Submitted By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
That ultimate question uttered by Senator Howard Baker encapsulated the Watergate Era as Congress grappled with assessing culpability of President Richard Nixon, who was then at the zenith of his presidency. Now almost forty years later, the nation is again captured by a fall from grace as steep and as fast as Nixon’s. And again that question has to be asked of “America’s Football Coach.”
While I’m certainly no Woodward or Bernstein, it seems my blog post about the expanding scandal has reached some folks in Pennsylvania with knowledge about the inner workings of the institution of Penn State Football and about the characters involved. One reached out to me with disturbing questions and a “theory” that has the distinct ring of truth. Here’s the version:
It’s 1999, and you’ve just been handed the American Football Coaches Association’s Assistant Football Coach of the Year award. The son of hard-working second generation Polish immigrants from Western Pennsylvania’s coal region, you graduated first in your class at Penn State after starting on the football team for three years. You’re coaching at your alma mater in a profession known as much for long hours, low pay, and eating its young as for being carried off the field in victory. Oh, you’ve had your share of shoulder pad rides, too. First, when you held everybody’s All-American (and arguably the finest player to ever play college football), Georgia’s Hershel Walker to 3.2 yeards per carry in the 1982 national title game. Then again in 1987 when your protegés intercepted Heisman Trophy winner, Vinny Testaverde, five times, in one of the sports most improbable victories over the heavily favored bad boy of American athletics, the infamous fatigue-wearing Miami Hurricanes, and in so doing vindicated the Nittany Lions’ hoary motto of “Victory with Honor.”
It’s your dream job and you’re coaching with one of the true legends of the profession. Your mentor is in his mid-70’s and you’ve been proclaimed his heir apparent by everyone who would listen. You’ve been approached by several schools to coach their floundering teams, including the University of Maryland, and even made the perfunctory rounds of interviews at places like the University of Virginia. You’ve produced 10 consensus All-Americans including NFL Hall of Famer, Jack Ham. You’ve been at your job for 20 years, and you’ve gained the respect of colleagues, peers, and the public alike for your charitable work and well-publicized interest in helping disadvantaged kids through a charity you founded. At age 55, you’re making good money — for an assistant coach — but a head coaching job would earn you ten times as much and give your family of six adopted kids and a devoted wife financial security. You’ve even written the definitive book on your area of expertise which you generously entitle, “Developing Linebackers the Penn State Way.” In short, you’re hot in your profession and uniquely poised to either succeed the legend or take one of the plum coaching jobs in America’s football pantheon. You know, the Notre Dames, Michigans, or Southern Cal’s of the world.
With all this professional and financial potential, what do you do? Well you retire, of course. You set yourself on a path of summer football camps, and chicken-dinner speeches with appearance fees earning roughly two-thirds of what you’ve made and orders of magnitude less that what you could make. You throw yourself into charity work from whence you derive some income and you rely on the largesse of a town where you preside as a demigod. But there are rumors.
In 1998, you’ve been investigated for “inappropriate” conduct with a minor. The mother of the child sets you up in sting operation where a detective hiding in a closet overhears you say, ” “I understand. I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won’t get it from you. I wish I were dead.” Luckily, the DA in charge of the case rules the matter “unfounded,” declines to prosecute, and thankfully later winds up missing after a 60 mile pleasure ride. You’ve dodged a bullet. Yet, you resign just under a year later.
Joe Paterno has claimed ignorance of the 1998 episode, but according to a person who contacted me, that’s highly questionable. State College, Pa is a 40,000 person enclave devoted to Joe Paterno and Penn State — in that order. Hell, there’s a bronze statue of the man in the middle of campus replete with those thick, black glasses; William Penn just gets some pages on the Paterno Library book shelves. Located in the largely unpopulated heart of Pennsylvania, the town was little more than an encampment when Joe Paterno arrived in 1950 with another icon of Pennsylvania’s venerable football coaching priesthood, Rip Engle. Engle, who was paranoid of losing even against vastly inferior teams, inculcated his charge with the notion that a coach must exercise iron-fisted rule over his program, and to borrow a modern bromide, “what happens inside the program, stays inside the program.” Brown University graduate, Joe Paterno was a good student to his football teacher, and when he took over for Engle in 1966 he inherited a strong football program and a town enamored of it.
