A LION IN WINTER

Pass rusher Aaron Maybin has 12 sacks this year and was named first-team All-America, but he’s not Penn State’s toughest man.

Anthony Scirrotto has started 37 games at safety, hits like a battering ram, but he’s a relative wimp.

Josh Gaines is a three-year standout at defensive end and checks in at 273 pounds, yet he’s embarrassed to mention his aches and pains in the company of Penn State’s true warhorse.

“I sat out for an ankle injury for a few games,” Gaines said. “It made me feel real soft.”

The steeliest bag of nails on Penn State’s roster doesn’t top 6 feet or register 170 pounds.

He can’t put a heavy shoulder to a blocking sled, as he once did, or bound easily off the ground after getting knocked down.

Joe Paterno, though, can still take a hit.

“He’s a beast,” Gaines remarked.

The Rose Bowl will be played Thursday on a field of 100 yards, but it was the few feet Paterno walked recently, without use of a cane, from a golf cart to an interview stand, two days after his 82nd birthday, before a practice at the Home Depot Center, that defined a program’s resiliency.

You could not help but acknowledge, and admire, those steps.

They were taken a month after hip-replacement surgery to alleviate the considerable pain Paterno suffered this year while, paradoxically, enjoying a triumphant ride in his 43rd season as Penn State coach.

“It wasn’t pleasant,” he said of all he has endured.

There were times, earlier this decade, when it appeared Paterno’s win-loss record might fail the annual physical and nudge him toward retirement’s plank. Penn State went 26-33 in five seasons from 2000 through 2004.

Yet, the football came back, starting with an 11-1 season in 2005, followed by campaigns of 9-4, 9-4 and 11-1.

The question became: How long, literally, could Joe go?

In November 2006, at the end of a play that ended at the sideline, Wisconsin linebacker DeAndre Levy inadvertently plowed into Paterno’s left leg, causing a tibial plateau fracture and two torn knee ligaments.

Surgery was required but, amazingly, retirement was not.

Then, last summer, Paterno aggravated his right leg during practice while demonstrating an onside-kick technique.

The pain, and Paterno’s renowned stubbornness, never relented as Penn State ambled toward the Big Ten title with a coach trying to remain ambulatory.

Paterno ultimately succumbed to cane usage and could no longer coach from the field, yet his field of vision remained clear and cantankerous.

When reporters pressed Paterno on his physical condition at one point during the season, he lashed back, “Can’t we talk about the football team and not me for crying out loud?”

Paterno admitted to taking pills to numb the pain of his injury.

His suffering did not go unnoticed.

Kids today may not have much in common with a coach who still favors handwritten letters over text messages and uses phrases like “tickled pink” and “for crying out loud.”

But football players know what tough is.

They can relate to rehabilitation, painkillers and magnetic resonance imaging.

They’ve been in training rooms, had their ankles taped, had sutures removed.

“He’s one of the toughest guys I have ever met,” Scirrotto said of his coach. “I have seen him, we have all seen him, take some tough hits from some big guys. He is the type of guy that doesn’t even want help getting up, no matter how old he is.

“It’s amazing to see him bounce back, injury after injury.”

Paterno’s list of career accomplishments could line the Rose Parade route.

This is his 59th season at Penn State since becoming an assistant on Rip Engle’s staff in 1950. Paterno is major college football’s all-time leader in victories, with 383, and the only coach to have won the Rose, Fiesta, Orange, Sugar and Cotton bowls. He has produced five undefeated teams but only two national titles, in 1982 and ‘86, a fact that has had him clamoring for a playoff since . . . 1968.

Paterno, a Brown graduate, has famously said “success without honor is an unseasoned dish,” yet college football is the only sport where success with honor can still leave you needing a palate cleanser.

His only other Rose Bowl team capped a 12-0 1994 season with a 38-20 win over Oregon.

Don’t you remember? That was the year Nebraska won the national title.

“Yeah, that bothered me,” Paterno recently chirped, “but what are we going to do about it, until we get a playoff?”

