If you ask people who know me, they’ll tell you I’m not a sports fan. I used to have sports heroes, like Alan Trammel and Pete Rose, but these days I’m not really surprised when a scandal breaks out, like Tiger Woods or Brett Farve or the current mess with the Minnesota Vikings and their little spat with the state of Minnesota about whether they deserve a new stadium, paid for by the state of Minnesota of course. God forbid pro sports teams have to pay for something.
So in the last week, when the scandal broke at Penn State, I wasn’t too surprised that people rioted on behalf of Joe Paterno. What’s a few raped kids when winning a football game is at stake? That was before I did some reading into Penn State. It was also before This American Life devoted its show to Penn State. It painted an entirely different picture of the Penn State football team than I was expecting. I felt conflicted, and I was happy to feel that way. I’ve gotten much too comfortable with thinking of athletes as bad people by default. It was good to get the other side of the argument.
Joe Paterno, if you weren’t familiar, has an incredible other side. After he wins his first championship, he tells the university they’re going to build…a new library. Because a top-notch university should have a top-notch library. I think that alone blew my mind. Most of the coaches I’m familiar with simply don’t care about academics. When I was in East Lansing, for instance, the Michigan State University football team got a new athletic center. This building was easily the nicest on campus at the time, and I found myself wondering how much money they had sunk into this place and how much could have been spent on renovating some of the older academic offices. Of course, the donor was a pro basketball player, but still…Joe Paterno was different. He held his players to a higher standard, and he chewed out a player for celebrating too much in the end zone after he had made a touchdown. For that kind of person, I think I would have less of a problem being a football fan.
And yet. He ignored the fact that a graduate student had said one of the assistant coaches was raping children. He ignored it for ten years. That’s a hard thing for me to comprehend. How could someone who thought so much of doing the right thing, of holding people to a higher standard do that?
You know what? I was going to dig in deep and bring up some psychological motivators. I was going to talk about the infamous case of Kitty Genoveese and point out that everyone involved pretty much just passed it on, doing the bare minimum in each case without really confronting the problem and then just assuming the proper actions had been taken. I was going to talk about whether things would be different if he had raped underage girls, and how strange it is that raping girls seems to be more of a concrete wrong to stop and that raping boys seems to not only be wrong, but surreal somehow, and how we can change that. But I’m sure other people are talking about the reasons on every single medium available to them. I wonder if they’ve brought in a psychologist on ESPN or if it’s the same bunch of journo-fans spinning their wheels. What I’m really thinking about is an associate in high school, Joe X.
Joe and I fought sometimes, but toward the end we were kind of on good terms with each other. I knew nothing about him—we shared some classes together—and I cannot for the life of me remember seeing him at graduation, which was not uncommon.
A few years ago, while I was talking with my mom on the phone, she asked if I’d gone to school with Joe X, and I replied that I had.
“Oh,” my mom said, and then paused. “Well…Joe was arrested for raping and murdering a woman last week.”
Even now, it’s still hard for me to comprehend. Joe didn’t seem like a killer at all. Let me say that once more—he didn’t seem like a killer at all. I have no idea why he did what he did, and even now it’s hard to reconcile the Joe X in my mind with the Joe X who is on death row. It’s hard to think of Joe X and not feel some sympathy for Joe Paterno. Hey, someone you’ve known for a long time likes raping children—now what do you do?
You know what again? It doesn’t matter. The part that’s indefensible isn’t that he knew—it’s that he knew about it ten years ago. Let me repeat that. Ten. Years. Ago. That’s ten years of more kids at risk, ten years of almost willful blindness. That’s the part that is so hard to wrap my head around. If not once in ten years did Joe Paterno look at Jerry Sandusky and think, “I wonder if he’s raped any more children,” then I will go cliff diving off Niagra Falls.
To me, the biggest tragedy is that the more I learn about Joe Paterno, the more I think that there is someone who could have shattered the negative stereotype into a thousand pieces if I’d heard of him without the scandal. I would have liked that. Instead, I’m just unsurprised. Again.
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