Maureen Dowd has finally written a column I can wholeheartedly endorse. She writes about how Joe Paterno and Penn State let down her ten-year old nephew who “is the proud owner of Penn State shorts, underwear, socks, jerseys, sweatshirts and plastic football players.” I’m not ten years old anymore, but I was once. And I was a big Penn State fan who idolized Joe Paterno. Fortunately, I am old enough now not to be emotionally scarred by the revelations at Penn State, but it’s still painful to process. People around here have taken pride in Penn State’s football program for a half century. Even their refusal to put anything on their helmets indicated a certain purity. Of Joe Paterno’s five undefeated teams, only one received a national championship, which only added to the fan base’s desire to see the program get the respect they thought it deserved. Defending Penn State’s honor and virtues is a habit deeply embedded in Pennsylvania culture. Yet, the way they handled the allegations against their legendary defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is so much worse than the booster scandals at Notre Dame or the notoriously bad behavior of the student-athletes at the University of Miami.
Unlike Oklahoma State, Penn State would never hand a degree to a man who admitted to being functionally illiterate. Of teams that participated in Division I bowl games last year, only Notre Dame and Northwestern had higher graduation rates (pdf) for the football players. Nationally, the graduation success rate of college football players increased last year to 67%, but Penn State could brag a 90% success rate. Coach Paterno proved, year in and year out, that you can be successful on the highest level without treating academics as a joke and without breaking NCAA rules. That meant something to people. And that’s what makes it all that much harder to deal with the fact they didn’t protect innocent children and didn’t follow the law in reporting incidents of child rape and, in some cases, perjured themselves in a failed effort to cover their tracks. Ultimately, the fact that they avoided many of the lesser sins of college sports is overwhelmed by the one of the biggest sins imaginable.
I hope the program can find someone who will continue to do all the little things right and slowly rebuild the reputation for excellence that Penn State earned. And I hope they don’t have any huge moral blind spots that ruin their efforts. There will be a lot of ten-year olds counting on them.
I’m no Penn State fan. I watched Illinois fall to PSU 2 weeks ago painfully. Ohh, what an ANNOYING game. I thought we had you PSU turkeys, and then you rose from the dead, and beat the Illini.
That being said, Paterno resigned as of the end of the season. I thought that was the right move. He was fired anyway, and the repercussions at Unhappy Valley are not yet over. More heads will roll. Why is the head of the Campus cops still in his position? Who was this reported to, who failed to act? I believe that Paterno reported in 2002 that something was going on. That’s 9 years and possibly 6-7 more victims. What’s the deal there? Lot of questions yet to be answered.
I’m glad my mother isn’t alive to see this. She had the utmost respect for Paterno and Penn State for all the reasons you just mentioned, BooMan.
I’m so disgusted by them, I hope they all burn in hell for not protecting those children.
In some ways, I don’t understand any of this. I’ve never heard of Paterno, and I still don’t even know the name of his team. I wasn’t entirely sure it was football until you quoted that Dowd column.
In other ways, it’s incredibly familiar to anyone with a strong sense of ethnic identity. It’s not so much idolatry as identity. When one of ‘your own’ acts badly, you can feel sick and dismayed and self-loathing, or you can lash out at the accusers and become obsessively defensive. Well, or both. If this guy was key to thousands of people’s definition of themselves, I guess none of this is surprising. Distressing, but not surprising.
Well, look, it’s pretty obvious that you don’t watch football and it’s not important to you. And there’s an argument to be made that football is a stupid game that’s a waste of time. But football is a very big deal in Pennsylvania. In the western part of the state it’s an obsession, but it’s big everywhere. And all football fans in Pennsylvania could take pride in the fact that we had a football program that combined on-field excellence (Paterno won more games than any coach in history, including two championships and five undefeated seasons) with classroom excellence. And he could do it without cheating and taking short-cuts. He was at Penn State for 61 years, during which time nearly every other major program has suffered some kind of scandal. Naturally, he had some players who committed crimes over the years, but he kept his program clean. It was pretty close to the standard for excellence.
Paterno churned out great professional players, but also great citizens. Mothers all over the country wanted their sons to play for him precisely because of his reputation for making his students learn and succeed in the classroom and later life.
He was everything that so many other coaches were not. We all need examples like that. We all want something to take pride in.
That’s what’s been lost here.
And his team is called the Nittany Lions. Believe it not, nearby Mt. Nittany used to have mountain lions roaming around on it.
That was actually my attempt at a sympathetic understanding! Because yeah, I think it’s a stupid game and a waste of time … except it’s not just a stupid game, it’s a point of pride and identity. I’m a Jew, I understand what it feels like when something excellent, something you’re proud of, is lost. I understand both impulses, as far as that goes–the desire to renounce and to defend–and the sense of irreclaimable loss.
And as a Jew you should understand how perverse a “sense of pride” can become. Your people suffered under “a sense of pride”. Those kids were expendable.
FIrstly, Eddie Robinson would still be the winningest coach in college football if this sick depravity was exposed sooner. You are unbelievable! You are a father! Would you be saying this shit if it was your child?! Fuck no! You wouldn’t give a fuck about how many athletes graduated or their “clean” helmets. You would only care that your son was raped and it was covered up by EVERYONE! You would have a hard fucking time understanding why anyone gives a fuck about Perterno or Penn State when nobody gave a fuck about your son!
“That’s what’s been lost here.”
Did you read that part or are you just ignoring it?
what disgusts me is the image of students rioting in support of someone who did nothing to help a child who was by all accounts RAPED by an adult.
the law regarding what to do when you suspect child abuse is clear and in plain english: reporting your suspicions to the police is MANDATORY. Not “optional”; not “proving abuse”. MANDATORY REPORTING OF CHILD ABUSE SUSPICION.
this isn’t some arcane or unfair provision: this is something everyone who works with kids knows. EVERYONE.
These protesting, rioting, selfish, amoral children of the Crappy Valley need to go look in the mirror.
Yeah, it’s not a pleasant spectacle.
Continue the program?! It needs to be shut down! It kills me how the same fucking people who demand banks be shut down and bankers arrested can try to find redemption in a greedy depraved corporate sports institution that allowed CHILDREN TO BE RAPED!
Shut it down? Why? Football and the program had nothing to do with the rapes. The players and students who benefit from the program did nothing wrong. The football program still achieved everything it was supposed to do — create decent achieving men who are valuable members of society — who also happen to win games.
Get rid of every person in a position of leadership who even remotely was complicit in allowing this behavior to happen and continue. Surely. Let them rot in jail. Let them endure our scorn.
And I think there are probably a lot of them, especially if this is true: http://www.nesn.com/2011/11/jerry-sandusky-rumored-to-have-been-pimping-out-young-boys-to-rich-donor
s-says-mark-madden.html.
THAT would be a shitstorm and THAT would say that as good as some aspects of the PSU football culture are, the culture needs a serious makeover — yes may shut the program down for a season and just start over.