Daytime Poll: Will You Read Joe Posnanski’s Joe Paterno Biography?
By Kyle Kensing
Former Sports Illustrated columnist Joe Posnanski is among the most celebrated sportswriters in America, a two-time Associated Press winner for top honors in his field. His baseball-themed books The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America and The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds are two of recent sports literature’s most praised works.
A biography about the most winning Division I football coach of all-time, written by one of the industry’s most celebrated scribes would seem the recipe for a surefire winner. But Posnanski’s book chronicling the life and career of Joe Paterno has come under scrutiny before ever hitting bookshelves. The New York Times juxtaposed human approach when the biography was first pitched to the ugliness that proceeded Paterno’s death in January. Today, Deadspin reported Posnanski’s longtime home, SI, passed on publishing an excerpt.
GQ will instead publish an excerpt, Deadspin’s John Koblin reports.
Simply entitled Paterno, the biography was moved from a June 2013 release to just before kickoff of the coming college football season.
With allegations stemming from the Freeh Report that Paterno may have covered up knowledge of Jerry Sandusky’s molestation of children brought to light, is Paterno worth an examination?