Paterno’s 23-10-1 bowl record stands above all.

His most impressive achievement, though, might be his incomparable endurance.

You want staggering stats? Paterno was born in 1926, three years after USC defeated Penn State in the first Tournament of Roses game played at Rose Bowl Stadium.

He began coaching at Penn State as an assistant a year before USC Coach Pete Carroll was born.

Since he took the reigns from Engle in 1966, there have been 837 coaching changes in major college football.

Thursday’s Rose Bowl will be Paterno’s 666th game as a member of Penn State’s football staff.

In 59 years, he has missed three games, for these three reasons:

* In 1955 his father, Angelo, died.

* In 1977 his son, Daniel, was seriously injured in a trampoline accident.

* In 2006, the serious leg injuries suffered against Wisconsin forced him to miss the following week’s game against Temple.

Winning has allowed Paterno to last, but so has perseverance.

He had hip surgery Nov. 23, the day after Penn State defeated Michigan State to clinch the Rose Bowl bid. He was released from the hospital two days later, on a Tuesday, and was back at work the following weekend.

“I didn’t even know he had his hip replaced,” Gaines, the senior defensive end, confessed. “I was back home watching ESPN and I saw it on the ticker. So I go back to school and we have a squad meeting and he’s walking around with a cane and I was just, ‘Oh my gosh, did you just have surgery?’ And I’m sitting there crying about an ankle injury?”

Some coaches lead with their lips . . . others with their hips.

“You can’t help but go out and play hard for somebody like that,” Gaines said. “But he’s a hard-headed guy. He doesn’t really listen to doctors. He knows what he wants. He’s definitely resilient, though.”

Paterno’s quick recovery also made it easier for the involved parties to agree on an exit strategy. Before surgery, even Paterno began to have doubts.

“It’s tough when you’re in pain all day,” he said, “and sometimes you get to the point where you wonder whether it’s worth it.”

Relieved of his discomfort, Paterno was able to agree with school officials on a three-year contract extension. He might opt out sooner, but at least now there seems to be an end game.

Paterno is not a big fan of the succession plans that have become popular in his sport.

“What do they call it now?” he asked. “Waiting coach? Coach in waiting? . . . I would rather not do it that way.”

With 11 wins, a new hip and a new contract in tow, it’s going to be, as always, Joe’s Way.

Paterno is probably done demonstrating special-teams pointers during fall practice.

But, as quarterback Daryll Clark recently noted of his redoubtable coach’s push back against time:

“He is still kicking.”

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chris.dufresne@latimes.com

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Joe Paterno at a glance

Joe Paterno has been head coach at Penn State since 1966. Paterno is one of three active football coaches who have been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

On Dec. 16, Penn State and Paterno agreed on a three-year contract extension through the 2011 season. Paterno turned 82 on Dec. 21.

Full name: Joseph Vincent Paterno

Born: Dec. 21, 1926, Brooklyn, N.Y.

College: Attended Brown University and planned to be an attorney

COACHING CAREER

Paterno began coaching in 1950 when he joined Rip Engle’s Penn State staff as an assistant. He replaced Engle as head coach 16 years later and has held the position for 43 seasons. Paterno’s 383 coaching victories are the most in major college football history; Florida State’s Bobby Bowden is second with 382. This season Paterno led the Nittany Lions to the Big Ten title to earn his second trip to the Rose Bowl. Despite having a hip replacement in November, Paterno announced he will “run out of that tunnel” with the team in 2009.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

1981: Bobby Dodd coach of the year

1982: National championship

1986: National championship; Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year

1994: Unbeaten (12-0) Big Ten and Rose Bowl champions; becomes first coach to win all four major bowls

2005: Big Ten co-champions; Walter Camp, Bobby Dodd and Associated Press coach of the year

2007: Inducted into College Football Hall of Fame

2008: Big Ten champions

Source: College Football Hall of Fame

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Rose Bowl

USC VS. PENN STATE

Thursday at Pasadena

2 p.m., Channel 7