Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Sports / News The game's over for Joe Pa
Posted by Mick Dumke on 11.09.11 at 05:30 PM
Why in the hell is Penn State preparing for a football game Saturday?
Believe me, I’m a big college football fan. No other sort of nutcase would spend his Saturday afternoons in the fall watching Northwestern—a team as imperfect as they come—alternate between last-minute failures and astounding upsets, with the occasional blowout loss thrown in to mix things up.... And I’ve actually enjoyed all of them.
But you know what? Football is a game. If I needed a reminder, it came in the form of a news break during the Wildcats’ thrilling win over Nebraska last weekend. That’s when I first heard about the arrest of former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky for the alleged sexual assaults of eight boys over a 15-year period.
Not much information was available then, but more keeps coming out, and, like many, I am struggling to fathom what went on.
What’s happening in State College right now is a horror show, not a game, yet so far Penn State officials haven't understood the difference. It’s as if they’re worried that the news of boys being raped by a football coach will prove to be a distraction as the Nittany Lions prepare to face Nebraska.
This morning Coach Joe Paterno announced that he’ll retire at the end of the season. That’s worse than if he’d declared he wasn’t going anywhere, because now he’s acknowledging that he failed to do all he could have to protect children from a monster who worked for him—while signaling that accountability can wait until the Nittany Lions try to pick up a few more victories. This has the stench of damage control, not the look of justice. In fact, there’s not even a vague resemblance.
“I wish I had done more,” Paterno said. I appreciate that someone tangled up in this outrage has come out and said so, but then again, I’m not sure what exactly he’s referring to. Presumably Paterno is talking about the time he learned that Sandusky—a man once considered likely to be the next head coach at Penn State—was seen assaulting a boy in a shower at a school athletic facility. That was in 2002.
But given how shockingly little the school or Paterno himself have come clean to this point, I’m left wondering if he’s alluding to other incidents before then. Sandusky, after all, “retired” in 1999, when he was still in his mid-50s.
Part of me feels for Joe Pa, a master coach in a game I love, especially when he describes this chain of events—a series of crimes followed by a cover-up—as “one of the great sorrows of my life.”
But then I think about the eight boys whose lives were changed forever by an apparent predator, a guy who reportedly had enough standing at Penn State to use their football training facilities as recently as last week—years after the criminal investigation had been launched.
“I just want to hear Paterno offer some sort of explanation,” my brother, Dave, a fellow football junkie, said as we were discussing this last night.
I do too—except there’s no explanation that can possibly make any sense.
I’m simply astonished how often people forget that human institutions—schools, churches, banks, football teams—are supposed to serve people, rather than the other way around. And that arrogance and corruption inevitably surrounds those who become ensconced in positions of unchecked power.
Penn State has had more than a decade to get this one right, and they still can’t sort it out. So the issue for me is not whether Joe Paterno should be on the sideline—that’s obvious. It’s whether Penn State should be inviting 107,000 people into its stadium to cheer for its football team Saturday.
Comments (8)
Showing 1-8 of 8
"I think about the eight boys whose lives were changed forever by an apparent predator"
Get me re-write!
http://www.myfoxphilly.com/dpp/sports/loca…
-- MrJM
like
dislike
You don't have to go all the way to rape for these guys -- and women -- to be motherfucking creepy in pursuit of a top game. I sat in a class a few years ago listening to a Big Ten basketball recruiter describe how she went after promising kids as young as 13, courting and wooing them and their parents, texting the kids while they sat in class and all around behaving like bus-station predators. The fact that these tactics are well-documented make them no less creepy. In the end the adults are there to use the kids. There's a lot of baloney about opportunities, etc., but it boils down to distracting the kids and twisting up their heads as they're growing up, working them to point of permanent injury for almost no money, then booting them with no responsibility for how they've damaged the kids physically or distracted from their educations. It's sick.
For Christ's sake, Sparky, please do not compare sexual abuse with normal college athletic recruiting. If you think those two things are in any way similar then I really don't know what to say.
Don't be stupid, of course I don't. I'm saying that the enterprise is sick top to bottom, and that you can go beyond saying "it's sick and wrong to rape kids" to "it's sick and wrong to stalk and use kids, period."
Now let the defense of stalking young kids in hopes of someday recruiting them, paying them bupkes, giving them fake educations, and telling them to wreck their bodies so a handful of rich guys can make another pile begin.
I'm pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of people who play college sports consider it to be a positive experience in their lives. If anything, I would imagine that this is even more likely to be the case for athletes at major programs who are talented enough to attract recruiters at an early stage (the ones you are talking about). So I don't get what you mean by "use". I'm sure there have been surveys about this type of thing. I don't feel like looking them up but I'm sure it would be very easy to find out whether the students, past and present, agree with you that they are being used. Regardless of a few scandals here and there, the overwhelming majority get real educations and not fake educations, of course. And sports are normally good for people's bodies because it keeps them physically fit. They do not wreck the bodies.
