Joe Paterno: The good guys eventually win

Joe Paterno was one of the good guys. In fact, he was one of the greatest of the good guys in modern college sports, and--if you read carefully about the recent Penn State scandal--you will realize that nothing that occurred in the Sandusky child molestation case diminishes Paterno as a coach or as a person.

One story a football coach friend of mine once told me encapsulates much about Paterno as a coach and as a man. It was the 1987 Fiesta Bowl, which pitted Penn State against Miami. Miami that year had a hot quarterback by the name of Vinni Testaverde. The game is now legendary for the contrast between the two teams. Miami was a team that had earned its reputation as a band of thugs. As someone put it, they were the "Oakland Raiders of college football.

And  they were furthermore run by a coach who had no business coaching students: Jimmy Johnson, who later went on to coach the Dallas Cowboys and who has thankfully retired from coaching. He personified everything that is wrong with modern college footbal. The thugishness on the team was something he apparently didn't discourage.

The game would be a contest between the good guys and the bad guys.

The Hurricane players decided to dress the part--in military fatigues. In a pre-game steak fry, to which both teams were invited, Penn State players ribbed the camo-bedecked Hurricanes about their coach, among other things. The humorless Hurricane players walked off in a huff, one remarking, "Did the Japanese sit down and eat with Pearl Harbor before they bombed them? No. We're outta here." The team walked out.

"Excuse me," said a Penn State player. "But didn't the Japanese lose the war?"

When the Penn State players arrived for the game, they stepped off the bus--dressed in suits. As they made their way to the locker room, Johnson's thugs were there to greet them. Paterno referred to both these incidents in his wonderful, Paterno: By the Book:

"I don't know whether Jimmy helped his kids plan their disgraceful walkout. ... But I know he was there. Nor did he raise a finger of caution when we were climbing out of our bus for the locker room as his team ... just about blocked our path, waving and taunting and yelling, 'We'll get you, you mothers.' (I'm only using half their word)."

Paterno cautioned his players, telling them to expend their energy on the field.

After having lost to Oklahoma the previous year in the Orange Bowl, Paterno's players wanted a win, and the attitude of the Miami players made them want it even more.

The game did not start out well for the Nittany Lions. Their quarterback, who had trouble finding any open receivers, was pummeled. Their ground game was in a funk. At one point they fumbled, a mistake which gave Miami a touchdown. Penn State got one of their own, resulting in a 7-7 tie at the half.

But the Hurricane's offense wasn't doing well either. The much vaunted Testaverde couldn't get anything going, despite the undersized Penn State safeties, which the Hurricanes had ridiculed before the game as "smurfs." It began to become apparent to Miami's offense that the Nitanny Lion defensive backs hit. Hard. And even though Penn State's offense kept stalling, Miami began turning over the ball. In the fourth quarter, Testaverde threw to the wrong places, and when he threw to the right place, his receivers dropped the ball. But Miami still managed a field goal, making it 10-7.

Peterno himself was not worried. His philosophy was that you win with defense, and second with special teams. All the offense had to do was not hurt them. This is exactly what happened.

Testaverde, shaken and confused by Penn State's shifting schemes, threw the ball right into the hands of a Penn State defender, who ran it to the Hurricane's five yard line. On the next play, the Penn State quarterback went in for a touchdown. The score was 14-10, and that's how the game ended.

The good guys had won.

When the board of Penn State basically fired Paterno, they sacrificed him on the altar of their own reputation. Rather than do the right thing to the man who had done so much for the university and its players and students, they did the easy thing. Paterno was 85 years old and suffering from health problems. He had already resolved, in order to make things easier for the university, to retire at the end of the year, which was shortly approaching. The board should have left it at that. It didn't.

Paterno called what he did at Penn State a "grand experiment." What was the experiment? It was a simple recipe: "Success with honor." This he accomplished not only by being a moral example to his players, but by doing something that too many college and high school coaches fail to do--some by simply not even trying: ensure their players do well academically.

