Sexual abuse scandals strike college sports
The sports world is no stranger to scandals. In recent years, Major League Baseball endured the Steroid Era, the NBA had its referee point-shaving scandal, and an assortment of recruiting and pay-for-play controversies have hit major college sports programs.
Those scandals engendered appropriate disgust from the public, but the misdeeds and sordid details could not match the horrors of the alleged child molestation crimes that dominated sports media in the final months of 2011.
The first and most notorious sex abuse charges were those filed against Jerry Sandusky at Pennsylvania State University. Sandusky, a longtime defensive coordinator for legendary head coach Joe Paterno, was accused of molesting 10 boys over a span of 15 years and using his charitable organization as a vehicle for the abuse.
Sandusky retired from Penn State in 1999 but was still allowed to use campus facilities. In 2002, graduate assistant Mike McQueary allegedly witnessed Sandusky sexually assaulting a young boy in the team showers. McQueary testified in court that he reported the incident to Paterno, who waited a day before informing superiors at the university.
Paterno did not report the incident to police, and neither did his superiors, athletic director Tim Curley and Vice President of Business and Finance Gary Schultz. When Sandusky was formally charged in November of 2011, the fallout at Penn State led to the resignation of university president Graham Spanier, the charging of Curley and Schultz with perjury and failure to report McQueary’s eyewitness account to police, and the ignominious end to Paterno’s 46-year run as head football coach.
Paterno, the winningest coach in college football history, was fired over the phone by Penn State’s Board of Trustees in the middle of the season, and he died of lung cancer on Jan. 22.
In the aftermath of the Penn State scandal, reports surfaced that Bernie Fine, an assistant coach for another powerhouse Division I program, Syracuse University basketball, had sexually abused two team ball boys from the late 1970s to 1990s. Syracuse fired Fine, and two more men came forward with allegations against the coach.
In another case filled with nauseating twists, one of the accusers later retracted his charge of sexual abuse, claiming that he made the accusation out of anger that Fine did not help him challenge a criminal conviction. It has also been revealed that Fine’s wife allegedly slept with players on the Syracuse basketball team, although that story has been deemed irrelevant to the case against the ex-coach.
Finally, the president and chief executive officer of the Amateur Athletic Union, Robert “Bobby” Dodd, was relieved of his duties after claims by two former athletes that Dodd sexually abused them in the 1980s.
The string of scandals has shocked the public into caution and awareness that seemingly benevolent figures can be using their authority for the most malevolent causes.
In the case of Paterno, hopefully we have learned that standing idly by is as heinous an offense as the actual abuse.
But sadly, it could also weaken the bonds of trust parents have with coaches and neighborhood mentors for their kids. As Phil Taylor wrote in the Jan. 9 issue of Sports Illustrated, “the Sandusky effect” has made him leery of doing anything that may be perceived with a skeptical eye in his role as a junior varsity basketball coach.
Taylor used to grow close with the kids by driving them home from practice, but he does so no longer.
We mnnaieg everyone as a people needs to realise that people have lost they way ,they dont even know what it is to say good morning ,good evening have a nice day .I watch people in the grocery line with a full cart watch a person stand behind them with one or two items and they dont have the common courtesy to say go ahead of me ,i see people block up an intersection in order not to let a person out ,or see a person coming to an exist indicator is flashing yet they refuse to let you over ,they would rather you have an accident or pass your exit .If the simple common courtesy in our everyday life do not exist .How do we expect people to care about something that do not concern them .People are so busy looking out for no 1 they could careless about anyone .This is a sick sad world we live in these people that allowed this to happen really needs to get their heart and head check because no real human being on the earth should be able to see something like this and not jump into action ,scream push him ,get the kid out off there ,the people that knew about this all need to see a physcologist .I had a dog years ago and if someone even look at me or my husband in a way he scence was not nice ,he jumped right into battel mode ,so how is it that humans dont have that same sence sick .I knew if i saw this or knew about it i would be dead because i would stop at nothing to get help .
