(CNN) -- Joe Paterno was admitted to a hospital Sunday morning after fracturing his pelvis when he slipped and fell at his home the previous night, a source close to the Paterno family said.
The injury will not require surgery, the source said. But since the former Penn State football coach is being treated with chemotherapy as he battles lung cancer, doctors have decided to keep him in the hospital.
The source did not say which hospital Paterno, who turns 85 later this month, is in or how long he is expected to stay there.
Paterno lost his job as the Nittany Lions coach last month amid criticism that he hadn't done more when a sexual assault allegation surfaced regarding his longtime defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky.
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According to a biography on a Penn State website, Paterno was born December 21, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, and attended Brown University. He joined the Penn State football program after graduating college in 1960, taking over as the team's head coach in 1966.
In late October, a Penn State win over Illinois -- the 409th in his head coaching career -- propelled Paterno past Grambling University's legendary former coach Eddie Robinson for the most in NCAA Division I history.
A week later, Sandusky -- who coached at Penn State for 23 years and remained a presence on campus after his retirement in 1999 -- was arrested and charged with 40 counts tied to allegations over a 14-year period. Ten additional charges were levied this month.
An investigative grand jury's summary of testimony claimed that Sandusky engaged in fondling, oral sex and anal sex with young boys.
One of the allegations came from 2002, when a graduate assistant told Paterno he'd witnessed an incident in a shower inside a school athletic facility -- a story that Paterno referred to Athletic Director Tim Curley, but didn't become known to investigators until years later.
Curley and Gary Schultz, a university vice president, were both charged with one count of felony perjury and one count of failure to report abuse allegations.
Paterno wasn't charged, saying he did his duty by referring the allegations to his superior, according to the grand jury report. But criticism quickly mounted, and Penn State trustees dismissed Paterno and school President Graham Spanier -- who initially backed Curley and Schultz -- days after Sandusky's arrest.
Just over a week after the firing, Paterno's son Scott announced that his father has a treatable form of lung cancer. The family learned of the diagnosis after Paterno's follow-up visit for a bronchial illness.
CNN's Dana Garrett contributed to this report.
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