I know nada about football. Worse, most of what I know about college football culture is the fact they get away with rape a lot. There seems to be a massive conspiracy of cover-ups, and when people are caught I assume the apologists will burst forth in the media like the alien from John Hurt’s stomach. So when it came out that Joe Paterno knew all along that Jerry Sandusky was raping kids I was expecting people to wring their hands are excuse him. Some certainly are, including his family who I can understand wanting to deny their loved one was a shit weasel who aided and abetted the rape of children. But I was pleased to see that there are also sports writers out there who are ashamed they bought into the Paterno mythos of decency, and are singing mea culpa. Today’s involuntary guest post is one of the best, written by Rick Reilly, who won the National Sportswriter of the Year award 11 times:
The sins of the father
What a fool I was.
In 1986, I spent a week in State College, Pa., researching a 10-page Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year piece on Joe Paterno.
It was supposed to be a secret, but one night the phone in my hotel room rang. It was a Penn State professor, calling out of the blue.
“Are you here to take part in hagiography?” he said.
“What’s hagiography?” I asked.
“The study of saints,” he said. “You’re going to be just like the rest, aren’t you? You’re going to make Paterno out to be a saint. You don’t know him. He’ll do anything to win. What you media are doing is dangerous.”
Jealous egghead, I figured.
What an idiot I was.
State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was accused of a 15-year reign of pedophilia on young boys, I thought Paterno was too old and too addled to understand, too grandfatherly and Catholic to get that Sandusky was committing grisly crimes using Paterno’s own football program as bait.
But I was wrong. Paterno knew. He knew all about it. He’d known for years. He knew and he followed it vigilantly.
That’s all clear now after Penn State’s own investigator, former FBI director Louis Freeh, came out Thursday and hung the whole disgusting canvas on a wall for us. Showed us the emails, read us the interviews, shined a black light on all of the lies they left behind. It cost $6.5 million and took eight months and the truth it uncovered was 100 times uglier than the bills.
Paterno knew about a mother’s cry that Sandusky had molested her son in 1998. Later, Paterno lied to a grand jury and said he didn’t. Paterno and university president Graham Spanier and vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley all knew what kind of sick coach they had on the payroll in Sandusky. Schultz had pertinent questions. “Is this opening of pandora’s box?” he wrote in personal notes on the case. “Other children?” “Sexual improprieties?”
It gets worse. According to Freeh, Spanier, Schultz and Curley were set to call child services on Sandusky in February 2001 until Paterno apparently talked them out of it. Curley wasn’t “comfortable” going to child services after that talk with JoePa.
Yeah, that’s the most important thing, your comfort.
What’d they do instead? Alerted nobody. Called nobody. And let Sandusky keep leading his horrific tours around campus. “Hey, want to see the showers?” That sentence alone ought to bring down the statue.
What a stooge I was.
I talked about Paterno’s “true legacy” in all of this. Here’s his true legacy: Paterno let a child molester go when he could’ve stopped him. He let him go and then lied to cover his sinister tracks. He let a rapist go to save his own recruiting successes and fundraising pitches and big-fish-small-pond hide.
Here’s a legacy for you. Paterno’s cowardice and ego and fears allowed Sandusky to molest at least eight more boys in the years after that 1998 incident — Victims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10. Just to recap: By not acting, a grown man failed to protect eight boys from years of molestation, abuse and self-loathing, all to save his program the embarrassment. The mother of Victim 1 is “filled with hatred toward Joe Paterno,” the victim’s lawyer says. “She just hates him, and reviles him.” Can you blame her?
What a sap I was.
I hope Penn State loses civil suits until the walls of the accounting office cave in. I hope that Spanier, Schultz and Curley go to prison for perjury. I hope the NCAA gives Penn State the death penalty it most richly deserves. The worst scandal in college football history deserves the worst penalty the NCAA can give. They gave it to SMU for winning without regard for morals. They should give it to Penn State for the same thing. The only difference is, at Penn State they didn’t pay for it with Corvettes. They paid for it with lives.
What a chump I was.
I tweeted that, yes, Paterno should be fired, but that he was, overall, “a good and decent man.” I was wrong. Good and decent men don’t do what Paterno did. Good and decent men protect kids, not rapists. And to think Paterno comes from “father” in Italian.
This throws a can of black paint on anything anybody tells me about Paterno from here on in. “No NCAA violations in all those years.” I believe it. He was great at hiding stuff. “He gave $4 million to the library.” In exchange for what? “He cared about kids away from the football field.” No, he didn’t. Not all of them. Not when it really mattered.
What a tool I was.
As Joe Paterno lay dying, I actually felt sorry for him. Little did I know he was taking all of his dirty secrets to the grave. Nine days before he died, he had The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins in his kitchen. He could’ve admitted it then. Could’ve tried a simple “I’m sorry.” But he didn’t. Instead, he just lied deeper. Right to her face. Right to all of our faces.
That professor was right, all those years ago. I was engaging in hagiography. So was that school. So was that town. It was dangerous. Turns out it builds monsters.
Thanks for posting that, BF. It was well worth reading, and makes me feel somewhat better about sports culture as a whole. Of course there are decent men in the mix. And probably many more decent than not. I’m glad we got to hear from one of them.
Those men who knew and did nothing should all pay, that’s for sure.
Oh ps as should Sandusky’s wife and any other wives who knew and did nothing.
Is there a medical term for these Jekyll and Hyde types? I don’t know how they do what they do. Paterno did do a lot of good. All of which will be forgotten and buried because of this awfulness. I had a doctor like this. I personally know a number of people that man saved because he refused to give up on them. He defied insurance companies for them. There are many stories of wonderfulness about this man. And it turns out he was selling steriods and diet pills out the back door. How do these people justify this? Or are they doing the ‘good stuff’ to justify the ‘bad stuff’? I just don’t get it.
Actually, I think it’s the other way around. They feel justified in doing bad things sometimes because they were already acting like good people most of the time. A while back I read about a study that found people who attend religious services regularly are more likely to commit small ethical offenses, like stealing office supplies for example, than people who do not consider themselves to be religious. The theory was that the religious people felt they had it covered, so a few ethical slip ups weren’t that big a deal, whereas the non-religious folk didn’t have that free pass and actually had to behave ethically.
Mostly what it tells me is that the religious people in that study weren’t paying much attention in Sunday School.
Which is all a bit off the original topic. But what I guess I’m saying is that while I do think some people try to do good things our of a sense of guilt, I think a lot of people do bad things out of a sense of entitlement. If any of the Penn State crowd was feeling guilt or remorse about the years long cover up, I think someone would have spoken up after it all started to come out. JoePa lied and denied to his dying breath. That is not a man that felt bad for what he’d done. That is a man who felt justified.
Although it’s Sandusky and the pedophilia that’s getting all the press (and lord knows that’s horrific enough), there’s a significant rape culture surrounding the entire football team at Penn State. I know someone who went with a friend to file a report against a Penn State player who raped her. Did the campus police call a rape crisis counselor? The town police? Try to take her to the hospital? Collect evidence? Even take her statement? No. They brought one of the football coaches in to talk to this girl, alone, in a room, recently raped, to try to intimidate her into dropping the whole thing.
Sick.
Please tell me she got a lawyer and sued their ass. Probably not, because she let them get her alone in a room in the first place. She should have gone to the hospital first and called the police from there. And where the hell did her friend go? Stuff like this just makes my head explode. (Note to self, have refresher talk with daughter…GRRR)