Once again these acts are wrong. Period.-I read the quote twice just to make sure that I had dtgiseed it before comment. What everyone is missing is the graduate student and their role in escalating this situation. This is the eye witness and the one that should have reported it to the police along with his/her superiors. His superior did escalate the issue. As I mentioned in a post yesterday on a great website (VFTB!), all organizations have a chain of command for this and other reasons (procurement management, HR, EEOC conformity, etc.). Paterno did exactly what he is supposed to do. He also is a VERY BUSY man. If his head works like mine does he escalated the issue and put a check in his mental box. He then added another mental note to his list to followup with the situation to make sure it was properly handled. He did that and he checked that mental box as well. He escalated the issue to the people who are there to handle this situations and entered into a contract with the university attesting to the fact that they acknowledge these job requirements. The people that should be getting hammered are the people that he escalated this to. They should be loosing their jobs and get blacklisted from future employment. They also should be listed on the nationwide sexual predators website as enablers to those that commit the act. The media is after Paterno because he is a known and popular entity. How much attention would the articles get if the AD or President of the school lost their job for mishandling this issue. Zero. It’s about ratings, notoriety etc. Another reason why Theo shouldn’t be concerned about how his manager swoons the media.
Jeff Anderson, a St. Paul, Minnesota, lawyer who retresenps victims of childhood sexual abuse. No sense can be made of Sandusky’s position or his lawyer’s decision to allow him to speak, says Mr. Anderson. Denying and minimizing is the mantle that the molester always dons when confronted with the reality of their crimes, both in the court of public opinion and in the courtroom. In the Costas interview, Sandusky denied that he’s a pedophile, though he admitted that he horsed around with boys in showers, occasionally patting their legs, snapping towels, and hugging them, but without intent of sexual contact. Attorney General Eric Holder, with the FBI should freeze all of the assets of Penn State personnel mentioned or involved in any way with the cover-up of Sandusky, who was witnessed numerous times in the shower with young boys. Sandusky was seen sodomizing a 10 year-old boy against the shower wall by Mike McQueary, a graduate assistant. McQueary now states he reported it to the police and with his father went to Joe Paterno’s (Penn State’s Head Coach) home and during a cook-out and described what he witnessed. The police have no record whatsoever of the reporting of the crime. This is very common I choose to believe he did report it to them.Penn State’s actions and firings have come too little too late even taking Paterno’s name off of the trophy doesn’t begin to address the medical help that these victims of Sandusky will require, possibly for years and years of psychological treatment for the crimes committed against them when they were just young boys, ages 9-12. These boys are now probably anywhere from 28-40 years old. I sincerely hope that this tragedy bankrupts Penn State’s coffers and that all assets and accounts seized go directly to the victims of this vicious monster, Jerry Sandusky. All of those that allowed all of this to happen, including Joe Paterno and Penn State Administrators should go straight to prison for life nothing less.
Bad behavior in the sports world is nothing new. One should bear in mind, however, that it does not occur exclusively there. It happens everywhere. Which is not to excuse it; rather, we should try to understand it, so as it avoid it in our personal lives (which I think is the whole reason for having sports reporting at all). I think this is the wider point that the civil-rights historian Taylor Branch was trying to make in his excellent October 2011 Atlantic Magazine article, “The Shame of College Sports,” which you can read here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/8643/
The impulse toward excellence and competitiveness in sports is supposed to make us better people, not support the unfortunate human tendency to act like a knucklehead, or worse. Too often, though, this tendency not only afflicts the players, but extends to the owners, managers, coaches, and fans as well. (The fallout from the Penn State child-rape scandal is only the latest example of this appalling phenomenon.)
While it’s true that “standing idly by is as heinous an offense as the actual abuse,” the bigger question is: Why does it have to happen in the first place? It’s not just factors such as a coach’s authority, a player’s testosterone levels, or the fans’ adulation that morally derails those involved in sports (whether participants or observers). Rather, it’s something outside of the narrow confines of the sport, and emanating from within American society itself, that is the real cause of the problem, which I would characterize as a combination of warped values and an overblown sense of entitlement.
An author friend of mine, Bruce Piasecki, has a chapter in his latest book (Doing More With Less, doingmorewithlessbook.com) entitled “In the Company of Knuckleheads,” which illustrates perfectly my point here, and also offers a possible solution to our society’s malaise in this regard. There he describes his up-close-and-personal encounter with sports-inspired bad behavior:
“We had up-front box seats as a gift to the last four games [of a series of NCAA college hockey games], and these four large males were there for each of these instances. As we got into the caliber and skills of the best players from the best teams, all four became louder and more demanding. By the semifinals, they were acting virtually insane, banging their heads and hands against the glass whenever opponents skated by, until they were thrown out by well-dressed security guards.”
His 12-year-old daughter asked whether they were drunk, and then followed up with this remark: “Why do they take this so seriously?”
What an insightful question from a mere child. Reading this passage in the book, I had a sudden epiphany: If one wants to avoid behaving badly, the key perhaps is to learn how to think like a 12-year-old girl!
These are the kinds of simple but larger lessons that the public can take away from media coverage of sports scandals like this.