Football coaches call their profession a “brotherhood.” Almost exclusively male and established as a true hierarchy, the work is exhausting as every aspect of the opponent must be broken down, scrutinized, and prepared for as if for a sea-borne military invasion. It’s overkill sure, but the adherents love the challenge and, most of all, the camaraderie in pursuit of the challenge. It harkens back to a time of face-painted men pledging their lives around a camp fire to the hunt of some sabre-tooth tiger for the glory of the tribe. It’s machismo pure and simple and most coaches will tell you it’s their life. Oh, they pay dutiful homage to “family and faith” of course, but it’s football that keeps the brotherhood together in almost an exercise of devotion. As I mentioned in the earlier post, it’s a religion in most every sense — ritual, zealotry, ornamental dress, and rigid tenets. Probably the most important tenet is that coaches live out every win and loss together. Like most closed circles of the faithful, they talk, they argue, and they critique their fellows — all the time.
With that background is it really plausible, that in a town as ga-ga over football as State College is, Paterno really didn’t know about Sandusky’s run-in with law enforcement? Is State College immune from the marriage that all authority figures have for one another in most every other small town. You know like when the police chief and the high school football coach meet over coffee to discuss who’s handling security for Friday’s game and whether that trouble-making Jones kid will be there. Or when the mayor runs into the school superintendent and they talk about the kid who bullied the mayor’s little precious. These conversations go on every day in every small town in America — and most big ones, too.
Put those little facts together with the fact that Paterno did not attend Sandusky’s retirement party, and was rarely seen outside of the football facility with Sandusky, and you might wonder what happened to the relationship after 1998. You might wonder why Sandusky quit applying for head coaching jobs. You might even conclude that Coach Paterno nudged his former right-hand man out of his position at age 55, and refused to recommend him for any job at the head of another football program. No, not even at Virginia or Maryland who were desperate for a big name, sure winner and who rarely ever played Penn State. Nobody ever explained why Sandusky didn’t get those jobs despite their stated interest and his brightly burning star. Just the usual, “we have a number of good candidates … blah, blah, blah.” You might conclude that Penn State knew about the transgression with the child and, in exchange for his leaving the Program, cut a deal to grant him and his charity unfettered access to the program and satellite campuses, but no direct role in its operation with young men. That way, you see, there’s no taint. No questions on the propriety of a program that made $51 million for the school last year and funded 26 academic departments — all on the efforts of 18-22 year old-young men. Nope, no questions indeed, except the big one whose answer may be locked away in some ancient personnel files that seem to have the nasty habit of getting lost amid all that moving that goes on within campus departments.
What does a person do who’s banished from the priesthood? How do you react, after a life of high achievement in every sphere, and then are abruptly denied your goal when it is within your grasp? What do you feel, and how do you act on those feelings? Those are the questions that can only be answered by answering the first one I asked.
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
He was cleared by Penn States own investigation then cleared of any misappropriations of any funds accepted from the NSF. I thought you new that by now.
A long history in Penn State child abuse case
Reuters, 11/12/2011
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/12/us-usa-crime-coach-feature-idUSTRE7AB06920111112
Excerpt:
FOOTBALL STATE
That the alleged abuse continued even after university officials were alerted to specific allegations has raised questions about the power and influence of the football program and its coaches — especially Joe Paterno, one of the most revered figures in American sports.
The football program at Penn State was so sacrosanct as to be almost untouchable. “We just had this empire all by itself, reporting to nobody,” said one member of the university’s board of trustees.
Pennsylvania State University used to be a sleepy engineering school, but it was turned into a national powerhouse with the money raised by its marquee football program. In 2008, the last year for which data is available, Penn State was one of the 20 largest recipients of federal research dollars in the country. It has fostered what is now the world’s largest dues-paying alumni association.
Now, the university is in turmoil. When the Sandusky news broke last weekend, at least two board members found out from television news rather than from the university. That probably helped seal the fate of university president Graham Spanier, said the trustee.
Spanier was fired on Wednesday, along with Paterno, the 84-year-old coach who was known simply as JoePa and who had won more college football games than any coach in history.
In a statement earlier this week, Paterno said: “With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”
Spanier said after he was dismissed: “I was stunned and outraged to learn that any predatory act might have occurred in a university facility or by someone associated with the university.”
Two other officials, former athletic director Tim Curley and former finance official Gary Schultz, have been charged with failing to report an incident of abuse and lying to the grand jury, which detailed the allegations against Sandusky in a 23-page report (Available on the Pennsylvania attorney general’s website here: here)
Lawyers for Curley and Schultz have denied the charges.
The grand jury report, and dozens of Reuters interviews with people in State College and connected to the case, indicate there were key moments when the alleged abuse was suspected or witnessed – and might have been stopped.
