Ever since I decided I wanted to be a journalist I have asked myself one question - "If you could interview anyone who would it be?"

Sports wise it would probably be either Jackie Robinson, Charles Barkley, Tug McGraw, Lou Gehrig or Joe Paterno.

In all honesty, I probably wouldn't take the sports approach. Maybe Ben Franklin. I always admired him. Martin Luther King Jr. would be high up on my list. But then again, so would Jesus or Mohammed or Ghandi. They would all have some pretty interesting things to say.

But if I really had a choice whom would I pick?

I finally figured it out.

My grandfather.

He died when I was 10 and I always think about the way he treated me, and he always seemed to care about the little things in my life. I wonder what he would think of me.

Sometimes I'll meet someone who tells me they knew him and I'll ask him or her about my grandfather as if I never met him.

And it's dawned on me recently.

I really never knew him. I only know the myth I created for myself.

Maybe that's why my grandfather has become this mythic image in my life. He's someone I want to appease, like a god of some sort. He is even the person I want to seek out for advice when something's on my mind. The one thing that stands out to me are the glasses he wore.

The vision of them is sharp in my memory -- they were thick and somehow tinted. It was like I wasn't supposed to see into his eyes.

Saturday, I stared at the mythic figure that dominates life in Happy Valley much like the image of my grandfather dominates me.

It was then that I saw the thick, tinted glasses. For a moment, it wasn't Joe Paterno anymore. It was my grandfather. Like something out of Field of Dreams.

Originally, I had wanted to give up journalism for the day and go back to where I belong.

In the stands.

I'm graduating in December and if things work out someone is going to want me to write about sports for their paper. That means I can't be a fan so I desperately needed to be out of the press box and with the crowd. But, I was working on a story.

Normally that excites me. I really love writing and reporting. But being up high with the rest of the media was depressing. It's cold, calculated and unenergetic.

I wanted to root, and root hard, for those 52 points. But I couldn't. I had a job to do. So the game was over and I had successfully refrained from clapping.

Afterwards, the reporters were gathered around the legend and myth that is Joe Paterno. They wanted their stories. I had already finished mine but was still on the lookout for something that could be a story. This is Penn State football. There are many stories to be told.

I stopped seeing Paterno as the football coach.

Or the legend, or the myth.

Or even as an old man.

The Nittany Lions, his boys, had just taken out a season's worth of frustration on the Indiana Hoosiers. The lights reflected near the top of his glasses. Glasses that hide those eyes.

"We're still only three and eight," he said.

And it all came back. The losses, the controversies, the coaching issues, the evasiveness. Black eyes to a great program.

"But I want to win."

Five simple words.

When his critics had surrounded him he cried out graduation rates.

His supporters talked about the past and the donations. And it's all true. But those five words said a lot. He needed this win to appease his fire.

"People don't understand that he's in his prime," wide reciever Maurice Humphry said.

"I think right now it's going to get better next year. He's so excited about next year."

Paterno's a competitive man, it doesn't take much research to figure that out.

And a complex man. There are few that know him. I wonder if his grandchildren will know the real Grandpa.

I sincerely hope so -- they deserve better than an image, legend or a myth.