God grant me the serenity to accept things that do not change, the courage to change those things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference. God also grant me the vision to adapt when the world changes and the grace to let go when my vision dims. No one was going to tell Joe Paterno that it was time to let go of the head coaching position. He brought too much money to Penn State for that. Too bad no one near him had the courage of conviction to tell him it was time to let go. But he didn’t want to let go of the program he loved, even though it would have been for the best.
I was born on a cold winter day in 1965 as the Chinese Year of the Dragon was coming to a close. Charles “Rip” Engle was preparing for his last season as Head Coach of Penn State. Joe Paterno’s first season as Head coach was the 1966 season. Their record that year was 5-5. But in the years that followed, out of 46 seasons only 5 resulted in a losing record. During the 5-year period from 2000 to 2004, Penn State suffered an unprecedented 4 of their 5 losing seasons under Paterno’s reign. Any other coach would have been shown the door. But not JoePa. His contract was due to expire at the end of 2008. In a landmark speech in Pittsburgh in May of 2005, he told an increasingly concerned public that he’d consider retirement if the 2005 season was a disappointment. That fall, the team finished the year 11-1. It was enough to give folks reason to let him complete his contract. Then there were other signs he would take great lengths to protect his precious team from criticism and scrutiny. Would he knowingly sweep criminal, even violent, behavior under the rug so as to protect his team from scrutiny and criticism?
College athletics programs are rampant with attitudes of “boys will be boys” that hearkens back to a time when women were allowed to get college educations so they could “meet boys” and better themselves – but let the men do all the hard work please. In public statements, Joe Paterno made light of sexual assault (by male football players) as nothing more than letting hero worship get a little out of hand (2006). See comments made by Coach Paterno when Florida State linebacker A. J. Nicholson was sent home before a bowl game under possible arrest for sexual assault: ESPN article In 2008, when his contract expired, no fewer than 46 Penn State players faced a combination of 163 criminal charges. It was enough to make ESPN take notice and, in an “Outside the Lines” feature, it was suggested that Penn State leadership had lost control of their nationally recognized team. But the collective will of Penn State alumni and others of influence merely wrote it off as “an off year” – certainly not indicative of the quality of the overall program.
What is behind this collective will, this refusal to see our “heroes” for what they really are – flawed, open to corruption, and above all, ought to be held to the same standard as everyone else? To understand this, we need to consider that in a world fresh from two very decimating world wars, people needed to believe in something positive, something lasting. Also, people were suffering from a kind of reality overload. They were ready to put blinders on. War turned to Cold War, and people were looking for an escape.
My dad was born on October 23, 1933, son of James A and Lena McElroy. It was a small town in Osceola Mills, PA. My grandfather barely had an 8th grade education. But he knew construction. Most of his working life, he worked as a foreman building many of the central Pennsylvania’s bridges. And most of these are still in good shape even today. My dad grew up in a home where you went to church every Sunday, sick or not. And when he went to high school, he played football. He also had a love of gardening, which he inherited from his own father.
After high school, he signed up with the U.S. Navy. The choice was largely based on a warning from his older brother, a sharpshooter who served his country in Europe during World War II. “Anything but the infantry,” was Dean’s warning to my dad. He would not say why. He didn’t have to. There was a tacit understanding, a recognition that man is capable of lowering himself to unspeakable depths of evil and of depravity. But one never spoke aloud what these specific acts were. My father’s generation (at least the Christian part) grew up with the belief that to envision a horror was to make oneself vulnerable to its seductive qualities.
Committing an act of “sin” in one’s heart (in the form of desire) was just as bad as physically doing it. And so, an entire generation closed its eyes to evil. They closed their eyes to the horrors around them, even when evil occurred in their own back yards. The soldiers who fought on the battlefields of Europe had no choice. It was a survival mechanism. These horrific realities were best left on the streets of France and Germany, and forgotten.
My dad then did what many young men in the area did. He applied to Penn State University and took up Dairy Science (following in the footsteps of Dean). Through hard work and determination, he graduated. It was a very different scene at Penn State than it is today. Many, like my dad, studied hard and led a clean lifestyle. It would be shameful to do otherwise. If there was a dark side, it was hidden… obscured from the light of day because it was not “cool” to be anything but squeaky clean. No one asked questions if there didn’t appear to be any problems. If it was out of sight, it did not exist. And no one complained. Not even the victims.
When folks of my dad’s era then became parents, their children grew up in a culture that was shockingly different from their own. High school included weekend parties in which all manner of experimentation took place. Binge drinking was a big part of teenage life, and other drug use, and open sex. Kids would pack into a van and think nothing of going to the local X-rated Drive-In theatre. Proprietors and vendors did not care about the mothers who would grieve to learn about their children’s activities. To the young and innocent, this was merely a blip on the screen of an otherwise normal life. But for some, doors opened to a world that was very dark and very exploitative. People who suppress normal and natural desires for decades, to the point of extreme self-prohibition, are perhaps the most susceptible to the opposite extreme in a post-sexual-revolution society.
Joe Paterno did not even have a word in his vocabulary for male rape, more specifically the rape of a child. It meant an extreme of violent behavior that had only been seen previously on the battlefields of Europe. Not in the locker room of a college football team. Now, a career has ended in disgrace and Penn State is being forced to learn a rather hard lesson in humility. Sadly the lesson will likely be too short-lived.
Ultimately, I think what bothers me most about this whole series of incidents is that it took the admittedly horrific act of rape of a child to lead to a coach’s dismissal. But athletes everywhere can get away with violence against women and receive no more than a short suspension and a slap on the wrist. Case in point was A. J. Nicholson (mentioned earlier in this article). A mere four months after the college incident, he was arrested again. Nicholson Our society has a long way to go, in my mind, toward a culture of intolerance of criminal behavior and applying the same consequences for rule-breaking to all. Athletes who break rules ought to have their scholarships revoked and a permanent end to their athletic careers should result.
