My grandfather is 83-years-old, and grew up in rural Pennsylvania. He’s a football fan – has been for most of his life. He was never the type of fan that I am. He was never so intimately involved in the sport as to sometimes lose a grip on other, more important things. To my grandfather, a football game on television was just something that you watched, like a John Wayne movie or the evening news. It was a way to pass the time, to allow one day to pass to the next in a more sane and comfortable way.
When I stole quarters from his sock drawer to buy baseball cards at the corner store, he gave me a fatherly lecture, because I lacked a real fatherly figure a lot of the time, and then he forgave me. When I stopped going to school and kept my mom up at night because of it, he gave me a fatherly lecture and a reward when I promised to go and fulfilled that promise. He taught me a lot of things, most good, and some bad. He taught me about standing up for what you believe, and right from wrong. He taught me that when you are wrong, there are consequences. But there is also forgiveness, and redemption.
My grandfather helped to provide me with a male presence in my childhood, something my dad was unable to give me much of the time because he was eye-deep in alcohol and running from his own demons. My grandparent’s house was in a particular part of Western New York where, in the late 80’s and early 90’s, a young kid could still walk the 2 blocks down the road to buy candy at the general store without fear of being kidnapped. They provided me with a childhood, pieced together with scotch tape and crazy glue and elbow grease that could resemble something like an American childhood is supposed to resemble if we are to celebrate it, anyway.
Though he’s millions of dollars and a life of celebrity and legend away from Joe Paterno’s life, I can’t help but think of my grandfather when I think of the Penn State situation this week.
My grandfather is a hero to me, and in the quiet and small way he led his life, it has always been enough to say that. Over time and with age, I’ve learned things about him that aren’t so heroic, things about him that would even cause me to question why I ever thought about him like that in the first place. He is a man whose accomplishments as a person exceed the singular blemishes within that life.
I know this, with an unequivocal certainty: my grandfather, a simple man, provided benefits to just a few people in the world. But if he knew what Joe Paterno knew, and did only what Joe Paterno did, I would still stand in front of any of you and say that my grandfather, though deeply flawed, was a good man.
It is a difficult or maybe impossible question to ask at what point those accomplishments stop exceeding the failures. I think that to be fair, one must accept that the line is drawn differently for everyone. That is what makes the Penn State situation so clear in one regard, and so tough on the other.
I don’t know too much about Joe Paterno that you couldn’t find out in five minutes. I know that about ten years ago, I decided that I liked his Brooklyn schtick, the attitude with which he approached the games, the way even that he answered questions. I liked that he reminded me of a time in the world that I’d never seen. I even liked Penn State’s colors, truthfully, and that helped.
So for the past decade I’ve infrequently rooted for the team. I couldn’t name more than five players, and one of them is Aaron Maybin. I was really rooting for the idea of Joe Paterno, or what I thought the idea of Joe Paterno was.
Despite only these loose connections, this past week has been pretty difficult for me to process, because we live in a country in which almost everything like this becomes intensely personal.
And the thing is: the very best I can say, the most I can muster is insufficient to quench the intensely personal feelings everyone has about this. Child abuse opens a lot of rage in people, and rightfully so. But vengeance and vitriol and violence and hysteria and anger and hatred can never fill the hole ripped open by that rage. We have never, in any place, built a bridge just by burning one.
What I think is so painful about Joe Paterno is not the anger with which so many people look at him now. I think that deep down people realize that we are all tragically flawed. We are all susceptible to moments of weakness. And there are men and women in this world, amongst them celebrities, and politicians, and yes, football coaches, who we look toward to erase that doubt. We hold out hope that through them we are indeed better than our own expectations.
But we’re not better – none of us. And though so many of us would have done the right thing in Joe Paterno’s situation, there is a situation for each of us, in a particular circumstance, where our conscience would falter. We are all already guilty, and hoping to go through life lucky enough to avoid it.