Elaine,
I would think that Sandusky’s foundation would bear some liability exposure, if not Paterno and PSU.
Sandusky Had Access to Vulnerable Kids Via Charity
By KEVIN BEGOS and MARK SCOLFORO Associated Press
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. November 12, 2011
http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/coach-accused-charity-assault-boys-14939549#.Tr61eoJQBio
Excerpts:
Over the past 30 years, politicians, sports stars and community leaders heaped praise on Jerry Sandusky and the charity he founded for troubled youngsters, The Second Mile. It was a model program, and the acclaimed football coach was its driving force.
Now, prosecutors say that very success enabled Sandusky to find boys and sexually assault them.
Sandusky, 67, was charged last weekend with molesting eight boys over a 15-year period in a scandal that rocked the Penn State campus and brought down the university’s beloved football coach, Joe Paterno.
In the aftermath, some are wondering if The Second Mile can survive amid questions about its role in the alleged cover-up.
Sandusky was a star assistant coach at Penn State from the 1970s to the 1990s, and many assumed he would lead the team one day, or even head to pro football. He founded The Second Mile in 1977 for youngsters from broken homes and troubled backgrounds, building it into an organization that helped as many as 100,000 children a year through camps and fundraisers.
Among the big-time athletic figures listed as honorary directors were Cal Ripken Jr., Arnold Palmer, former Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris and Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid. President George W. Bush praised the group as a “shining example” of charity work in a 1990 letter. (Sandusky’s reaction: “It’s about time, George! This is long overdue,” he recalled in his autobiography, “Touched.”)
SANDUSKY
AP
This Dec. 28, 1999 photo shows Penn State… View Full Caption
But prosecutors said that running the charity gave Sandusky “access to hundreds of boys, many of whom were vulnerable due to their social situations.”
He invited youngsters for overnight sleepovers at his home and took them to restaurants and bowl games. He wrestled in the swimming pool with kids who craved the attention. And he gave them gifts: golf clubs, sneakers, dress clothes, a computer and money, according to the indictment from the Pennsylvania attorney general.
The good-guy aura around Sandusky was so great that when some children questioned behavior that didn’t seem right, no one took the complaints seriously.
Troy Craig recalled attending a weeklong sleep-away camp run by The Second Mile on the Penn State campus in the early 1990s. He was never sexually abused, but in other ways the coach’s behavior seemed inappropriate at the time, said Craig, 33, who is now a disc jockey in State College.
Sandusky “had a way of, whether it was a hug or a hand on the leg in the car as we were driving, or just a way of putting his arm around you,” Craig said. “I said this back then to people I knew. Everybody found it hard to believe, or that I was overreacting. I remember feeling as if I was the only one that thought anything was amiss.”
Through his attorney, Sandusky has maintained his innocence.
Experts on pedophiles aren’t surprised by the stories that have shocked so many people.
Richard J. Gelles, dean of the school of Social Policy & Practice at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and author of several books on abuse and violence in families, said pedophiles typically engage in a “grooming” process in which they select a potential victim and proceed to “break down the inhibitions and establish trust.” Gelles said it is no accident so many people saw a “good” Jerry Sandusky.
Sandusky “covered himself by being so beloved that nobody would think he would do something as awful as this,” Gelles said.
**********
Sandusky also had the support of many other powerful figures in the community. The group’s current board includes state Sen. Jake Corman, and attorneys, prominent business leaders, and community volunteers. Corman didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
The grand jury said that Penn State officials in 2002 told Jack Raykovitz, executive director of The Second Mile, that there had been an issue with Sandusky and a minor. But the charity took no action against Sandusky because, it said this week, Penn State did not find any wrongdoing.
And in 1998, Sandusky was investigated after he was accused of “behaving in a sexually inappropriate manner” with a boy in a shower at the football team’s facilities, the grand jury said. The report said an attorney for Second Mile who was also university counsel, Wendell Courtney, was aware of the allegations.
Phone calls seeking comment from Courtney on Saturday rang unanswered, and emails sent to him were returned as undeliverable.
The Second Mile said that Sandusky told the organization in 2008 he was being investigated, and that from then on the charity separated him from programs involving youths.
But the word about Sandusky may not have reached other youth programs he was involved with.
Sandusky held summer football camps — both at Penn State satellite campuses and at other Pennsylvania schools — for years after he was banned from taking youths onto the main campus by the school’s athletics director and senior vice president. Both officials have now been charged with failing to tell police about a 2002 allegation that Sandusky had sexually assaulted a boy in the showers of the football building.
