THROWN FOR A LOSS: Legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno refuses to answer questions yesterday about alleged sex abuse involving a former coach and his team’s facilities. (Getty Images)
You always knew it was going to end badly for Woody Hayes, long before the fabled Ohio State football coach took a slug at a Clemson nose guard named Charlie Bauman in the waning seconds of the 1978 Gator Bowl.
You always had a sense that Bob Knight wasn’t going to leave Indiana quietly, and so it surprised no one when some mouthy kid set in motion the legendary basketball coach’s ouster in September 2000. Jerry Tarkanian? No. It wasn’t ever going to be a gold-watch ceremony final chapter for the Shark.
But Joe Paterno?
Paterno was going to be the one coach who would get out unblemished, who would exit on his own terms, even if it sometimes seemed that those terms wouldn’t be drawn up until he was in his 90s.
Paterno had 60 years of exemplary behavior in the business of coaching, and since coaching years are like dog years in so many ways . . . well, do the math.
What we are learning now — and properly — is that life does not proffer an unlimited line of credit. Sixty years of good deeds and good behavior and standing on the right side of temptation and greed is fine, and no one will ever forget that Paterno, far more often than not, tried to be a beacon of integrity in a college-football culture too often ruled by the seven deadly sins.
PENN STATE SET TO REMOVE PATERNO
But even for Joe Paterno, there is a difference between what is legal and what is right. At the bare minimum, we know that the 2002 incident that serves as the horrific foundation for the case against his longtime assistant, Jerry Sandusky, sparked something inside Paterno to alert his superiors.
It is absolutely fair to wonder why, if the coach who allegedly spotted the incident, Mike McQueary, truly saw what he saw — which, rinsing away the most grotesque of the details, involved a 58-year-old man, a 10-year-old boy, and a shower — why he didn’t do more than he did, why he didn’t break up the encounter, why he didn’t call a parent, make a fuss.
But here is another hard truth: McQueary is like you, and like me, and like most normal citizens in our towns and cities and villages. For us there is only so much we can do. But part of the responsibility that goes along with the image Paterno carefully crafted for so long, as the proud protector of The Right Thing, is to do just that. The right thing. Joe Paterno can get the president on the telephone; it stands to reason that hearing about a 58-year-old man, a 10-year-old boy and a shower might inspire him to call the State College chief of police, the district attorney, the governor.
Somebody. Anybody.
Unless he didn’t want anyone to know.
And here’s the thing: Penn State is a marvelous university. It has clearly tried to do what is proper across the decades. But it is no more infallible in its own world than the Catholic Church is in its world.
I was raised in a parish ransacked by a rogue priest; I was subjected to many days and nights of inappropriate behavior, spared the worst of it by a saying the nuns would drill into us: There but for the grace of God go I. Others were not so fortunate.
There are many church leaders who would lose their jobs over the scandals: cardinals, archbishops, pastors, and with good reason. They may not have been the ones committing the vile acts. They may, in fact, have thought they were acting properly by transferring the predator priests out of parishes, and trying to keep the matters in-house.
But by not doing more than they did, they bore a distinct responsibility. The church began the long road back to reclaiming its soul and its mission by making hard choices and firing good men who had made poor decisions.
If that sounds familiar to the task facing the men who run Penn State now, it should.