"Virgil's ability to plumb the complexity of human affairs is a key to his greatness, a key to his relevance for us today. We live in an age in which simplistic versions of reality — simplified social and political perspectives, philosophical world pictures, moral principles — are privileged over nuanced understanding." — From an introduction to Virgil's The Aeneid, by Fred Will

"There is hypocrisy in me. And a little of the con man and actor, too. Look, I'm not trying to fool anybody. But I want things to be difficult. It's more fun to win with handicaps. If you have the best players and no problems and you win, that doesn't intrigue me." — Joe Paterno, to Sports Illustrated's Douglas S. Looney, 1980

All great football coaches eventually fade into myth. These days, we attend Broadway plays about Vince Lombardi; we romanticize Al Davis as a countercultural icon and Woody Hayes as a Pattonesque disciplinarian raging against the rising tide of hippies. In the frenzy on Bourbon Street leading up to this year's national championship game, Alabama fans born long after Bear Bryant's passing found new and sartorially perplexing ways to appropriate houndstooth as a fashion statement. It is the nature of the job; in order to exert influence, football coaches have to appear larger than life. In death, they become muscular symbols of authority.

This is why it's so goddamned complicated to write an obituary for Joe Paterno: His mythology was grounded in an utter lack of pretense. He was the football coach who lived in a modest house, with a listed phone number, whose preferred method of propulsion was the fullback belly play. He was the football coach who walked to work, who wore Poindexter glasses and flood pants, who became a towering figure because his whole ideal was based in the notion that football coaches should not become larger than life in the first place. Once, in college, a few of us student-newspaper reporters strutted through the locker room o...