Rick Reilly on Penn State; Coaches Can’t Be Idolized
Remember the children
By Rick Reilly
ESPN.com
This is not about Joe Paterno.
If these boys really were molested, groped and raped by a middle-aged ex-Penn State football coach, then whatever misjudgment Paterno made will be a single lit match compared to the bonfire these boys will walk in for years to come.
Many of them won’t be able to trust. Won’t be able to love. Won’t be able to feel — nor trust or love themselves.
Don’t feel sorry for Paterno. He’s had his life. Feel sorry for these boys, because they may never get one.
Ask former NHL All-Star Theo Fleury, who has reached out on Twitter and radio to the alleged victims of Jerry Sandusky. Fleury was sexually molested once or twice a week for two years by his youth hockey coach, Graham James. It twisted Fleury so inside-out that he numbed himself for years with booze, cocaine and strippers. He blew much of the $50 million he made in the NHL trying to forget. The coach he’d entrusted his hockey dreams to flayed open his soul for his own sexual perversions and left Fleury hollow.
“I no longer had faith in myself or my own judgment,” Fleury, 43, wrote in his book “Playing with Fire.” “Once it’s gone, how do you get it back? … I became a f—ing raging, alcoholic lunatic.”
Ask former Red Wing, Flame and Bruin Sheldon Kennedy. He was sexually molested by James every Tuesday and Thursday night at parent-approved sleepovers at James’ house from age 14 to 19. This snake even took Fleury and Kennedy to Disneyland, where he groped them, by turn, in a motel room. It left Kennedy so shamed and confused that suicide looked better to him than living with the guilt of it another day.
“You can’t trust anybody afterwards,” Kennedy said yesterday from Toronto, where he runs RespectGroupInc.com, an organization that teaches adults how to recognize abuse. “So you tend to live a very lonely life. You mask the horrible way you’re feeling with sex and gambling and drugs. You put all these walls up. You keep saying, ‘Why didn’t I say anything? I must’ve done something wrong. I let him do it to me.’”
Imagine: One reported victim in the Penn State case, now 24, has been living with that kind of hole growing inside him since he made allegations against Sandusky in 1998 — 13 years ago. Those allegations never led to charges. That’s 13 years of not being believed, of knowing his alleged perpetrator was out there, volunteering at high schools and running his grisly camp “tours” of the shower room.
The horror of it makes you want to punch somebody. If Kennedy could talk to boys Sandusky might have abused who haven’t come forward yet?
“Tell someone,” says Kennedy, now 42. “Because people are going to believe you. People know it’s not your fault.”
STATE OF DENIAL
No, this isn’t about 84-year-old Joe Paterno not taking more steps that might have stopped it. It’s about everybody not taking more steps that might have stopped it. Not parents, not teachers, not uncles, not friends, not counselors.
Imagine: Victim One, according to the Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News, was often taken out of class by Sandusky to be further molested. Just taken out of school by somebody who wasn’t his parent, with no questions asked until his mother finally called the principal and asked her to check into it. Later that day, the principal called back in tears. “You need to come down here right now.”
According to a 1998 study on child sexual abuse by Boston University Medical School, one in six boys in America will be abused by age 16. For girls, it’s one in four by the age of 14. Those “If you see something, say something” billboards shouldn’t just be about terrorism. They may apply to sex abuse, too. Doesn’t matter if it’s your uncle, your longtime assistant coach or your buddy. You HAVE to say something. And yet, precious few people have the guts to say anything at all.
“The fear is too strong,” Kennedy says. “People don’t know what to do. They think, ‘Oh my god, how bad is this going to look? What are we going to do now that we’ve let this guy operate right under our noses? We better keep quiet.’ But it can’t work like that anymore.”
Does Kennedy blame Paterno?
“Does he have grandkids? (Yes, 17.) How would he feel if it were one of his grandkids in that shower with the coach? What would he have done? Somehow, the perpetrator felt welcome at that school. We need systems in place that make perpetrators feel unwelcome.”
What must those boys feel like, right now, as all this darkness gets played out in front of the camera lights?
“Probably second-guessing themselves,” Kennedy says. “Coming forward doesn’t get these boys any further ahead in life. It isn’t easy. But it has to happen.”
The road these boys are on now is endless and buckled and uphill. Some will hate their parents for not protecting them and hate themselves for hating them. They will hate the pervert for tricking them and hate themselves for being tricked. And just when they think this cruel and long legal process is over, it can start all over again.
Imagine: Kennedy’s abuser, James, got 3½ years but was pardoned by the Canadian National Parole Board in 2007. Currently, he is out on bail, awaiting sentencing on nine more counts of sexual abuse and who knows how many more sinister trips to motel rooms.
If all these charges turn out to be true, though, soon he and Sandusky will both be going to prison — a place where, with any luck, they will feel most unwelcome.
