As we’ve said here before, the lure of sports for many is its simplicity. Sports are compelling to many because, in a world filled with nuance and shades of gray, where the good guy and the bad guy are often indecipherable, athletics are nice and neat. In that story line, our guys can do no wrong and whatever they do in pursuit of success is acceptable.
No sport sells that narrative better than college football, where practically anything goes in the name of winning one for the dear old alma mater. And no one symbolizes college football’s moral relativism better than the late Joe Paterno, the longtime coach at Penn State. For 45 years, Paterno roamed the sidelines at Happy Valley, molding young men and winning football games, 409 of them, to be precise. That number established him as the winningest coach in college football history. Paterno’s teams were fundamentally sound and the coach presented himself and his teams as examples of integrity in an athletic world gone mad.
As we well know, precious little in the Penn State program was good. In 1969, Paterno hired an assistant coach named Jerry Sandusky and kept him for 30 years. Sandusky, who is not to be confused with the Baltimore television sportscaster, was convicted nearly three years ago of 45 counts of sexually assaulting boys, many of whom were at-risk or were underprivileged. Much of the abuse occurred on the Penn State campus, yet Paterno said he knew nothing about it. An investigation commissioned by the school and conducted by former FBI director Louis Freeh indicated that Paterno hid facts of Sandusky’s abuse.
Indeed, an assistant coach testified during Sandusky’s trial that he told Paterno he saw Sandusky abusing a boy in the Penn State locker room. Paterno did nothing. Paterno was fired in November 2011 and died two months later of lung cancer at the age of 85.
Penn State signed a consent decree with the NCAA regarding the institution’s inaction towards Sandusky. The school agreed to pay $60 million to a fund that would go to abuse survivors. Penn State was also barred from postseason play for four years and suffered a reduction in football scholarships. The school also had to vacate 111 wins from the time Sandusky coached at Penn State, meaning Paterno was no longer atop the leader board. State officials challenged the decree and the NCAA last week settled. Among the points in the settlement was that the wins were restored to the record and Paterno is once again the king of college football.
Paterno had experience in ignoring evil in his midst. When he was athletic director for a time, he hired a woman to coach the women’s basketball team. That woman, Rene Portland, spent much of her 27 years at Penn State, running off players that she thought were lesbians, in violation of state discrimination laws and with the complicity of Paterno.
The Penn State men’s hockey team wore decals last week with the number 409, the number of wins Joe Paterno racked up in his time there.
Do you think Jerry Sandusky’s victims were as happy for Joe Paterno as the rest of Happy Valley?