Reply #8: I agree, Fumesucker. [View All]

[Tansy_Gold]

I just watched the ESPN conversation -- http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/7219828/no-one-seems-really-know-former-penn-state-assistant-coach-jerry-sandusky -- in which both the guest, a Jon Ritchie, and one of the three commentators basically said Mike McQueary acted the way they would have acted had they seen an idol (my term, not theirs) raping a 10 year old boy in the shower. They would have run away screaming.

What does that say about a culture -- college football -- that it produces men (?) who will not protect a child? That it produces men (?) who will rally around and defend another man (?) who walked away from the rape of a child and did nothing to stop it?

What angers me, and you can call me sexist if you like but I hope you'll read this all, is that there were mothers who tried to stop this, mothers of children in the Second Mile program who were being abused by Jerry Sandusky, and those mothers tried to protect their children. They may have been single mothers with few resources to fight back against the big and powerful of the Penn State football program, but at least they tried. Two powerless women at least made an effort, and one of them finally brought down the idols.

Jerry Sandusky targeted vulnerable children. His charity addressed children from poor, dysfunctional, and single-parent (which usually means single mother) families. He took children away from the protection of their mothers, including the adoption of one of his children over the protests of the boy's mother in 1995 http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/college/penn-state-jerry-sandusky-scandal-tracked-back-1995-coach-s-adopted-son-report-article-1.976557?localLinksEnabled=false

If there is a parallel between the horror that has gone on at Penn State and the horror that is the Catholic church, I think it's because both are such resolutely male, all-male, anti-woman cultures. I think if McQueary had walked in on Sandusky raping a 10-year-old girl, he wouldn't even have been distraught and probably wouldn't have even told his father about it. It was just a girl, after all.

I live with a sports fanatic. In the almost 50 years I've known him, he's always been involved in sports in one way or another. A one-time Olympic track hopeful, he was also offered an opportunity with an MLB farm team. For years he was a coach of boys' and girls' baseball and softball teams, then went into umpiring. He just left this morning to umpire a girls' softball tournament. When I asked him a question about football the other day, a question that should have had a one or two-sentence answer -- are guys who play the defensive end position usually great big huge guys or not? -- I got a long lecture on the history of defensive ends, a comparison of them with linebackers, what they do and how they do it and who are the good ones and how the position has changed over the years, etc., etc., etc. He eats, drinks, sleeps, breathes sports, and he knows what he's talking about.

And because of his long association with kids and sports -- which goes back at least to 1965 when he was a parks and rec supervisor in the Chicago suburb we both grew up in -- he's always put the kids first. Last summer he threw a kids' baseball coach out of a game because the coach told the players to do things that weren't safe for themselves and other players. When the coach told the kids to ignore the umpire's instructions because "I don't care if you get hurt as long as you win," the coach was ejected, was reported to the league's board, and is no longer coaching.

So his reaction to the McQueary story was, "Bullshit. He shoulda stopped it, first and foremost. McQueary's a big guy, with almost 30 years on Sandusky. He could've stopped it and he didn't. The safety of the kids comes first. If he couldn't do that, if he's so worried about his job or anything else that he can't save the kid first, then he doesn't deserve to be in the program. And if the program permits that, then the program needs to go."

I, too, think football at Penn State had become a cult, a cult of winning at all costs and never questioning anyone in a position of authority within the cult. And it took people -- women, mothers -- from outside the cult to bring it down.


Tansy Gold, mother and grandmother