Joe Paterno, His Biographer, and the Last Chapter This won't be another book about Xs and Os, will it? Joe Paterno's daughter Mary Kay asked. Joe Posnanski, then a senior writer for Sports Illustrated who had done a flattering profile of Paterno for the magazine, was trying to persuade the famous Penn State football coach and his family to agree to cooperate in a full-blown biography. In his pitch to the family, Posnanski quickly identified one of their initial misgivings. "This seemed to be the early worry of the people closest to Joe, that this would be another in the series of surface Joe Paterno books," Posnanski wrote in a book proposal delivered to publishers, "that it would not delve deeply enough into what Joe means, the impact he has made on countless people and a college town in Pennsylvania and the game of football." In the proposal, Posnanski then emphatically, even ardently, tried to reassure the Paternos. "This book, I told them, will have a few Os, and almost no Xs," wrote Posnanski, a product of Cleveland, a onetime columnist at The Kansas City Star and a writer with a self-confessed soft spot for sports greats of the past. This book will tell the remarkable story about a man who could have been anything but decided that the best way he could help change America was one college football player at a time. Indeed, Posnanski promised, his proposed biography would be nothing less than "the most amazing football story ever told." Posnanski's pitch worked. Paterno agreed, and Simon & Schuster paid Posnanski a reported $750,000 advance to produce the biography. Of course, Paterno's story concluded with a couple of spectacularly unexpected chapters: last fall, a former top assistant was charged as a serial pedophile, and Paterno was fired for having failed to do more after being told in 2002 that the former assistant had molested a young boy in the showers of the Penn State football building. The assistant, Jerry Sandusky, went on to molest more boys, prosecutors have charged. Paterno, saying little about the matter publicly, was dead months later. He owned the record for most victories by a major college football coach, but to many it seemed as if, very late in the game of life, he might have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Certainly, the jarring revelations, and Paterno's exit as a consequence of what Penn State's board of trustees deemed a failure of moral leadership, created warring camps among those left to debate Paterno's legacy. There was a chorus of furious critics who pilloried Paterno, saying he turned out to be just another big-time coach willing to place the interests of the football program over basic human decency. This camp had more to seize on when The Wall Street Journal reported in November that Paterno, again in contrast to his polished public image, had regularly over the years tried to intimidate university officials when his football players wound up in trouble or were arrested. On the other side, there was an aggrieved, angry population of Paterno loyalists who charged that he had been made a scapegoat, that a lifetime of accomplishment and distinction had been cast aside by a lynch mob of self-serving university officials and a knee-jerk press corps. Then, too, there was Posnanski, the Paterno believer and biographer faced with one of the more remarkable late-project twists to reckon with. Would he halt his project, or recalibrate its timetable to allow him to trace the fuller meaning, if there was fuller meaning, to the revelations and accusations concerning Paterno? Could there be more secrets? Or would the imperative be to publish sooner rather than later, to maximize the storm of notoriety? There are, after all, 550,000 living Penn State alumni, many of them, judging by their protests and letters to the editor, hungry to have the Paterno they thought they knew delivered back to them. Posnanski, a near compulsive tweeter and blogger, offered a kind of glimpse of his predicament soon after the initial revelations last fall. In a blog post for Sports Illustrated titled "Darkness," he acknowledged that he was still trying to process the news.