From America's premier sportswriter, the definitive, #1 New York
Times bestselling biography of Joe Paterno and the story of America's
love affair with football.
Joe Paterno believed that football was a way to teach young men how to
live. He coached at Penn State for 62 years. In the course of his years
as a head coach, his teams won 409 games, a Division I record. At the
end of his life, more than 100 of those wins were invalidated by the
NCAA because of the crimes of a longtime assistant coach, Jerry
Sandusky, and Paterno's alleged knowledge of those crimes--knowledge
Paterno denied until his death. In the process, the name Paterno--the
name he had spent a lifetime building--came to represent scandal and
controversy.
Joe Posnanski lived in State College, Pennsylvania, through the
turbulent final months of Paterno's life and was with him and his family
as the scandal that eventually consumed him unfolded. Now with a new
afterword, Posnan-ski's book delves deep into the life of Joe Paterno,
going back to his childhood days in Brooklyn and his college days at
Brown, and looks at him through the eyes of the young men he coached. It
is a portrait that goes beyond the daily headlines and into the life of
a stubborn idealist, a teacher, and a flawed but principled man who, to
the very end, loved to coach.