Penn State football players not only had to perform on the field, they had to perform in the classroom. He produced 37 first team all-Americans. In 2010, the team sported an 84 percent graduation rate, a rate too rare in college athletics. And the emphasis Paterno gave to academics didn't end with the players on the team. He gave millions of his own money and money that he raised to improve Penn State's academic programs.

It is interesting to note that while the Penn State football stadium is named after a former governor, the library is named after him: The Paterno Library.

The scandal itself was not Paterno's fault. Nobody even pretends that it was. He did what he was supposed to do, reporting what little had been reported to him by Mike McQuary to school officials the next day, one of whom was the head of the campus police. But as soon as the scandal was announced, the Monday morning moralists swung into action, spouting casuistry as they came. Local police had known about Sandusky since 1998, but let it go.

And some of the criticism had come from ESPN, which itself had sat on a recording it had of a conversation with the wife of Syracuse assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine, revealing something of the man now charged with charges similar to those against Sandusky--a recording they sat on for years.

Within a matter of hours, the reputation of Paterno who been the paragon of propriety and virtue in a world characterized by two little of either was in tatters.

Even before the report of Paterno's death, the wheels were falling off the moral case against Paterno. Mike McQuery, who witnessed what we know now to have been child molestation recently testified that he didn't tell Paterno all that he had seen. And the board is now being battered by charges from its own alumni that it did Paterno wrong.

He was told of his firing in a phone call from a board member. It was cheap. It was tawdry. And it was entirely without class.

Paterno's reaction to what was done to him, on the other hand, was as classy as the rest of his career. "You know, I'm not as concerned about me," Paterno told one interviewer. "What's happened to me has been great. I got five great kids. Seventeen grandchildren. I've had a wonderful experience here at Penn State. I don't want to walk away from this thing bitter."

He said he was not bitter, although he had every right to be. He wanted everyone to understand that this wasn't a football scandal. "I'm not worried about me. I think the courts will have their decisions as to what happens. That's where I want to leave it. I want to leave it on a high note and let the legal process do what they got to do."

The Sandusky scandal happened to Paterno in the fourth quarter of his life. He was 85 years old, having been head coach for 46 years, and having served at Penn State in other capacities for more years than that. The scandal put him behind as he approached the final minutes.

But Paterno was a devout Catholic Christian who believed that the game doesn't end here. Despite the fact that you are behind as you near the end is not reason to give up hope. It was a message he told his players again and again over the course of his storied life.

Joe Paterno was a good guy, and good guys eventually win.

ESPN: A moral obligation to report sexual abuse to the police for thee, but not for me

On CNN last night, Anderson Cooper interviewed an ESPN reporter. Turns out ESPN had contact with a man who had been sexually victimized by then Syracuse assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine. The man even had an audio tape of a phone conversation he had with Fine's wife in which she talks about Fine's problem with young boys. What did ESPN do with this evidence?

They sat on it.

The reporter said that, because they couldn't find any other victims willing to speak, they felt they couldn't do anything with it. Nor did they bother to take the evidence to police, who have only just found out about the audio tape.

In the time between when ESPN found out about this and now (I think the reporter said 2002, but someone needs to check that), it appears that other boys may have been victimized by Fine.

Where is the outrage?

Remember the outcry against Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who did what he was legally obligated to do, apparently under the assumption that his superiors would do what they were legally obligated to do, but who, say his critics, while he discharged his legal obligation, did not discharge his moral obligations?

Why are the same standards of reporting child abuse to police not applied to the press? The taped phone conversation ESPN had in its possession was at least as damning as anything Paterno knew and ESPN was actually talking to the victim. Why didn't Cooper drill the ESPN reporter and ask him why he didn't discharge his moral obligation to report this to the police?

The reporter went on about how they felt the evidence they had did not meet up to some journalistic criterion for any action. Okay. Fine. They why doesn't that same criterion apply to Paterno?

The police DID know about Sandusky

His critics say that Joe Paterno should have reported the accusation he heard about him to the police. Then, we are told, something would have been done.

Right?

