Category Archives: joe paterno

Fool us once, shame on you….twice, shame on us

Leave a reply

Maybe ESPN’s exhaustive “Before Jerry Sandusky; the Untold Story of the Most Dangerous Player in College Football” could too easily be interpreted as targeting the monumental failures at one college, by one powerful coach, to deal with violent misogyny. Maybe the meticulously researched 30,000-word report of a 1970s serial rapist could seem to be painting all big-time football players with the same brush: That of entitled, sub-human brutes with no fear of institutional or judicial guardrails.

In fact, “Untold” is an invaluable piece of journalism that gives voice to the victims in a disturbingly common culture that normalizes sexual assault. And it’s another warning of the age-old tendency to God-up our athletic stars, and how that allows sports organizations to bank on a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil disposition among fans.

It is the lurid tale of Todd Hodne, who had been a Long Island high school football star and, briefly, a scholarship player at Penn State more than 40 years ago, when his string of horrific crimes began to surface (yet were widely covered up). More than that, the story is what co-author Tom Junod called the “prelude to what happened in the Jerry Sandusky scandal” at Penn State 33 years later.

It was in early November 2011 that Sandusky, a celebrated veteran assistant coach at Penn State, was indicted for abusing scores of young boys. That led to the firing of Joe Paterno, Penn State’s sainted head coach, for having failed to act on complaints against Sandusky.

Immediately after those bombshells, Newsday dispatched me to Penn State’s next game in State College, Pa., where students and fans were in stages of anger and disbelief: That such a menace could have gone on for years right under their noses; that football and Paterno had become such mighty forces, bringing in $53 million the previous season, that such evil digressions could essentially be ignored; that Paterno could be guilty in any way, given his fatherly title of “JoePa,” his on-campus life-sized cardboard cutouts called “Stand-Up Joes,” his “success with honor” motto claiming to prioritize morality over athletic doings.

But there it was. And not, we learned from “Untold” by Junod and co-author Paula Lavigne, for the first time.

The Hodne story, beyond the kind of satanic details to set off creep-o-meter alarms, is about what Lavigne previously discovered in her exposes of sexual violence by athletes at Baylor and Michigan State. “If there is one universal,” Lavigne recently told Richard Deitsch on his Sports Media podcast, “it is certainly that there is an effort to keep things quiet, to protect the brand, find ways to deflect and conflate and put the blame elsewhere, make the argument that this is one bad apple.

“What we find typically is that it is not one bad apple. These incidents often point to systemic issues, and those system issues often, not always, involve a lack of transparency.”

Enough unsettling examples are out there to realize the Hodne piece can’t simply be about Penn State’s and Paterno’s sins of priority, that worshippers at the temple of jock celebrity continue to facilitate a blind-eye syndrome. The Cleveland Browns just traded for quarterback Deshaun Watson, facing sexual misconduct civil lawsuits by 22 women, and rewarded him with a $230-million, five-year deal. Jameis Winston was never charged in a rape case while starring at Florida State University—police reportedly did not investigate the allegation—and became a top NFL draft choice. The NFL’s Washington Commanders currently are being investigated by the House Oversight Committee for widespread workplace sexual harassment after years of accusations.

A 2019 USA TODAY investigation noted that NCAA rules allow athletic transfers to continue their playing careers even after criminal convictions, team suspensions or being expelled. The report identified more than two dozen athletes over a five-year period who, after having been disciplined for sexual offenses, simply found another school (and team) and resumed playing, and five others whose careers at their original schools were not interrupted by either convictions or judicial discipline.

There are some heroic figures in the “Untold” piece—specifically, Hodne’s Penn State victim Betsy Sailor and a Hodne teammate, Irv Panky, who helped Sailor confront her predator, the school’s football establishment and the justice system. But co-author Junod found far too familiar a pattern between the Hodne and Sandusky cases.

Junod told Deitsch that, with the publication of the gruesome Hodne narrative, there was plenty of Twitter defense of Paterno—just as there had been a great rush to his side in the Sandusky saga. “I think [Paterno] is an ambiguous figure,” Junod said. “There are definitely times when he is telling people to tell the truth, and there are definitely times when he’s telling people not to talk to the police without his permission. I don’t think that you can view Joe Paterno clearly unless you also view through this lens that we have created, that before Todd Hodne there was Jerry Sandusky…a second serial sexual predator that Joe Paterno had under his administrative oversight.”

