Jim Souhan asks, “What would young Joe … have said about JoePa, the legend who waved cheerfully to doting fans after being revealed as an enabler of child rape?”
Many of my peers are choosing to remember young Joe today. They’re using the sadness of his death and the enormity of his accomplishments to obscure his crimes of omission. This is sports sentimentality at its worst, and nowhere does sentimentality run amok the way it does in the bastion of school fight songs and mascots.
One man had a chance to preserve, even enhance, young Joe’s reputation as a great leader. That man was old Joe. Presented with eyewitness accounts of child abuse in his own locker room, and surrounded by years of rumors about one of his most important assistant coaches, Paterno shrank.
With great power comes great responsibility. Paterno wielded more influence than anyone else in Happy Valley. When he could have used it to protect children, he passed the buck like a cowering bureaucrat.
