Brooklyn Prep Football Hero (and Tragic Figure) Joe Paterno Dies.

Joe Paterno attended Prep some years before me. He was 85 at his death today, and I'm 62.

But he was a special guy for Prepsters of all generations. The Jesuit high school known as Brooklyn Preparatory closed in 1972, and Medgar Evers College then set up shop in the grand old Crown Heights school complex.

Word is that those running the Prep knew they would have an increasingly difficult time drawing the Irish and Italian students who had been its core.

For all of my four years at Prep, I was the only black kid in the class.

Prep was an old-fashioned, all-boys college preparatory that opened in 1908.

It prided itself on the training of the mind and the body as integral parts of one entity.

I had dozens of medals in track, and the school's former track coach - Bob Giegengack - went on to coach the U.S. Olympic track team and then the team at Yale, which I attended and graduated from in 1970.

At Prep, I studied, pretty intensively - and at the same time - Latin, ancient Greek and French, in addition to the other standard courses.

Thoughts of the Prep have waltzed through my head in recent weeks as I'b read about Paterno.

His story is a classic tragedy, a tale of one who rose to the heights and then plummeted (in a mental/psychological sense anyway) into the abyss.

After a day of false reports about Paterno's demise, the Washington Post is now saying he is in fact dead.

The Post is putting it this way:

"Joe Paterno, the former Penn State football coach who was among the most admired figures in the annals of collegiate sports but whose reputation was shattered in the wake of a child abuse scandal involving one of his longtime assistants, died Sunday morning of complications from lung cancer.. He was 85. The death was announced by his family."

I'm on Long Island Railroad train to Stony Brook now. Will have more to say another time.