The most striking thing about ESPN’s E60 documentary on the legacy of Joe Paterno and the Jerry Sandusky scandal is how much it feels like yesterday and yet how so much has changed since then.
This point struck home twice for me on a personal level, once early in “The Paterno Legacy,” on the side of the frame as the Penn State football coach’s statue was removed from the ground outside of Beaver Stadium. I had to pause to rewind and double check. Was I really that young? Was I really that skinny? Was a I really that green around the edges, trying to find my way through a week I was unprepared for?
The second time comes a decade later – or a few minute later in the magic of film – older, allegedly wiser and most certainly not as skinny, standing a few feet from James Franklin at a post practice media session. A whole decade flying by, and there I am, the same person, and yet so different.
Penn State, too, is older, as big as it ever was and undoubtedly changed as well. It has seen two head football coaches, a boatload of assistants, a pandemic, the entire tenure of an athletic director and two university presidents. There have been multiple classes of students to pass through the university who never knew what it was like to see Paterno eating ice cream on campus or walk the sidelines at Beaver Stadium. For a place that was built in no small part on the efforts of one man’s football team, much of that memory these days is chronicled as exactly that — a memory.
As for the documentary itself, which airs at 8 p.m. on Monday, it is a recounting of events, something of a Wikipedia page of what happened, what unfolded and the fallout that ensued. Appearances by former president Graham Spainer and vice president Gary Schultz are interesting additions alongside Jay Paterno, Matt Millen and Matt McGloin, but they offer no insight that has not been stated an untold number of times over the past decade. Aaron Fisher, Victim 1 at Sandusky’s trial, makes an appearance as well, but even he seems tired of digging up the past.
If you’re looking for a moment, there isn’t one. If you’re looking for a conclusion, there isn’t really one there either. The film just sort of ends, the only conclusion being that Joe Paterno’s legacy is what you make it, and that time slowly erodes away at the prominence we all have on the streets we used to call home.
Those who are staunch defenders of Paterno will find details worth nitpicking. Those who find Paterno’s inaction regarding follow ups with the administration lacking will continue to do so. There is nothing about this 40 minutes or so of television that will change your mind, but there is nothing about it that is trying to either.
Many years ago, I had coffee early one morning with a screenwriter that had come to town to see what he could make of the entire saga. The answer was the same that it has always been: it’s complicated. That particular treatment of the scandal never saw the light of day as the writer left town, uncertain what to make of everything, uncertain what the moral of the story was.
ESPN comes to the same conclusions in this film as well, lacking any final note beyond a phone interview with Jerry Sandusky arguing that his exoneration would equate to Paterno’s. While this would undoubtedly be true, everything to this point suggests that day will never come.
There is a poignant moment at the midway point of the show though, noting what is a little-known homage to Paterno sitting out in broad daylight in the middle of State College. But even that isn’t new information.
In its own way that is the conclusion ESPN draws. That Joe Paterno’s legacy is complicated, and that everyone was changed by the Jerry Sandusky scandal. The bricks memorializing 409 wins are out in the open but understated like a scar still visible even as new flesh grows around it. Visible, but no longer the topic of conversation.
