07.23.12
JoePa and Penn State, destroyed
One of the last college football games Don Hunt and I watched together was Penn State/Houston in the Ticket City Bowl. Joe Paterno had been fired. The team limped into the holiday season and was subsequently destroyed by Houston. They looked like young men who wished to be put to death.
That day I told Don I bet the Jerry Sandusky atrocity would kill Paterno and it did, although the official cause was lung cancer. It wasn’t a hard wager to make.
Through much of the Eighties I spent Saturday afternoons as a guest of my family at Penn State home games in Happy Valley. I was a grad student at Lehigh which does wrestling and pretends a little at college football. So given the option of seeing the Nittany Lions during the fall and early winter, rather than the Engineers in Bethlehem — well, it wasn’t really a choice.
And over the years in which Paterno became the the most winning coach in college football you could always find me in front of the television on Saturday afternoons in season. I drank the Kool-Aid. I bought all the superlatives.
But James Holmes and Jerry Sandusky are the two biggest arch-fiends in America today. No one walks away from such associations.
And so Penn State and Joe Paterno have not. In one stroke, all the wins that put the Nittany Lions at the top of the heap were taken away. They were made non-entities in their conference for four years, a team no one good will want to play because it can only take the role of a hated spoiler. And PSU and JoePa are now statistically just good to mostly average, which is nowhere if you wish to outgrow the reputation of being enablers to the country’s most loathed sex offender.
Today you can still see Jerry Sandusky working the sidelines and exhorting the troops in the ten minute highlight reels Penn State fans have put on YouTube by the scores. And when they’re over one thinks about what Jerry was doing with young boys at the victory party in his home or posh hotel room later that night. There’s no way to get rid of the man in the film and videotape records of the glory years.
The school won’t recover from it in my lifetime. The entire economy of Centre County will take an enormous hit, especially in the fall. It will be as if you were living in a beach resort and woke up one day to find the sand and ocean taken away. Nothing left but flopping, dieing and rotting fish on mud flats. Television interest is already almost gone, I bet.
No more Happy Valley, no White Out, no more shouts of “We Are … Penn State” without smirks. Plain blue and white, black shoes, the linked official athletic wear of pedophilia and cover up. No one will wish to remember where they were during football season, from 1969 when Jerry Sandusky arrived, until news of the sex crimes erupted last year.
Books, magazines and merchandise sales will plummet. No more great enthusiasms for getting your picture taken with the almost life-size JoePa cardboard standees. Glorious statues, murals, trophies, autographed photos, promotional football cards and programs, all metamorphosed into embarrassment. Maybe there could be one last bonfire for all of it. (eBay auctions of PSU stuff are frozen up.)
Whenever someone says they played football for the old Nittany Lions, those being told will immediately wonder if the person knew Jerry the Molester, defensive architect of Linebacker U. As an ice-breaker, it will be right there with admitting you partied, say, with John Wayne Gacy.
It’s a shame for the kids who have to work out their exit plan now
the NCAA equivalent of a giant nuclear bunker-busting bomb has been detonated in State College.
Cover it up.
Chuck said,
July 24, 2012 at 9:56 am
Don’tcha kind of wish that the same rules would apply to the Catholic church? Not going to happen, though.
Big football is destroying our university academic system. Here in Oregon, hundreds of millions of dollars has been plowed into the program. After building a state-of-the-art “student athlete academic center”, we’re now constructing a massive 6-story “Football Administration Building”, complete with waterproof media center, so one can watch TV while soaking in a hot tub. It makes the rest of the campus resemble an aging public housing project.
Of course, the reason that this all succeeds is that the athletes themselves get paid nothing other than preferential treatment. Get injured and you’re off the program, and your scholarship. Good luck with the student loan. The athletics program, in the meantime, rakes in big money from the NCAA broadcast franchise and coaches are paid 7-figure salaries complete with golden parachutes and bonuses.
The American Way. Riches through exploitation.
George Smith said,
July 24, 2012 at 12:18 pm
Yeah, I’ve seen Oregon quite a lot. Who was the ignoramus who got run out of town about two years ago for stealing? Wound up at So. Miss or Mississippi State or something? It is a travesty with the athletes, if they don’t make the pros they’re life is over if they’ve been a starter on a big deal team. Like big business anywhere in the US, you can’t fail as a coach even when terrible. You can only go upward once you’ve arrived, no matter what happens.
In most circumstances.
Most of JoePa’s assistants are finished. They have the mark of Cain upon them.