Fresno PD could have found it.  It was not uncommon for DeLiddo’s teams to have a match in Fresno in the morning/early afternoon, then jump into vans and drive three hours to Stanford for a night competition.  There were a limited number of athletes and the number of scholarships (I can’t recall exactly how many “equivalencies” they have, e.g. three-and-a-half scholarships? to be split among the entire squad).  In addition, the make up of the team had a great percentage of minorities and low income kids (which usually is an administrator’s dream).

Maybe it’s because they’re not entitled and the sport is so demanding that they forgot the one essential necessary for survival in today’s climate - a great lawyer.

Today’s quote is from none other than me:

“If there is any justice in the world, the 2020 Olympics will include wrestling.”

When I was a member of the National Speakers Association, I wrote a book of funny (true) stories (Life’s A Joke) and had begun another on a more serious subject.  It was to be titled “The Lost Art of Role Model Leadership.”  My idea was to write the book but have a “co-author,” someone relatively famous who would only have to read the text and agree to have his name on the cover - above mine.  The content was derived from the numerous books I’d read, the experiences I’d had and the people I’d met.  There were five categories with several traits in each categories.  Naturally, a great deal of it was to be quotes.  Short, or a bit longer, lines that made a powerful point.

I got the idea when I was returning from working Michael Jordan’s Flight School in Santa Barbara.  Nearly all the time I’m driving alone I’m listening to an audiobook.  Since the one I had in my disk player on the way to Santa Barbara had finished, I stopped at an outlet mall in Atascadero to get another.  The one that caught my eye was a book Jane Leavy did on Sandy Koufax.  If ever I idolized a professional athlete, Sandy Koufax was my man.  I mean, I was a Jewish teenager from New Jersey in the ’60s.  After listening to that audiobook, I knew I had my co-author.  Instead of boring you with how it didn’t happen, suffice to say I thought I had an “in” to help me present my idea to Sandy but it didn’t pan out.

I was pretty bummed out until it struck me there had to be other guys who qualified.  That thought was more difficult than it should have been but I came up with several other possibilities.  Because I spent 30 years in the world of relatively big-time college athletics, I had made contacts and met “people who knew people.”  A few I thought would be possibilities were David Robinson, Cal Ripken Jr, Roger Staubach and John Stockton as well as a couple of other basketball guys, Grant Hill and Bruce Bowen, because of their alpha vs omega type backgrounds.  Obviously, nothing came to fruition.  My contacts not as powerful, or willing, as I thought.

Now that I’m retired, I’ve had people ask me if I was planning on coming out with another book - a sequel to Life’s A Joke.  I mentioned to my friend/boss/mentor George Raveling I had quite a bit of a book on role model leadership already done and he said to me, “Then why don’t you write it?”  Good question.  Currently occupying my time are CuteBabyNameGifts.com, a business which produces unique, personalized artwork for babies and toddlers; traveling weekends throughout California with my wife to watch our son, Alex, play for the Cal State Monterey Bay Otters; yoga, stretching and exercising, and, if you’ve read many of these posts or know me at all, going to doctors’ appointments.

If I did decide to venture into the literary world and tackle my original idea, who in the world could be a role model?  Our country’s been blitzed by not just negative stories but horrendous, offensive ones.  Put it this way, if you’ve ever wanted to tell a lie, now’s the time!  From Jerry Sandusky to Lance Armstrong to Manti Te’o, we’ve got some hard-to-top whoppers.  I imagine there are some qualified men and women.  In fact, if you think of one - please let me know.

What is redeeming is that people are tired of less-than-the-whole-truth apologies and explanations.  What needs to be taught to the youth (and not-so-youth) is the statement by  Mark Twain:

“A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

My computer has been acting up and is going in for service later today.  I hope to have it back foe a blog next Tuesday.  Thanks for your patience and loyalty. 

With all of the tearing down of individuals and groups that’s been employed (in many cases, successfully) in this country, it’s time we changed our ways and became more trusting of each other.  I mean, is the answer to the gunning down of innocent people - as young as age five - really to get more guns?

