No Reason To Treat Coaches Like Deities
Follow
By DERON SNYDER
As it turns out, former Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno wasn’t a saint after all, which shouldn’t come as a surprise because no one is. Yet we repeatedly make the same mistake, elevating coaches, civil rights leaders and clergy to God-like status, though they’re as flawed as anyone else. Sometimes more so.
The great and mighty “Joe-Pa,” who became the Nittany Lions coach when Lyndon B. Johnson occupied the White House, acquired so much sovereignty as he built a pristine image, his so-called superiors were more like peers, if not underlings. Thursday, in a 267-page report on Penn State’s sex-abuse scandal, former FBI director Louis Freeh outlined how the school’s former president and two other former senior officials were followers more than leaders when it came to the head coach.
Paterno was more concerned about his legacy than about the victims of former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who last month was convicted on 45 counts of child sex abuse. If Paterno was so inclined, former President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley and Vice President Gary Schultz would have ensured that the proper authorities investigated claims that Sandusky had raped a child in the football team’s locker room in 2001.
But Paterno, who died in January not long after the scandal broke, wasn’t interested in finding out the truth and possibly putting his program in a negative light. Penn State had a reputation as one of the nation’s cleanest football powerhouses under Paterno’s 46-year tenure. If he didn’t want anything to interfere with that record, neither did the other officials.
