SI Sportsman of the year: Joe Paterno
December 22, 1986
Not An Ordinary Joe
In the often murky world of college athletics, Penn State coach Joe Paterno is a beacon of integrity—and he knows how to win
As this year's Sportsman of the Year, we choose a tenured professor who wears glasses thicker than storm windows, a jacket and tie, white socks and pants legs that indicate continual fear of flash floods. He goes about 5'10", 165 and looks less like a football coach than a CPA for an olive oil firm. On most mornings he leaves a red Ford Tiempo in the modest driveway of the modest house he has owned since 1967 and walks to the office. He has worked at the same place for 37 years. For excitement, he likes to sit in his La-Z-Boy and doodle on a yellow sketch pad. Such a glitzy celebrity is our honoree that his number is in the book.
But legends have a confounding habit of showing up in strange shapes. And a funny thing happens when this one starts to say something. Two-hundred-eighty-pound linemen, college presidents, NCAA honchos, network biggies and even your basic U.S. vice-presidents cross-body-block one another to get near him. Good thing, too, because Joe Paterno, the football coach at Penn State University, can teach you some of the damnedest things.
From whom else but Paterno did we learn that you can have 20-20,000 vision and still see more clearly than almost everybody else, that you can look like Bartleby but coach like Bryant, that you can have your kids hit the holes like 'Bama's and the books like Brown's, that the words "college" and "football" don't have to be mutually exclusive. "We try to remember," Paterno once told The Reader's Digest , "football is part of life—not life itself."
Maybe for that wisdom alone, we choose Paterno as Sportsman of the Year. But that's not exactly right. Because what he has done in 1986 is not much different from what he has done for 21 years as head coach. He went undefeated for the regular season. He has done that six times, a feat equaled only by Bear Bryant. In two weeks Penn State will play for the national championship. It has done that four times in the last nine years, more than any other school. Over the past two years, his team has been 22-1. But he has done better than that. From 1967 to '70 he had a 31-game unbeaten streak. This year 100% of his seniors are expected to graduate. Next year Paterno will become the first Division I-A coach to achieve this trifecta: 200 victories, a winning percentage of more than 80 and an 80% graduation rate by his players. Not bad for a kid from Flatbush.
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