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What: “No Ordinary Joe: The Biography of Joe Paterno”

Author: Michael O’Brien

Publisher: Rutledge Hill Press ($24.95)

Close your eyes and imagine this: In 1998, the USC football coach, now well into his third decade, is . . . Joe Paterno.

But for a different tumbling of the dominoes, it might have happened.

In an illuminating biography, O’Brien points out that when Paterno was Rip Engle’s No. 1 assistant coach in the late 1950s, USC offered Engle its head coaching position.

Engle wanted the job but also wanted to take along most of his Penn State staff. Paterno, writes O’Brien, was the only Engle staffer who voted yes. Engle stayed. At USC, Don Clark resigned in 1959 and John McKay became the head coach.

Had Engle gone to USC, would Paterno have then succeeded him as the Trojans’ head coach, as he did at Penn State, in 1966? And if he had, what would have happened to McKay? And to John Robinson? And to Paul Hackett?

O’Brien’s book takes you along on Paterno’s football ride through life, from his high school days at Brooklyn Prep in New York, to Brown, and, in 1950, to Penn State, where he is now in his 33rd season as head coach.

He is shown as a coach who will upbraid a player on campus for wearing his hair too long, or for not wearing socks . . . and also a man who reads Kipling, Homer, Virgil, Napoleon, Churchill and Patton.

In the 1990s, Paterno is haunted, according to the author, by a society markedly different from that of his Brooklyn boyhood.

Paterno: “When I was a kid, you never heard about a kid committing suicide. The choices just weren’t that hard. You had it all laid out in front of you. Your church told you what to do, and your parents told you what to do, and you knew what was right and wrong.

“But now kids have so many choices to make, so many people to listen to, no direction. Now you hear of kids committing suicide every day. It’s very frustrating to me.”