Because our son’s college basketball team plays nearly every game in the state of California and because I have had to make so many visits to the Stanford Pain Management Clinic (from Fresno), I do an awful lot of driving.  In February of 2012 I bought a new car and, at my current pace, it’s first birthday will see it turn 25,000 miles.  On so many occasions I realize exactly how much trust I have to have with my fellow drivers.  I trust the guy driving on the (either) side of me won’t cut me off, putting me in an impossible situation and forcing an accident.  I have to trust that cars at red lights observe the rule that I have the right of way just as the vehicles approaching stop signs are going to stop.

And they have to trust me.

It calls for both defensive and offensive driving.  While there are car accidents daily, it’s always amazed me how, overall, most people get to and from their destinations safely.  The rest of our interactions should run so smoothly.

Trust comes from being trustworthy.  It’s an admirable a trait for a person to have and it’s one of the easier ones to acquire.  Seldom is a trust broken that’s not done intentionally.  Possibly with regret, but nevertheless done on purpose.  The first quote below, from my late mentor, the brilliant John Savage, explains the value of trust while the second, from another whose life would be good to model, Abraham Lincoln, states how awful a world without trust would be:

“All relationships are built on trust and trust, once violated, can never be regained.”

“It is better to trust and occasionally be disappointed than to mistrust and be miserable all the time.”

A press release from Dallas said Derek Fisher requested to be waived by the Mavericks so he could spend time with his family.  No one can ever question Fisher’s character.  He was a major factor in the negotiations for the new collective bargaining agreement (CBA), a level head in a room of . . . unlevel heads.  He can be remembered for, among other memorable plays, returning at game time and ultimately knocking down a crucial three to help the Jazz beat the Warriors in Game 2 of the NBA playoffs.  He had been with his daughter for her complicated, delicate eye surgery and flew from New York to Salt Lake City.

Although Fisher had built up enough equity with fans, what doesn’t quite pass the smell test is his excuse for retiring.  Players who want to spend more time with their families usually are guys whose ability has waned to where they no longer can make significant contributions to their clubs.  If family time was so important, different decisions would be made and more families would stay together.  There actually are players and coaches who work in the professional ranks without divorce or hard feelings.

What must be done is to prioritize properly.  The NBA schedule is brutal (as are all the other professional sports leagues).  For a select few (emphasis on few), the answer is to keep the family together during the season.  Obviously, this can only work if the player is married with children who aren’t of school age.  It’s expensive and because most teams don’t allow non-team personnel on their charters, it becomes one agonizing experience after another for the wife.

The better solution is to understand that family time together is limited.  Therefore, when everybody’s together, make it quality time.  I know - and have worked with - many coaches who realize that, while they may be physically tired from the stress and travel of a long season, when they get a day off, nothing interrupts family time, whether it’s a cookout, catching a movie or going to a school performance.

Players who claim they’re giving up their career so they can have more “family time” simply means their skills have eroded and no team’s offered them a contract.  In too many instances, they sacrifice their family for their career which is a shame when they could have both.  In no means am I giving marital advice, but I often wonder why some of those guys are in such a hurry to get married.  Worse, yet in vogue today, are those who bring children into the world only to become absentee dads.

No matter what someone’s salary is, the fact remains:

“Making a baby is not the same as being a father.”

The headline sounds like a Chicken Little warning but football is at such a crossroads now.  The only way it can be saved is with drastic changes, the kind that would make it unrecognizable to someone who enjoyed it in the 1960s but hadn’t seen a game since.  It’s doubtful there is such a creature so the experiment is moot but when you combine the new player safety rules (without which football would probably spend more time in the courtroom than on the playing field) and the increased strength, speed and overall ability of today’s player, one of them is going to lose out.  Between the two, the latter will be overwhelmingly outvoted by the former - unless the only voters were the people who used to watch the gladiators.  The game will be as popular as ever; it just won’t be the same.