No one seems to have taken much note of the fact that the police knew a whole lot more than we have any indication Paterno knew a lot earlier than Paterno did. In the 1998 police investigation of Jerry Sandusky, the police appeared to know plenty about Sandusky's behavior, including the fact that he liked to shower with naked little boys.

It apparently wasn't enough to prosecute, but it certainly seemed to be enough to keep an eye on him, which they apparently never did.

If Paterno is morally culpable for not going beyond his legal obligation to report what he knew up the chain of command at Penn State, and Penn State officials were legally culpable for not going to police with the charge, then what kind of culpability to the police themselves bear in this case.

It's an interesting question a lot of people don't seem to want to address.

Do Paterno's critics want to legislate morality?

I notice that there is now a movement to write into Pennsylvania law that anyone, not just those in highest positions of authority, as is now the case, is required to report suspected child abuse to law enforcement authorities.

Critics of Paterno argue, not implausibly, that, although he was not required by law to report what he heard from McQuery to the police, he was morally obligated to anyway.

The law is being changed to put this moral obligation into law. In other words, they are legislating morality.

But I thought we couldn't do that?

The Vanity of Human Wishes: Joe Paterno and the "Bystander Effect"

David Brooks is not averse to committing psychology. In fact, he does it frequently, a practice we normally turn our noses up at around here. But Brooks makes a good point on the Penn State controversy in a New York Times article titled, "Let's All Feel Superior," a point I have made without the pscyhological dressing, which is that we are reading back into the situation all that we know now and from a viewpoint Paterno could not have had:

First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. The atrocity is what Jerry Sandusky has been accused of doing at Penn State. The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.

Unfortunately, none of us can safely make that assumption. Over the course of history — during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods — the same pattern has emerged. Many people do not intervene. Very often they see but they don’t see.

This seems to me self-evident, but many of these commentators can't wrest themselves from their knowledgable future perspective to see their vanity for what it is. They see, but they don't see. They are incapable of putting themselves in someone else's shoes.

Our culture has become coarse and nothing about the depravity of men is now hidden from us.We now know what people are capable of and we are accustomed to having it paraded before us in all its squalor on a daily basis. But we're talking about a man here who is of another generation. Paterno is 84 years old. He's not only old, he's old school. When someone tells him they witnessed something going on "of a sexual nature," the rest of us have a pretty vivid image of what that might be since we have seen it dramatized for us over and over and over again.

But people of Paterno's generation have not. He probably goes home and watches "Gunsmoke" reruns, not "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit." That's what I do.

I'm loathe to quote "studies" on anything, and so it makes me feel better about the studies that Brooks quotes that it is he who is quoting them. But the next time you hear someone tell you all the heroics he would have performed had he been in Paterno's shoes, remind them of the "Bystander Effect":

Even in cases where people consciously register some offense, they still often don’t intervene. In research done at Penn State and published in 1999, students were asked if they would make a stink if someone made a sexist remark in their presence. Half said yes. When researchers arranged for that to happen, only 16 percent protested.

In another experiment at a different school, 68 percent of students insisted they would refuse to answer if they were asked offensive questions during a job interview. But none actually objected when asked questions like, “Do you think it is appropriate for women to wear bras to work?”

So many people do nothing while witnessing ongoing crimes, psychologists have a name for it: the Bystander Effect. 

I have had my differences with Brooks, but the piece is really good. Read the rest here.

The Media Mob

There is a scene in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird in which Atticus Finch has stationed himself at the door of the jail. Tom Robinson is about to face trial for rape. A lynch mob gathers in front of the jail and confronts Atticus, Robinson's attorney, has anticipated trouble. Tom Robinson is a black man accused of raping a white woman in early 20th century Mississippi. Atticus knows Tom is innocent and is trying to keep him safe.

As Atticus faces down the mob, whose members include many respectable members of the community, his daughter Scout and her brother, seeing his danger, run from behind the bushes where they have been hiding to stand at his side. Atticus, concerned for their safety, demands they leave, but they refuse.

