Sporting News Conversation: Joe Paterno
College football’s winningest — and oldest — coach says he hasn’t spent one minute thinking about how his run at Penn State will end.
Joe Paterno would like to walk again—the 25 or so weekly miles he was accustomed to before leg and hip injuries slowed him the past few years. He’d like to feel no pain, no weariness, as he pushes hard down the path that plunges straight into the park outside his State College home; as he pulls off his shirt and tramps through the sand near his and wife Sue’s second home at the Jersey Shore.
But what the 83-year-old Penn State coaching legend would really like to do is run again—to charge onto the football field with the vim and vigor of a man decades younger, which is how Paterno still feels on the inside. “I can still run,” he said on a January morning in his office, a couple of weeks after the Nittany Lions’ victory over LSU in the Capital One Bowl, “but I’m a little nervous about it because every game’s on television. One stumble …”
SportingNews.com
2/11/10
Magnolia Tribune
