Posnanski and the Paterno book

Allow me to quickly clarify the Shakespearean hero comment.

I meant that he was positioned to be a heroic figure, but because of his flaws - namely over concern about his own image and the image of the institution he commanded - he could not achieve that.

It seems like there should be little question that he was positioned to do good. He had power. He had success. He had adulation. He had a platform most of us could only dream of. The tragedy is that, because of his own faults, he squandered the opportunity, and, in this case, many people were harmed as a result.

If his story is not Shakespearean, well, I don't what is. And calling it such is not an exoneration of him, or an excuse for him. Nothing of the sort.

 

Joe was probably Hamlet, then in his later years, he was definitely King Lear.



I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks I should know you and know this man;

Yet, I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant

What place this is; and all the skill I have

Remembers not these garments;

nor I know not Where I did lodge last night.

Do not laugh at me.

 

CNN with the story of a woman who stood up to Paterno over the disciplining of players... And lost her job:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/15/us/triponey-paterno-penn-state/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

Forget Shakespeare and go the dictator route. Benevolent dictator at times? Sure. But right down to the statue, the parallels are so there.

 

History is going to show that not only was JoePa even more of an SOB than some thought, but he wasn't nearly the principled icon either. His principles began and ended with the won-loss columns.

 

Hopefully Posnanski asked Sue what her feelings are knowing she was married and loved a man who loved himself too much to be concerned with child rape.

 

Hopefully, he did not ask it in quite that way, though. Sheesh...

 

Summed up quite well. I always thought he was an SOB anyway.

 

Since we're so deeply analyzing a book none of us has read . . . interesting thoughts on what might be in it from Rob Neyer: http://mlb.sbnation.com/2012/7/16/3161844/bill-james-joe-paterno-jerry-sandusky

Short version: on his personal website, somebody asked James a question about Paterno, and he did his usual contrarian, I'm-the-smartest-man-on-the-planet thing (not that he isn't remarkably smart and hasn't had an amazing career, but he sure does come off that way sometimes), and speculated that Paterno did all he could have. If he's limiting this to the '98-'99 time frame, there's possibly a slight chance there's some defense for that, though there certainly isn't from 2001 on.

Anyway, this led to a discussion on Hardball Talk in which James was pilloried, and some internet/talk radio outrage. Now comes Rob Neyer, who got his start with Bill James, and who points out that James is tight with Posnanski and has seen advances of the book. Neyer, rather predictably, defends James.

What really strikes me is this, his comment on a passage from an interview of James by Doug Gottlieb:

Gottlieb: "No one is bigger at State College than Joe Paterno."

Bill: "False. Absolutely false. That's the key thing. You're saying everything revolves around him. It's total nonsense. He had very few allies. He was isolated, and he was not nearly as powerful as people imagine him to have been. And he had poor sources."

Neyer's response to this: "None of that's in the Freeh Report, leaving me to guess it's instead in Joe Posnanski's manuscript."

There's a lot of context missing, and I obviously haven't seen the book. But if Neyer's right, and Posnanski's really going to say that Paterno was isolated, had less power than was thought, and had poor sources . . . I sure want to see how he backs that up.

 

By quoting Paterno's family -- which, it appears now, has been busy pursuing this line of bullshit since the first hints of the grand jury were coming out. Seeing how it has all unfolded, I would take a guess that this is a large part of the reason, and maybe the entirety of the reason, they welcomed Posnanski in for the book in the first place.

I would love to know how long the crisis managers have been advising the Paternos. Also the whole manipulation of Sally Jenkins, beginning with the selection of her for the interview because she wrote such a softball column in November, looks like the same thing.

 

It's possible Paterno wasn't the most powerful man in the state. If that's the case he's not as powerful as we thought.

Still pretty fucking powerful though.

 

I am going to have to see some pretty convincing proof to believe this purported lack of power on Paterno's part. For God's sake, they tried to fire him and he told them to get lost and got away with it. Short of controlling Pennsylvania's National Guard I'm not sure how he could have had more power than he did.