Rooting for the Home Team: Sport, Community, and Identity

10. American Brigadoon: Joe Paterno's Happy Valley

10. American Brigadoon Joe Paterno’s Happy Valley DaViD W. zang Never have I had a piece become outdated so quickly. Since news of Joe Paterno’s firing on November 9, 2011, in the wake of the most horrific scandal in American sport history, the temptation has been to retouch this original version, completed in May 2011. I have resisted because it is more provocative and instructive to read sentences like: “Joe has done far more good for the game and for Penn State than he can possibly undo in his fading years.” I was wrong about that and a few other things. It turns out the values associated with Penn State were just as unsustainable and illusory there as elsewhere. My apprehension about the statue being premature seems prescient, however, and the riots that took place after the coach’s dismissal seem to confirm a great deal of what I wrote about defending our voluntary associations to the death rather than entertain the possibility that we’ve lived a foolish life (and I’ve been wondering these past few days whether my father would have been one of JoePa’s supporters—I’d like to think not). It is easy to stick by my contention that Paterno’s exit trumpets the end of Happy Valley as Brigadoon, and we all learned that losing his football lifeline indeed foretold the end of Joe Paterno’s life. D.Z., January 4, 2013 158 DaViD W. zang “Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.” —William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.” —Shakespeare, Hamlet It’s October, and as I’ve done on nearly every autumn Saturday for four decades, I’ve settled in front of a television. As a panoramic shot captures a gorgeous landscape of distant mountains and rolling foothills, ESPN’s announcers reveal that “we are live from Happy Valley.” Scanning the more than one hundred thousand spectators in Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, a camera comes to rest on a manic student who is gesticulating wildly, as contemporary fans tend to do when they realize their three seconds of fame have arrived. This one is wearing a full-headed rubber mask that caricatures the bulbous nose and black pompadour of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, and I can think of only one thing—well, two, really: first, I want one of those masks, and, second, if my father had lived to see it, he would not only have owned one, he’d have actually worn it. And who could blame him? My father didn’t like himself all that much, but he was happy around Penn State football, specifically Penn State football under Joe Paterno. Raised near the State College campus, my dad grew up playing tackle football with his brothers in the shadows of the school’s sheep barns. My grandfather was an itinerant preacher, and his travels took my dad in his teens to the suburbs of Philadelphia. He remained there until the mid-1970s when, nearly fifty, he decided to chuck his pension and twenty-seven years of seniority at a local chemical plant to return to Happy Valley. He bought a rundown biker bar at the top of Mt. Nittany and operated it as a restaurant for more than twenty years. (One night in the 1980s, Joe Pa stopped in for dinner. The staff did not think—bother—to summon my father from his home fifty paces across the parking lot.) All the while his love for the area expanded severalfold, revolving around and boosted by Nittany Lion football. Maybe I’m just guessing at some of this, but I think his passion for Penn State—and that of many others—grew from an illusion that Happy Valley, particularly and uniquely under Paterno, was as much a mindset as a place. I know, I know, you could argue the same about any number of campus American Brigadoon 159 locales, Tuscaloosa being just a mental way station for those in search of the lost, mythic South, for example. But even there, fans are acutely aware of being Alabamans (or, in...