Sandusky held the football camps through his Sandusky Associates company from 2000 to 2008 at Penn State’s Behrend satellite campus near Erie. There were never any complaints, according to a spokesman. Still, Behrend’s athletics director said he wishes someone had told him about the 2002 allegation.
Elaine,
Obsession is a dangerous mindset. It can cause one to commit the most inappropriate acts.
Good catch and good call.
Elaine,
Great response to bdaman. Those pesky facts just keep getting in the way of the agenda.
“Luckily, the DA in charge of the case rules the matter “unfounded,” declines to prosecute, and winds up missing after a 60 mile pleasure ride.”
Here is a link to the sequence of events in the case of the disappearance of the prosecutor.
There is no conclusive evidence the disappearance is related to Sandusky, but there are some strange facts in that case.
An example is: On the fourth anniversary, investigators disclose that before he disappeared, someone using Gricar’s home computer searched the Internet for information on “how to wreck a hard drive,” “how to fry a hard drive” and “water damage to a notebook computer.”
The greatest mystery in this case to me is the psychology of Sandusky: What fried his mind, and when did that process of mental degeneration begin?
There’s an old saying around here pertaining to driving and deer … if you see one, there’s probably two. If you see two, there’s probably four. Slow down and keep your eyes wide open.
The same applies to pedophiles.
I hope the PA authorities are taking it slow and looking deep into the woods. Sandusky was retired in 1999 but kept emeritus status. His keys to the locker room were not taken from him till March of 2002 after McQueary’s report. Normal, healthy men do not, under any circumstances, protect pedophiles unless ….
Was anyone else besides Sandusky preying on the boys?
Bizarrely, in the Catholic Church pedophile scandals, it appears that only priests were doing it. Not a single archbishop or cardinal has been implicated in the sex, just in the coverups.
I find that not believable. And I doubt Sandusky was the only one.
Bdaman,
Mann has been vindicated. I thought you knew that by now.
It isn’t just universities that try to cover-up scandals. Many organizations do. The Catholic Church covering up the clergy abuse scandal would have been a much better example than the ginned up controversy called Climategate, don’t you think?
On Campus, a Law Enforcement System to Itself
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: November 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/us/on-college-campuses-athletes-often-get-off-easy.html?_r=1&hp
Mark,
My hat is off to you and your excellent follow up to the Penn State scandal. If sunshine is the best disinfectant, then you have not only done Justice Brandeis proud, but Apollo as well.
Bron,
“But it is BS that I dont care about what happens to children”
So noted. I take your word for that.
“You know, when you get old, in life, things get taken from you. I mean, that’s… that’s… that’s a part of life. But, you only learn that when you start losin’ stuff. You find out life’s this game of inches, so is football. Because in either game – life or football – the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it.” (Any Given Sunday … Tony D’Amato line)
Penn State’s football organization may have won many football games but it blinked, then lost the biggest game.
Great article Mark. I do think we are looking at the tip of the iceberg here. If Joe Pa did know back in the 1990’s, he is just as responsible as Sandusky for these heinous crimes. How many kids lives were ruined and their childhood ended by these men?
Thank you, MIke. High paise indeed coming from you. It’s easy to write what you know, Now I’m off to one of those fall events to watch some kids I coached do what they (and I) love for all the reasons lost on many of the adults who supervise them.
Bdaman & Bron,
It seems you don’t take the sexual abuse of children as a serious topic of discussion for the Turley Blawg. Shame on you for attempting to steer the discussion off topic to Global Warming!
Elaine I was referring to the cover up. How they covered up the insidious act of child abuse to protect the university. It just goes to show you to what lengths they are willing to do so.
With all due respect, you could have skipped my comment as well.
Mark,
I am blown away by the skills you displayed in writing this post. From the standpoint of a thorough exposition of concepts it is the best piece written by any guest blogger thus far. Echoing Bob the choice of second person added drama and force to your narrative. By it you succeeded in capturing the mindset of those to whom college football is a profession. The hagiographies produced by those who live off of sports of these “legendary” coaches makes them indeed “Demi-Gods” possessing superabundance of character, when they are merely people looking to reach the ultimate heights of celebrity by any means.
I’ll ask the same question here as I did on the other post regarding this:
“If life was the sentence in this case,what should Sandusky be sentenced too ?
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2011/nov/03/east-naples-man-sentenced-life-prison-child-porn/“
Elaine:
so noted and you are right. But it is BS that I dont care about what happens to children.