All Is Not Well In Happy Valley

I’m not a Penn State fan. They don’t have any insignia on their helmets, there are no names on the backs of their jerseys and they wear their practice pants in the game for goodness sakes! I’ve never been particularly enamored with Joe Paterno. He seemed to always state the obvious when interviewed over an upcoming game or right after a devastating loss. But you’ve got to respect the years he’s spent in the game; the several undefeated seasons; the two national championships; the all time wins leader in college football history. He was doing something right at Penn State! And most important of all, I have never heard a former player or an associate say a word against him. I have, on the other hand, heard many past players speak glowingly about the guidance, direction and help that Coach Paterno provided them during their Penn State run. It was obvious that the program was about a heck of a lot more than just winning football games. One year he was asked to speak to the Penn State graduating class. Let me tell you, I’ve been around a few football situations in my day, they don’t ask the normal head coach to get up and deliver the commencement address. They save that honor for Nobel Prize winners, heads of state or the enlightened intelligentsia of the corporate world.

Joe Pa is gone. In an instant! And I’m certainly not here to defend him. The charges of a long ago assistant coach having inappropriate contact with young boys are as well documented as they are disgusting. The story just broke a week ago and heads are rolling around Happy Valley like someone cranked up a well oiled guillotine from the old French Inquisition days.

I would like to raise my hand and ask a few questions. What happened to due process? And I’m referring directly to Joe Paterno here. And listen, 409 college football wins can’t shield him if he is guilty. But being famous shouldn’t condemn him either. Let’s afford him the same opportunity if he scrubbed floors in the university laundry. There has been no grand jury indictment against him. No criminal charges filed against him. No arrest on his front steps. Good golly, Billy the Kid got due process, then they shot him! Bruno Richard Hauptmann got due process. Tokyo Rose got due process. O. J. Simpson got due process. If Jack the Ripper had been operating in Jacksonville, Memphis or New Port Richey and was apprehended, I dare say he would have gotten due process. 

And yet, Coach Paterno is dumped immediately. No trial, no defense team. No opportunity to face his accusers. The Penn State Board of Trustees said they were going to start a “full and complete investigation” into the matter. Less than a day later these same trustees got Joe on the phone to give him the ouster news. That was either the fastest “complete investigation” in the history of the known world or somebody jumped the gun. After 61 years of unfailing loyalty to the university, they gave Joe Pa the news over the telephone. Billy the Kid got better treatment. The trustees said the news media frenzy forced their hand. I’d say they’re looking down at pretty weak hands!

But the trustees did get one thing right. The news media’s goal today is to shape our minds to their way of seeing it and to whip up viewership by any means possible. Oh, they will decry “due process” when it fits their story. But they don’t give it a second glance if they smell blood in the water. They quit reporting the news years ago and went to making it! They will bend it to fit their political agendas or ratings charts. When they get their “slant” going on a story and they sense they’ve “hooked” the audience, there is no heights, or depths, they want aspire to. And don’t you think for a second the news folks haven’t covered up, or suppressed a story, if the situation or a boss above them demanded it. The real problem is that unknowing folks by the boatloads out there are all too often swayed by the latest byline or the last anchor man they listened to!    

Another fairly pertinent question would be how much did Coach Paterno know? Or not know? When did he know it? What exactly was said to him in 1999 or 2002? Is there any hint of a reasonable doubt here? Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Lord knows, I would hate to be judged today on every hasty or uninformed decision I have ever made during my entire life. I know one thing for dead certain sure, I’m not in a very good position to go casting stones.

No one is going to win here. Except the ratings for ESPN, Fox and the Nightly News! There were three lousy games left on Penn State’s schedule. Everyone has agreed that football games are not important in the wake of the sensational story unfolding now around the long departed assistant coach. Why not let Joe Pa finish out the season. His highly esteemed position of coach, mentor and benefactor to the university, the athletes and the students has been tarnished forever. That’s a sad epitaph for such a distinguished career. 

If he was a party to some kind of cover up, we can hang him later. If he knew more than he let on, let’s deal with that in a proper fashion, following a proper channel of legal steps that I think are guaranteed in the Constitution, Bill of Rights and one of those chapters in Deuteronomy.

Due process! It is horrific that those young victims didn’t get it. But taking it away from Joe Paterno doesn’t atone for, fix or render any real solution to the original problem which was certainly not of his making.

Respectfully,

Kes