In a scene that marks the high point of the book, Scout looks over the crowd and sees a face that she knows: Walter Cunningham, a poor but proud and hardworking man whom she remembers stopping by the house to pay his legal bill from Atticus with hickory nuts and turnip greens. The movie portrays this scene to perfection: "Hey, Mr. Cunningham," says Scout. "I said, 'Hey, Mr. Cunningham.' How's your entailment gettin' along? Don't you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I'm Jean Louise Finch."

All of a sudden Mr. Cunningham is shamed. The moment has become a human one, one in which his own inhumane attitude--and that of the men around him--has been exposed. He looks down and shuffles his feet. All the men in the mob are made human in that moment. They are embarrassed by the light that has been cast on their own darkness and they disband and go home.

The men didn’t want to wait for the courts to deal with the situation. Tom Robinson had been to the woman’s house. She had been raped. He was black. Ergo, he did it.

When Joe Paterno was fired at Penn State, CNN dropped most of its other news programming to cover the student protests that ensued. The media called them "riots."  Admittedly, there was some minor vandalism, but the worst offense occurred when students overturned a news van--an action I myself have felt like performing on a number of occasions.

CNN viewers were treated to a grim Anderson Cooper, lamenting the misguided nature of student sentiment, and expressing abhorrence with the student mob. They were engaging in senseless behavior. These students just didn't understand.

It's worth considering what it is about mobs that we profess to dislike.

What do mobs do? They presume someone is guilty until proven innocent. They jump to conclusions on insufficient evidence. They exact justice indiscriminately. They let their emotions control their judgment. They put the execution of justice before the process of justice. They want justice administered before it can be determined what its administration should consist of.

What is ironic is to watch the media, still in high dudgeon over the student riots, doing itself exactly what mobs do. They have presumed Paterno to be guilty. They have jumped to conclusions about what he knew on insufficient evidence. They have let their emotions cloud their judgment. They have rendered a verdict before any facts have been accepted into evidence. They have supported his firing without the Penn State board even saying what he was fired for.

Mob psychology is easy to get caught up in. Sandusky had been involved in the Penn State program. Paterno was coach. Sandusky sexually abused a boy in the locker room. Ergo, Paterno is guilty.

And the mob continues to gather.

We Interrupt this Kangaroo Court for an Important Message about What We Don't Know about the Penn State Scandal

Armed with the hindsight of history and with a few scraps of fact (and plenty of fiction) in front of them, the media has embarked on the serious and careful process of recklessly trying Joe Paterno. After his firing by Penn State, they cheered. Now they're taking the next step and saying, with hopeful satisfaction, that he may be facing further charges.

This is the same media, of course, who only recently got through apotheosizing Michael Jackson, who had a disturbing penchant for sleeping with young boys. It's also the same media that looked the other way when gay rights groups associated themselves with advocates of pederasty and pushed for the lowering of age of consent laws.

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In any case, when I wrote the previous post on the issue of Penn State and Joe Paterno in which I expressed my dissappointment with what I said I thought was scapegoating by the Penn State board, I had not read the grand jury report. Since then, several friends have expressed their dissatisfaction with my remarks on the basis of their reading of the grand jury report. Susan Perkins Weston, an education consultant, posted the following:

Martin, go read the grand jury report. Paterno knew boys were being raped. He knew that the Penn State aura was part of how the rapist recruited his victims. He knew at Nittany Lion facilities were part of the bait.

When I saw these comments, I thought to myself: Now you've gone and done it, Martin. You should have read the report before saying anything about this issue. You're going to look pretty stupid when you read this thing and see that Paterno was in fact implicated in this whole scandal. You should never have relied on media reports of what the report said (like that ever works).

Well, now I have read the grand jury report, and I have a public announcement to make:

The grand jury report says almost nothing about Paterno and what he knew. I have therefore done a complete 360 degree turn in my opinion and now I think ... just about exactly what I thought before.