Ed Reed, defensive back for the Baltimore Ravens, was called for his third violation of player safety rules in the past three years, i.e. hits to the neck and head area of a defenseless player.  According to the commissioner’s office, his actions will earn him one game suspension which, at his salary, would be in the range of $420,000.  That’s an expensive lesson although I imagine that’s why the rules are structured the way they are.  It’s easy to understand - unless you’re Ed Reed, in which case you’d be really pissed.

Although Reed has a history of being a, for lack of a better term, “hit man,” in this case the punishment seems quite a bit harsher that the crime after viewing the three infractions.  The first was a roughing the passer (vs. the Saints’ Drew Brees), yet Reed would probably tell you he whacked many a QB harder than he did on that day.  Brees would undoubtedly agree he’d been hut harder.  The second was a hit on a defenseless receiver (vs. the Patriots’ Deion Branch) and is, by far, the worst of the three.  The final one, the one that put him over the top, was also a helmet to helmet collision with Pittsburgh’s Emmanuel Sanders but “hit” would describe the contact better.  He didn’t look to be headhunting as didn’t accelerate through the tackle.

The scientific part of sports, in relation to the human body, has grown exponentially - in both legal and illegal ways.  Players are just bigger, stronger and faster than ever before in the game’s history.  Coaches are smarter.  The game has evolved from men leaving their jobs, driving to the field, changing clothes and “having at it,” into a true profession - especially for the coaches.  In the earlier days of football (from the no facemask days until the ’80s), offensive didn’t have elaborate “schemes” to deal with.  Offensively, the coaches have implemented “packages” for specialists.  It’s genius until the next generation comes along and takes the game a level higher.

But, if a football player is going to be fined nearly a half a million dollars for three hits like the ones delivered by Ed Reed, either football will drastically tone down or Roger Goodell and his minions will pull back on their safety issues.  All but the Neanderthals are on the safety side.  Personally, I’ve suffered through ten back surgeries.  When I went to see the doctor for my first one, a ruptured disk at C5-6, the first question he asked me was if I’d ever been in a car accident.  When I said no, he asked me if I had ever played football.  That was in 1987.  Now, some of the hits in football are like car accidents.

When I saw the kid from UCLA hit Matt Barkley, who had no idea he was coming, my body actually tingled.  Then, they kept showing the replay and when I saw his neck snap, I had to turn away.  Many years ago, I recall a study being done that showed in an average NFL game, there are only nine minutes of actual action.  I mentioned that to a football coach on the staff at our university and he told me:

“There might only be nine minutes of action, but it’s nine minutes of violent collisions.”

Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/football/nfl/11/19/ed-reed-suspended.ap/index.html#ixzz2CkNspgfV

hits to the head and neck area of defenseless players.

Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/football/nfl/11/19/ed-reed-suspended.ap/index.html#ixzz2CkNspgfV

hits to the head and neck area of defenseless players.

Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/football/nfl/11/19/ed-reed-suspended.ap/index.html#ixzz2CkNspgfV

Heading to Monterey to watch younger son Alex’s first college basketball game.  Then, it’s onto Stanford for a refill for my pain pump.  The blog will return on Wednesday.  The next effort for this site will be the trials and tribulations of parents taking in their son’s first college contest.  Among mother, father and son, by far, the least nervous with be the youngest.

With Texas A&M going down to Tuscaloosa and knocking off the #1 Crimson Tide, the nation now has three undefeated teams.  Should all of them win out (not at all an easy task - for any of them), the BCS brain trust will need to pick two teams to play for the national championship.  Out of those three.  Uh, . . . maybe not.  If Alabama doesn’t lose again - and not too many people feel they will, including in the SEC Championship game - the Crimson Tide will have an argument that they’re certainly one of the top two teams in the nation, independent of any other team’s record.

Their reasoning will have to do with strength of schedule, an argument they would surely win if two of the final three lost.  Or if all of them did.  It would be unimaginable that anyone would argue that Alabama isn’t the best of all the one-loss teams.  When you take into account that every team Alabama plays approaches the game as its own national championship, the fact the Red Elephants continue to win is remarkable enough on its own.  Their swagger alone may not scare opponents but their talent, execution and discipline do.

