For several years, Nike sponsored a summer retreat for college football coaches, an event that enabled men who lived under extreme and constant pressure to relax, mingle and socialize for several days.

Most coaches attended for the golf. Former Gophers coach Glen Mason came for the wisdom.

"I decided not to play golf, because it was such a great opportunity. Joe Paterno didn't play either, so every day, he would be sitting by the pool, reading and talking to people," Mason said Sunday, shortly after learning of Paterno's death. "I used to write questions to ask him ahead of time on a legal pad -- any problems I was having with my program, any issues he could give me advice about -- and he would give each one some thought and tell me what he would do. And his advice was always so simple, such common sense, that sometimes I would be embarrassed I had even asked."

Such was the regard that Paterno's peers held for him. Jerry Kill never faced Paterno on the field, but the current Gophers coach said in a statement that merely meeting Paterno at the Big Ten meetings last summer is "something I will never forget." Added Kill, "it's a sad day for football, but a good day for the Man upstairs."

Mason feared that the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal, and the lung cancer that was diagnosed just days after he was fired, was taking a far greater toll on the 85-year-old coach than the public realized. He wrote Paterno a note every week after he was fired in early November, and "I never heard back. That wasn't like Joe -- he always wrote back, or called," said Mason, who last saw Paterno when he broadcast Penn State's season opener against Indiana State in September. "Today, this is a day of sadness. It's a loss of a good friend, and it feels like a death in my family."

Mason's relationship with Paterno dated to 1973, when he was an assistant coach at Allegheny College, about 100 miles from Penn State, and grew stronger as the years went on. He once sat in Paterno's office and traded stories about legendary Ohio State coach Woody Hayes, for whom Mason had played and then coached as a defensive assistant. The parallels between the successful traditionalists -- whose decades of success and honor were muddled by a scandalous, inglorious end -- strike Mason as a sad but human coincidence.

"When I think about Joe Paterno and Penn State, it's a book with a lot of chapters, just like with Coach Hayes," Mason said. "I'm not minimizing the [Jerry Sandusky] scandal, it was horrific. But that's one chapter. It's far from the whole book."

Paterno influenced hundreds of young students to live righteous lives, and play football the right way. "Football is the ultimate team game, and nobody knew it like Joe," Mason said. "When you played Penn State, there was no trash-talking, nothing fancy -- and those guys played like a team."

Mason beat that team four straight times while coaching the Gophers (he is 4-4 against Paterno all-time), including a 24-23 upset of the second-ranked Nittany Lions in State College in 1999. He was invited to dinner at Paterno's house after that game but didn't show because he didn't want to seem to be gloating. But Paterno insisted he come to dinner after their 2003 game, another Gophers victory that had opened with an onside kick.

When Mason reluctantly showed up, Paterno came out of his office jokingly growling, "'What does that pain in the ass want now? Starting a game with an onside kick is cheating,'" Mason recalled, and they laughed about it. Paterno eventually autographed a photo of the pair of them together, a memento Mason has looked at this weekend.

"It says, 'To Glen -- A hard guy to beat, but an easy guy to love,'" Mason said. "That's probably the highest honor of my coaching career."