In particular the grand jury report doesn't say anything close what Susan says it does. It does not say anything remotely like "Paterno knew boys were being raped." It says only that he knew about one and it wasn't exactly clear what he was told about it. Nor does it in any way indicate explicitly or implicitly that Paterno "knew that the Penn State aura was part of how the rapist recruited his victims." It doesn't say anything about Paterno knowing anything whatsoever about Sandusky recruiting anyone. Nor does it indicate that he "knew [that] Nittany Lion facilities were part of the bait."

Sorry, but it doesn't. And anyone who claims it does needs to quote for us the grand jury report, chapter and verse. I read the whole thing and it's not there.

What it does do is give a litany of the utterly depraved nature of Jerry Sandusky. To use an old-fashioned word, the guy was a pervert. Perversion, however, implies such things and sexual norms, and we all know now that there are no such thing as sexual norms. When it comes to sex, there is now only consensual and non-consensual sex, the former being perfectly permissible in all its permutations, and the second being absolutely wrong even though we no longer think there are absolute rights or wrongs anymore. So maybe I should shy away from the word "pervert."

On second thought, having studied this matter carefully and considered this issue seriously and in depth for about a fraction of a second, I think I'll use it at every available opportunity.

The grand jury report lists for the reader all of the many things Sandusky did which numerous people knew in bits and pieces, and much that nobody knew except for the victims. Wrong things. Perverted things. A lot of people knew a lot of things, but very few individual people knew more than a thing or two about what Sandusky was doing. A small handful of them knew enough to know that Sandusky was committing sickening crimes, and were, under Pennsylvania law, required to report them to police.

You can also say that many of them should, whatever the law may have required, reported them to police even though the law did not require them to do so. In hindsight, and knowing what we now know, this certainly seems to be the case with Paterno.

While many media reports seem to assume that Paterno knew that Sandusky was a sexual predator pervert, the grand jury report indicates one thing and one thing only: that one of his assistants came to him and said he saw Sandusky "fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy" (the report's words, not necessarily Paterno's), which is what Paterno reported to Penn State atheletics director Tim Curley the very next day, a Sunday, when Paterno called him to his home.

That's it. As the report says:

Pennsylvania's mandatory reporting statute for suspected child abuse ... provides that when a staff member reports abuse ... the person in charge of the school or institution has the responsibility and legal obligation to report or cause such a report to be made by telephone and in writing within 48 hours.

If you are not the person in charge of the school or institution, then your job is a little different. Here is what Pennsylvania law requires that you do: "... as a member of the staff of a medical or other public or private institution, school, facility or agency, [the person with a reasonable cause to suspect child abuse] shall immediately notify the person in charge." [emphasis added] This is precisely what Paterno promptly did.

But now Paterno's critics are applying the Monday morning quarterback rule (by which we all state that we know without a doubt what we would have done in this case except that we really don't) by which we attribute all that we now know about Sandusky being a sexual predator to Paterno and conclude that he therefore should have immediately reported it to police. As far as we know McQuery's accusation is the only thing Paterno ever heard about Sandusky's behavior. And if it was, it was probably a bit hard for him to believe about a person he had worked with as a coach for so long. As it was it was an accusation, and he did exactly what the law said he should do.

Now, should he have gone to police with an accusation like this from one of his coaches which he did not witness himself? Again, in hindsight it seems clear, he should have. There's a lot of things which in hindsight could or should have been done. I'd like to think that I would have gone and borrowed a bat from the baseball team and applied it liberally to Sandusky to make sure he was rendered incapable of doing anything to anyone again. But, knowing what we now know, we have lost all sense of what this charge may have looked like to Paterno at the time.

In fact, this is the main problem with the kangaroo court now in progress: it uncritically accepts the fact that Paterno committed some egregious moral blunder by reading back onto the situation at the time all that we now know, most of which almost certainly Paterno did not know.

We don't know, for example, whether Paterno even knew of the 1998 investigation of Sandusky (you know, the pervert), and had he known about it, he would have known that the report basically acquitted Sandusky. Not only that, but it turns out that investigation was shut down by the then head of the campus police--one of the entities that people are now saying Paterno should have known to report the incident to.