The BCS has adopted a four-team playoff but that’s not yet in effect (for this year).  Has there ever been an organization that has caused so much confusion and ill feelings - that wasn’t a union?  A playoff system results in controversy but people don’t seem to have the same feelings toward playoffs they do toward the BCS.  If next week the first of the undefeated teams loses, wouldn’t it be great to have YouTube catch the BCSers watching the remaining two teams?  They’d know the words to both fight songs.

If two teams are left without a loss, although they may not be the two best teams in the country, they’d be the easiest two to justify for a national championship game.  After all, did the people of this nation have the two best people to vote for?  Should anyone think this isn’t at all right, recall the prophetic words of Rick Santorum:

“Just try to make the best of a bad situation.”

Politics in America today have turned into theater, which may be appealing to the performers but does little for many of us who would like to hear what they think of the real issues and how they plan on improving the country.  So, representing this brand of individual is none other than yours truly.  Here are the (my) rules:

1) The moderator is equipped with a taser to be used as soon as one candidate a) so much as mentions the other’s name, b) refers to what my opponent’s plan is or will be and c) talks over the other, out of turn.  In other words, tell Americans about you and what electing you would mean to us.  Note: If a taser is deemed to be overly excessive, the rule shall be amended, to, rather than tase the offender, mute his/her microphone.

2) Each candidate will be allowed to bring a special adviser, whomever he or she considers an expert on the subject being discussed and whose views reflect those of the candidate.  These advisers will or will not necessarily be a current or potential Cabinet member.  The reason for this rule is simple.  The job of president is entirely too difficult for one person to do by him or herself.  The candidate will answer the question but will be allowed to confer with his or her adviser before doing so.

The nation, if not the world, has become one of specialists.  No one ought to be expected to know everything.  It is now commonplace for an honest gaffe to be recorded and YouTubed forever.  A candidate may has changed his or her opinion from years ago, yet the former version is still out there for anyone and everyone to see, hear, email, text or tweet.  Everyone’s job - especially the POTUS - is infinitely more difficult since the invention of the Internet.

3)  There should be a gallery of people who have used dishonest methods in the past to attain personal fame, power or fortune.  Should candidates find it necessary to use any such person in their campaign, it should be duly noted and the candidate should disclose his or her reason for wanting to be associated with such an individual.  This is not negative campaigning as the agenda of each of these people has been exposed and we should see them for what they are - people who will win at any cost.  There shouldn’t be any room for such people in politics.  Examples are Michael Moore, Karl Rove and hundreds of others - on both sides.

4) Each candidate must explain how he or she plans to work with members of the opposing party.  Once again, there is to be no speaking over the opponent.  In this one case there will be an exception and each candidate will have a limited amount of time (two minutes?) to explain why his or her opponent’s “across-the-aisle” techniques won’t succeed but there needs to be evidence why the methods won’t work .

Why, you might ask, would I, someone who admittedly knows next-to-nothing about politics - and cares just a smidgen less - would decide to come up with something like the above?  The recent negativity in campaigning is, or at least out to be, embarrassing to all Americans - and outlawed.  Plus, it’s hard to blog on something every day!  Seriously, if selecting a leader is vital - and it is - how important is picking someone to lead the country for the next four years?  Seemingly, the overwhelming majority of our citizens aren’t happy with the direction our nation is headed in so many areas - educationally, economically, taking care of our seniors, younger folks being able to take care of themselves, the use of our military, . . .  whatever!   We have a chance to improve it but only if we change our attitudes.

As best selling author John Maxwell says:

“It’s not our conditions that determine our choices; it’s our choices that determine our conditions.”