It seems to me that when you say that recruiting "uses kids" the logical extension of your argument is that the entire education system (college as well as below) also uses kids. One of its main purposes is to get the country to remain competitive and prosperous by training a well-educated workforce for the next generation. I suppose you could say that this "uses kids" for the purpose of the whole country's future. But I don't think that is a bad thing. Using people, even using kids, is not always negative. When you pretend that it is you minimize the seriousness of the times when it is truly deplorable, such as the Penn State situation.
"I'm pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of people who play college sports consider it to be a positive experience in their lives."
Sure they do. Because they're idiots. For the equivalent of about $20K a year, they neglect college and beat the crap out of their bodies, often acquiring lifelong physical problems. Whatever they may be nominally, in fact they're not students; they're poorly-paid employees with no future in the business. Then they graduate with "degrees" nobody takes seriously, there's no sports career, no health insurance, nothing. Meanwhile, who made money? The coach with the big salary and the TV execs, that's who. And the ranks of hanging-on recruiters and athletic dept employees and other salaried types who'll see a couple dozen more crops of young morons come through during their working lives.
Yes, sports are great for your body if you play them recreationally. Do it for hours daily, competitively, and you'll soon be well-acquainted with the ortho surg and PT guys, not to mention the wonders of corticosteroids. Add contact and you can say goodbye to the normal use of some part of your body. These guys are walking around strapped up like crazy. The women, too. And of course they don't give any thought to what it's going to be like living with these injuries at 35, 45, 55. They're kids. But nobody's going to pay for rehab, joint replacement, etc. when they're older and the injured joint's deteriorating. You graduate or fall off the team and they're done with you.
You have to see these recruiters in action to believe what they do and how they talk about it. I am not joking when I say they stalk middle-school kids. They go to the games, they hang around, the language they use is very much the language of seduction. They're wooing kids. They do all they can to sell the kids on their programs, their schools, and on committing hard to the sport regardless of what else might be good for the kid. Why? It ain't for the kid's own good, baby. It's so the recruiter's school -- the one that pays the recruiter's salary -- can win, and so the recruiter can chalk another one up. That's what they care about. It's creepy as hell, listening to a revved-up 40-year-old talk about what she can offer some 15-year-old she's kept on the line for two years, desperately texting the kid in math class, thinking about how she can get inside the kid's head so she doesn't lose the kid to a rival who's also texting him or get in trouble with the law. Made me glad my kid shows no athletic promise at all, because if she did, I'd put a stop to that stuff before you could say restraining order.
Actually I'd forgotten what happened when I wandered onto the radar in grad school. I was and am a pretty fast medium-distance runner, and when I showed up on the track for a workout one day the coach saw me & tried to recruit me, redshirt me. I already had a pile of sports injuries and said no, thanks, the priority's keeping the knees working. The guy didn't let up. Tracked me down and was calling me for months, telling me nonsense about tuition benefits I didn't need, baloney privileges, etc. For track, for God's sake, at a very minor school. Multiply that by about a zillion and that's probably what a talented football kid gets.
One of my college friends was a rare (relatively) smart football player, picked a little selective school with a terrible team because he actually wanted to get an education. The other recruiters abused the hell out of him, told him he was stupid, throwing his big chance away, etc. He still busted up his knee bad enough that he had to switch to baseball partway through, and in the end he had to cut that out, too. He scraped through without athlete's A's, and his diploma actually meant something when he got out, but a knee's still a lot to pay for a BA. I don't think he'd recommend it.
Now, very slowly and carefully: Nobody here is minimizing the boys' getting raped. Noooobody. But this other shit is also wrong.
First of all, I'm not even sure who you are talking about specifically. In fact, I'm not certain that you do. Are you talking about all college athletes or just all college athletes playing a popular sport at a school with a major program? Or are you only talking about the top players (or perceived to be top players) who attracted the most attention from recruiters? Obviously, only a small amount of high school students are receiving attention from recruiters at the age of 15.
"Then they graduate with 'degrees' nobody takes seriously"
Again, I have no clue what you are talking about. With few exceptions, when someone graduates from a four year college with a degree it is a real degree that they earned and it allows them great leverage towards good employment prospects.
I suppose if one reads between the lines of your post the best thing to conclude is that your anger about all this comes from personal experience. In any case, its very tough for me to understand the complaints about annoying and persistent recruiters. If someone isn't interested in playing the sport at a college level it is very easy to make that clear to the recruiter. If it is abundantly clear they are not going to get what they want they will go away. Nobody wants to waste their time on a fruitless cause.
