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.
Whether we like it or not, the failure of Paterno to do more than the bare minimum is a more important part of his legacy than the cute coke-bottle glasses he wore, the way he led his team onto the field in a ratty sweater, and any football game won. Football is a game. It does not affect life. The abuse of a child is an act that affects the victim for life and can lead to self-hatred and suicide. I, for one, know of no football player who committed suicide because he threw a last-minute interception or missed a game-saving tackle.
Even before Paterno’s death Sunday, the travesty of Penn State was already veering away from the countless acts of sexual abuse Sandusky allegedly committed against minors, not to mention all the indications of a cover-up by the top echelon of the university, including Paterno. Instead a new steam engine has been in motion, questioning whether Paterno had been treated fairly by the trustees when he was fired. The chorus was growing louder, forcing board of trustee members to go on a public relations blitz to The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer to make their case they had done the right thing. Which they did. Artful, no, because of the way he was notified, with a phone message to call a board member. Necessary, yes.
My guess is that the death of Paterno will pump that steam engine even more. Those who loved him—and there are many thousands, and they have every right to love him—will push him more and more into the sanctity of the martyred because of his death.
“When I think back on Joe Paterno’s legacy, the events of the last two months won’t even cross my mind.”
Franco Harris, last week:
“I find it hard to believe that on Nov. 9th, that all 32 board members wanted Joe Paterno fired,” Harris said. “Hopefully, someone will come forward and admit they didn’t want Joe Paterno fired. This wasn’t a football problem. If it had been a football issue, believe me, Joe Paterno would have handled this.
“The present leadership thinks it’s right what happened and how this was handled. And we all know it was wrong. And this comes from our current leadership. They’re hoping everything goes on as normal. All I want is the truth.
“I think we deserve it.”
Hopefully, somebody supplied him with a copy of this article out of the New York Times today:
The board, scrambling to address the child sexual abuse scandal involving the university and its football program, had already decided to remove Graham B. Spanier as president. Then, many of those present recalled this week, the tension in the room mounted. Joe Paterno’s future was next up. Surma announced that an agreement appeared to have been reached to fire Paterno, too — the trustees having determined that he had failed to take adequate action when he was told that one of his longtime assistants had been seen molesting a 10-year-old boy in Paterno’s football facility.
Surma, those present recalled, surveyed the other trustees — there are 32 — for their opinions and emotions before asking one last question: “Does anyone have any objections? If you have an objection, we’re open to it.”
No one in the room spoke. There was silence from the phone speakers. Paterno’s 46-year tenure as head coach of one of the country’s storied college football programs was over, and the gravity of the action began to sink in.
Or more importantly (emphasis mine):
“To me, it wasn’t about guilt or innocence in a legal sense,” the trustee Kenneth C. Frazier, the chief executive at Merck, said of Paterno’s decision not to go to police. “It was about these norms of society that I’m talking about: that every adult has a responsibility for every other child in our community. And that we have a responsibility not to do the minimum, the legal requirement. We have a responsibility for ensuring that we can take every effort that’s within our power not only to prevent further harm to that child, but to every other child.”