His statue is moved, the NCAA is on their way in and people everywhere - with the possible exception of those in eastern PA - are having at Joe Paterno and what his legacy will be.  Maybe this is as it should be but there ought to be some degree of fairness afforded him.  The first part of the fairness is that, while the entire situation is disgraceful, the main culprit is Jerry Sandusky.  He is the man who abused those children, not Paterno.  For the people who claim what Paterno did was just as bad as what Sandusky did, that’s simply not true.  Paterno’s lack of proper action was an egregious mistake.  Had he - and others - acted immediately, many of the young boys would have spared.  But Paterno was not a child molester.  In fact, without Jerry Sandusky there is no tragedy at Penn State.  NCAA violations, quite possibly, but if you truly believe that that list isn’t a lengthy one, your favorite team better be from the Ivy League or someday you might be in for a major shock.

“The horrific allegations that came to light in November have haunted us all, but nothing we have experienced compares to that of Jerry Sandusky’s victims,” Steve Garban former chairman of the Penn State board of trustees said.  “My thoughts and prayers will remain with them always.”  All of Paterno’s vocal critics will say, “Amen” to Garban but, “now let me get on with my lambasting Paterno.”

The highly opinionated Roland Martin said, “Joe Paterno was nothing more than a narcissistic, arrogant coward.”  How well Martin actually knew Paterno I don’t know but there are many who have exhibited similar intense feelings toward the late coach.  Maybe that attitude is due to some previous confrontation with Paterno, maybe it’s a long held vendetta because JoePa blew them off one day when they asked for an interview they didn’t get.  Or maybe they’re just small people who love it when people higher up on the totem pole than they are found to have faults and relish in crucifying them.  What is it these people want?  Exhume his body and draw and quarter it in Beaver Stadium on national TV?

Therein lies the difference in how people feel toward this ugly situation.  Those who’ve known him for some time, e.g. his former players, have an entirely different take of him.  From Lavar Arrington to Matt Millen to former defensive captain Lee Rubin.  When Rubin was asked, “After hearing the Freeh report, do you feel the same way about Joe Paterno?” his response was, “Not regarding my relationship with him and all he did for me.”

“All he did for me.”  Let’s not forget that JoePa spent over six decades, longer than most of his critics have been alive, and accomplished some pretty exceptional things during that tenure.  Those who knew Joe, or admired him from afar, are devastated by his inability to have done what was right because, for so long, that’s what they felt Joe stood for.  When he said, “In hindsight, I wished I had done more,” his supporters sympathized. The human element holds as true in this story as it does in every one.

In John Maxwell’s book, Everyday Greatness, he relates that in 1972 Paterno was offered the head coaching job with the New England Patriots which was worth in the neighborhood of $1.5 million, plus partial ownership of the franchise.  After refusing it, JoePa said, “I love winning ballgames as much as any coach does, but I know there’s something that counts more than victory or defeat.  I get to watch my players grow - in their discipline, in their educational development and as human beings.  That is a deep lasting reward I could never get from pro ball.”  That doesn’t sound like the monster many are making him out to be.

In the end his loyalty to Penn State may have been his undoing.  He stayed too long.  Winning as big as he did, for as long as he did, in such a remote place as Happy Valley gave him godlike stature.  This is what could have led to his dismissal of Sandusky’s actions and his apparent abuse of power.  Paterno isn’t alone in a football coach who, in retrospect, made missteps in authority.  To find what autonomous power can do, read The Junction Boys about Bear Bryant’s preseason conditioning techniques.  People laugh that off as, “Ol’ Bear was a sonuvabitch to play for, but he made you a man.”  As with much of life, timing is key.  Does anyone in their right mind think Joe Paterno really condoned sexually abusing children?

In an interview earlier this week, Mike Krzyzewski, who became a close friend of JoePa’s said that there’s danger when someone is afforded power, prestige and, he added, money.  “But,” Mike continued, “with all of that comes trust and it can’t be abused.”

Another coach, Bill Parcells, when asked about how to handle making a mistake, gave some terrific insight:

“When you make a mistake: 1) admit it, 2) correct it, 3) learn from it, 4) don’t dwell on it, 5) don’t repeat it.”