Penn State Coach Paterno Says He Will Retire at Season’s End at BetLM

Penn State Coach Paterno Says He Will Retire at Season’s End

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Joe Paterno, the Penn State foot­ball coach who preached suc­cess with honor for half a cen­tury but whose leg­end was shat­tered by a child sex abuse scan­dal, said Wednes­day he will retire at the end of this season.

Paterno said he was “absolutely dev­as­tated” by the case, in which his one-time heir appar­ent, Jerry San­dusky, has been charged with molest­ing eight boys over 15 years, includ­ing at the Penn State foot­ball complex.

He said he hoped the team could fin­ish its sea­son with “dig­nity and determination.”

The trustees could still force him to leave imme­di­ately. It also could take action against the uni­ver­sity pres­i­dent, Gra­ham Spanier.

He said the school’s Board of Trustees, which had been con­sid­er­ing his fate, should “not spend a sin­gle minute dis­cussing my sta­tus” and has more impor­tant mat­ters to address.

The beloved 84-year-old Paterno has been engulfed by out­rage that he did not do more to stop San­dusky after a grad­u­ate assis­tant came to Paterno in 2002 after allegedly hav­ing seen the for­mer assis­tant coach molest­ing a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State showers.

“This is a tragedy,” Paterno said in a state­ment released Wednes­day. “It is one of the great sor­rows of my life. With the ben­e­fit of hind­sight, I wish I had done more.”

Paterno briefly talked to play­ers in the audi­to­rium of the Mil­dred and Louis Lasch Foot­ball Build­ing. Stand­ing at a podium, the coach told them he was leav­ing, then broke down in tears.

Play­ers gave him a stand­ing ova­tion when he walked out.

The deci­sion to retire by the man affec­tion­ately known as “Joe Pa” brings to an end one of the most sto­ried coach­ing careers, not just in col­lege foot­ball, but in all sports. Paterno won 409 games, a record for major col­lege foot­ball, and is in the mid­dle of his 46th year as coach.

His fig­ure patrolling the side­line — thick-rimmed glasses and wind­breaker, tie and khaki pants — was as unmis­tak­able at Penn State as its clas­sic blue and white uni­forms and the name Happy Val­ley, a place where no one came close to Paterno’s stature.

The retire­ment announce­ment came three days before Penn State hosts Nebraska in its final home game of the sea­son, a day set aside to honor seniors on the team.

Paterno has been ques­tioned about how he acted when a grad­u­ate assis­tant, Mike McQueary, reported the inci­dent to him in 2002.

Paterno noti­fied Penn State ath­letic direc­tor Tim Cur­ley and vice pres­i­dent Gary Schultz. Cur­ley and Schultz have since been charged with fail­ing to report the inci­dent to the authorities.

Paterno hasn’t been accused of legal wrong­do­ing. But he has been assailed, in what the state police com­mis­sioner called a lapse of “moral respon­si­bil­ity,” for not doing more to stop San­dusky, whose lawyer says he is innocent.

In the state­ment, Paterno said: “I grieve for the chil­dren and their fam­i­lies, and I pray for their com­fort and relief.”

He went on: “I have come to work every day for the last 61 years with one clear goal in mind: To serve the best inter­ests of this uni­ver­sity and the young men who have been entrusted to my care. I have the same goal today.”

A day ear­lier, Paterno had showed up for prac­tice and ador­ing crowds ral­lied out­side his mod­est home into the night, chant­ing his name.

But Paterno, whose foot­ball pro­gram bore the motto “Suc­cess with Honor,” could not with­stand the back­lash from a scan­dal that goes well beyond the every­day sto­ries of cor­rup­tion in col­lege sports.

“If this is true, we were all fooled, along with scores of pro­fes­sion­als trained in such things, and we grieve for the vic­tims and their fam­i­lies,” Paterno said Sun­day, after the news broke, in a pre­pared state­ment. “They are in our prayers.”

The coach defended his deci­sion to take the news to the ath­letic direc­tor. Paterno said it was obvi­ous that the grad­u­ate stu­dent, since iden­ti­fied as McQueary, was “dis­traught,” but said he was not told about the “very spe­cific actions” in the grand jury report.

After Paterno reported the inci­dent to Cur­ley, San­dusky was told to stay away from the school, but crit­ics say the coach should have done more — try to iden­tify and help the vic­tim, for exam­ple, or alert authorities.

“Here we are again,” John Salve­son, for­mer pres­i­dent of the Penn­syl­va­nia chap­ter of the Sur­vivors Net­work of those Abused by Priests, said ear­lier this week. “When an insti­tu­tion dis­cov­ers abuse of a kid, their first reac­tion was to pro­tect the rep­u­ta­tion of the insti­tu­tion and the perpetrator.”

Copy­right 2011

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Related Posts:

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• Joe Paterno, Penn State Leg­end, Dead at 85
• Patri­ots’ O’Brien Near­ing Deal to Become Penn State Head Coach
• Penn State AD Hopes to Have Coach Soon
• Titans’ Mun­chak Says He’s Not Inter­ested in Penn State Job

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