“You would think that Joe Paterno learned something. And either he didn’t, or he learned the wrong thing.”

About keeping ALL of Joe Paterno’s history

1 Reply

It is not as if Joe Paterno coached 111 college football victories posthumously. That restored portion of his record at Penn State wasn’t so much a give-back by the NCAA on Friday as it was an acknowledgment that things cannot un-happen.

Paterno’s teams in fact won those 111 games—from 1998, when the first complaint of possible child molestation by Paterno assistant Jerry Sandusky reached police, until 2011, when the Sandusky scandal became public and Paterno was fired for not having acted on an abuse charge against Sandusky.

So Paterno, three years after his death, once again is in the record books for winning more games (409) than any other coach at the highest level of college football. Fine. There are ramifications to rewriting history.

Just as necessary as maintaining an accurate record of wins and losses, though, is acknowledging what got Paterno in trouble in the first place—his elevation to sainted status that surely came into play when the Penn State brand was threatened by the Sandusky revelations. And Paterno, the most powerful man in State College, Pa. (and likely all of Pennsylvania) failed to do more about the awful transgressions on his watch.

Let’s not erase that part of the story, either.

Paterno literally had been put on a pedestal, his seven-foot statue outside the school’s palatial football stadium serving as a pilgrimage site for Penn State fans. An inscription with the statue glowingly proclaimed Paterno an “Educator, Coach, Humanitarian.” He was canonized for his “success with honor” motto that, after the Sandusky mess, sounded ironic at best.

Maybe the trouble was immortalizing Paterno in bronze while he still was alive, which not only fed his self-importance (subconsciously or otherwise) but also prophesied a purity of virtue impossible for any human being to live up to.

Better for universities to sculpt likenesses of some figure of history who is no longer around to take himself too seriously. Or, even less dangerous, a fictional personage. (I therefore submit that my alma mater, the University of Missouri, had a better idea with the two statues on campus: One of Thomas Jefferson, because Mizzou was the first university west of the Mississippi River built in Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase territory; the other of Beetle Bailey, a comic strip character. Beetle and his pals were based on fraternity brothers of his creator, Mort Walker, when Walker was a Missouri student. You may recognize the two honored characters below, during my recent visits.)

me and tom jefferson

me and beetle bailey

Eight months after Paterno was fired—and six months after his death—Penn State officials removed his statue, declaring that it had become a “source of division and an obstacle to healing.” It is hard to know whether Paterno could have been aware of that, or if he somehow is monitoring efforts afoot now to bring back his sculpted likeness. Does he worry, in the afterlife, about the rehabilitation of his legacy?

Some say once gone you’re gone forever

And some say you’re gonna come back

Iris DeMent considered in song,

But no one knows for certain so it’s all the same to me

I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

In this matter of Paterno’s (figurative?) resurrection, it does seem downright cynical that some Penn State boosters want to go beyond his football-record comeback, with fund-raising already in progress to erect a second statue in downtown State College, depicting Paterno seated while reading Virgil’s “Aeneid.”

That Latin epic poem was Paterno’s favorite, an ode that is all legend and exaltation of moral values, chronicling Aeneas’ devotion and loyalty to his country and its prominence—rather than personal gain. It all sounds like Penn Staters again poised on the slippery slope of hero-worship. So many of them were so enamored of football success that Paterno took on the fatherly title of “JoePa;” turned up on life-sized cardboard cutouts (“Stand-Up Joes”) sold in State College; gave the campus creamery reason to market “Peachy Paterno” ice cream. The Sandusky scandal, and the fact his crimes went on so quietly for so long, hinted strongly that Paterno and his football operation had become too powerful to rein in, too locked into the tunnel-vision of producing football success to pay attention to the Sandusky menace right under their noses.

Paterno did leave behind some substantial worth in his 46 years at the school. More than $4 million personally donated to university projects. Hundreds of millions of dollars raised for Penn State through the football operation, including admission into the lucrative Big Ten Conference.

The visibility that Paterno and his teams brought to Happy Valley factored into growing Penn State as a prominent academic institution, and he was further applauded for his insistence that he would not allow athletic preference over education. He called it his “Grand Experiment.”

In the end, though, Sandusky’s depravity knocked Paterno off that pedestal. So, let the old coach keep his football victories. But the complete picture is not a work of art.