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Follow Rick on Twitter @ReillyRick
Rick Reilly is the 11-time National Sportswriter of the Year. He contributes essays and commentary to “Monday Night Countdown,” “SportsCenter,” and ESPN/ABC golf and tennis coverage. He’s also the host of “Homecoming,” ESPN’s unique, one-hour interview show set in the hometowns of legendary athletes. For more Rick, check out the archive.
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Stewart Mandel>INSIDE COLLEGE FOOTBALL
By Stewart Mandel
Courtesy of www.sportsilustrated.cnn.com
Penn State tragedy shows danger of making coaches false idols
Penn State idolized Joe Paterno, building a statue of him while he was still on the job, and that reverence proved dangerous.
In 2000, the late Myles Brand made the controversial decision to oust revered Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight. Brand, then Indiana University’s president, drew the scorn of students and alumni but the admiration of his peers, who named him NCAA president two years later.
If college athletics held its proper place in the greater landscape of higher education, there would have been no reason to congratulate or criticize Brand. In other walks of life, it’s not considered courageous when the head of a business dismisses one of his subordinates for inappropriate behavior. The Brand-Knight incident was only jarring because for the previous 30 years, the power dynamic between Indiana’s president and basketball coach had been reversed.
Nothing about college coaches’ skewed importance has changed since then. If anything, it’s gotten worse. Head football and basketball coaches now make as much as five times more than they did just a decade ago, and the media coverage surrounding them has amplified accordingly.
But if there were ever a time for fans, media members and college administrators alike to get a collective wake-up call, it’s following Joe Paterno’s dismissal. No football coach has ever lorded over an entire university the way Paterno did during his 45 years in State College. And no university has suffered a more gruesome football-related episode than the ongoing Jerry Sandusky child molestation scandal.
The mess at Penn State has illustrated the danger of putting successful coaches on pedestals. Four wins or 400, coaches are still people, and people aren’t perfect. That’s why our government employs a system of checks and balances, and why businesses nationwide mimic that distribution of power.
At Penn State, Paterno had all the power. President Graham Spanier and athletic director Tim Curley were technically his bosses, but they held as much sway over him as the guys selling hot dogs at Beaver Stadium on Saturdays. We know this most vividly because in 2004, Spanier and Curley tried to push out the struggling 77-year-old coach, and Paterno told them … no.
That distorted dynamic is why Sandusky was allowed free reign of the Penn State football complex years after the first account of sexual molestation surfaced. Who was going to stop him if not Paterno?
Many think Mike McQueary should have. According to his grand jury testimony, McQueary, then a 28-year-old graduate assistant, witnessed Sandusky raping a boy estimated to be 10 years old in the locker room showers. How, people ask, could a grown man like McQueary fail to step in and stop this atrocity when he saw it? Why did he not call the authorities?
In McQueary’s world, Paterno was The Authority. McQueary, a State College native, former Penn State quarterback and son of a huge Nittany Lions fan, has spent nearly his entire life in a warped world few of us understand. What some view as cowardice probably seemed courageous to McQueary at the time: He went to The Authority’s house and relayed bad things about the coach’s long-time trusted confidant. He didn’t know The Authority would merely pass the information along to his two in-name-only superiors, who then failed to take substantive action.
What’s far more puzzling is how McQueary went to work for the next nine years and accepted seeing Sandusky at practice or in the weight room. But the Penn State football complex wasn’t a normal workplace; the lone Authority was out to lunch in his last years on the job, but he held such clout that few dared to question his actions. That’s not an excuse for McQueary’s decisions, but it’s reality — a sick reality in which inaction was the norm.
Paterno and his so-called bosses deserve all the blame we can muster for allowing this atrocity to occur, but the rest of us deserve blame for lionizing coaches like Paterno in the first place. We turn these mortal men into irreproachable icons. We do it with articles portraying them as something more mystical than people who happen to be good at their jobs. We do it by camping out for tickets in tent villages named in their honor. We do it by building statues of them while they’re still on the job.
Few actually rise to the realm of idolatry, but any major college football or basketball coach who has sustained success enjoys unprecedented power. The truly revered have presidents and athletic directors who theoretically sit above them but in reality work for them. They enjoy blindly adoring fan bases that would raise arms at the mere suggestion of wrongdoing.
Sports are our escape, so it’s not surprising that we treat our favorite figures like movie stars. But as we were reminded so painfully this week, this is real life. And unlike professional coaches, who work for businesses tasked solely with winning athletic contests, college coaches are theoretically part of a greater community, where education is supposed to trump entertainment and leadership is supposed to be more than a Big Ten Network infomercial.
There’s nothing wrong with going to a game, painting your face or cheering on your favorite team’s coach for hours. There’s nothing wrong with me writing an article praising a coach for his inspired gameplan. There’s nothing wrong with a school president giving a championship coach a raise.
But there’s something inherently wrong with a community in which one person holds an inordinate amount of power. Teachers answer to their principal. CEOs answer to their shareholders. Mike McQueary answered to Joe Paterno.
Paterno didn’t answer to anybody. No coach has ever experienced a more painful downfall, in part because no coach had ever been elevated to such heights.
Hopefully, no coach ever will be again.