I heard one commentator talk about how Paterno should have known about what was going on because Sandusky was his "good friend." Uh, well, no. Sorry. Not only had Paterno informed Sandusky in 1999 that Sandusky would not be his successor, about which Sandusky was quite upset, but relations between the two seemed particularly strained (one report recounts Paterno damning the man with faint praise in a very brief comment at Sandusky's retirement dinner in 1999, after which Paterno promptly left).

It also appears that the two didn't socialized together.

I also have heard several commentators talk about Sandusky working under Paterno when Paterno received the original report from McQuery. Well, sorry again. Sandusky retired in 1999, three years before the incident that is now causing all the controversy. He was not on Paterno's staff at the time. It's not even clear he knew that Sandusky had access to the locker room.

In addition, we have no idea what the conversation was between Paterno and Tim Curley the day after the accusation was reported to Paterno. For all we know, Curley could have assured Paterno this would be dealt with. We just don't know.

As it is, what we have right now is bunch of commentators running around like 5 year-olds saying, "Why if I'd o' been there, I would o' [insert brave sounding heroic exploit here]."

The bottom line is there are too many unknowns to say much about anything relating to Paterno in this case. Maybe he knew everything that went on. Maybe he participated in a cover-up. Maybe he protected Sandusky. All that seems very unlikely given what we know, but who knows what further investigation will turn up in time.

My point was simply that there was insufficient reason to fire Paterno, a conclusion lent credence by the interesting coincidental fact that the board never provided one.

But observers far and near, who have almost literally nothing to base their charges on, are out in force announcing the verdict against Joe. If we're trying to figure out where injustices have been committed, however, it's probably not a good idea to commit them in the process.

Ecce Homo: Why Penn State had to fire a guy who didn't deserve to be fired

Joe Paterno was a good guy. No one denies it. That he made a mistake in not doing more in dealing with coach Sandusky is something even he admits. But there is the feeling that an injustice has been done to him that just doesn't seem to go away.

One thing is clear: none of the people who voted for his dismissal has done so much for so many as he has. He was fired by people who will never be as great as he is.

If the facts of the case were clearer his firing wouldn't seem so problematic. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and it's not clear at all that Paterno knew all the things he would have had to know in order to bear the level of culpability the board would have to attribute to him to justify the way they treated him in the end. In fact, when whoever it was from the Penn State board made the call to tell him he was dismissed, he asked what the problem was with serving the remaining several games of the season (He had just announced his retirement at the fast-approaching end of the season). They couldn't tell him why.

But they didn't need to have any reasons to fire Joe Paterno. That was not what this was about.

My theory is that the board felt like they could not afford to do the appropriate thing here, which was to let Joe go at the end of the season, which is almost here. It had to be seen as forcing him out. There was no need for him to go in the ignominious way in which they forced him to go. It wasn't something he deserved. But it was something board needed to do in order to look like it had done something when it was too late to do anything that really mattered.

If you don't want someone else to shoot you, one of the ways to prevent it is to shoot yourself. And that's what Penn State's board decided the university must do. Committing institutional suicide was the safest thing for it to do.

Part of the measure of a man is how he reacts when people treat him as if he were less than he was. Paterno's reaction to his dismissal was to say simply that he prayed for the victims. Even after he was treated as less than he was, he still acted as if it wasn't about him.

And yet it was.

In the end, the problem was that it was Penn State as an institution that was sullied in the whole episode. And Joe Paterno had done so much for the university for so many years that he was the embodiment of the university. It wouldn't have mattered if he had never known about any of it. He would still have had to be fired.

The institution needed a scapegoat to bear the guilt. They found one: the guy who is Penn State. It was their way of washing their hands of the whole affair. John Surma, vice chairman of the board of trustees, was the one who made the announcement. It was quick and clean. They had no Barrabas; all they had was Joe.

I wonder if anyone thought to ask Surma's wife if she had had any strange dreams the night before.

Joe Paterno was not fired for what he did: he was fired for who he was.  He was a great man. And it was his own greatness that made him the guy who had to be gotten rid of.

Now the institution can go on. But it isn't Penn State anymore. It's just another college.