No one should defend Joe Paterno, because, reporting child abuse only to his Athletic Director, and not to the police is a part of whom he is. But it is only a part. One act, no matter how unthinkable, does not paint the entire portrait of any human being. It is the totality of acts, whether the bad or good weighs more, that counts.
Joe Posnanski, one of the most accomplished and well-regarded writers in the country, has spent the last two years crafting a biography on the life of Paterno. He wrote yesterday that his objective is to write the fullest portrait of the man that he can. He also said that Joe Paterno was obviously wrong.
To that end, he was inundated with negative responses. Many accused Posnanski of being out only for profit or that his judgment was clouded by being too close to the subject. Many more vowed never to read Posnanski again. Many more, still, advocated for Paterno to be jailed, beaten, hanged and more.
I’d like to think that most of those people didn’t read what Posnanski actually wrote. I’d like to think that a great deal of the comments I’ve read in the last few days are reactionary, but meaningless, and that everyone involved in this can still safely put their head to a pillow at night.
A lot of this is media driven. The media, who have collectively patted themselves on the back with one hand over their “professional” coverage, while tweeting provocative things with the other, have done about as bad a job as I think can be done with this.
On WGR this week, a radio host said he “couldn’t get enough” of the coverage. A beat reporter said that he was proud of the example being set about how journalism “should be done”. Meanwhile, hundreds of cameras peered into the house of a football coach. Jerry Sandusky, the man who actually committed the crimes, lay quietly somewhere, out on bail, seemingly unobserved.
The victims of the crime, whose story could educate us more than anything about the way in which an atrocity like this could possibly come to be, have not been allowed to tell their story. But we care what Ashton Kutcher tweets.
There is very little inquiry into how a systematic failure of such a large proportion, how everyone from the school janitors to the police to the board of trustees knew and said nothing, has occurred.
Because these people, these questions, these thoughts are all unfamiliar to us. Joe Paterno is not. And it’s a shame that, at the end of the day, as we quickly rush to destroy that man, as we frantically build a fire station after the fire, so many equally culpable, profoundly evil people will go essentially unpunished in the court of public opinion. Because the media has done a bad job and so have we.
I saw a FOXSports person today say that it was “shameful” for writers to “hide behind Paterno’s legacy”, and another who said that some writers failed to “separate the true legacy from the myth”.
I don’t know what in the first 83 years of Paterno’s life he did wrong. I’m sure there are many, many flaws in that time. But I also know that there are a great many accomplishments that make him good, and some that make him terrible. It is up to each person to decide if the accomplishments outweigh the failures. It is not yours to make for me, and not mine to make for you.
No matter what you decide or when, you are not less of a person to think that way. Life is a limitless rainbow of gray shades. We all have our intensely personal reasons for feeling as we do about anything.
I’ve been called an idiot, helpless, in need of therapy, clueless, “f#cked”, and at least two people have called into question my capacity as a human being to be around children, because I said that some of the other people who knew should share some of the blame with Paterno. I’ve been told I feel this way only because I don’t have children of my own. I’ve been told I feel this way only because I am a Nittany Lion fan (which I am not, really). I’ve been told my failure to exhibit outrage makes me culpable, too.
That’s the world we live in, as it goes. An intensely personal place. We have a predatory, competitive media. We have a great number of people who are out to prove points about being right about this thing or that. We have some tools that allow that all to be connected, instantly.
When it comes to Joe Paterno, there is no right and no wrong, no matter how much you may wish it to be so. There are only intensely personal feelings. Feelings for me, that I connect back to my own grandfather, or my childhood without a real father, or the things that happened to me when my dad actually was around.
My grandfather told me that when you do something wrong, there are consequences. There is then forgiveness, and redemption.
You know, I haven’t talked to my real father in over five years. Honestly, I don’t know if I ever will talk to him. So I can understand people who say they can’t ever forgive Joe Paterno, or allow him to redeem himself. I can understand that some things, once broken, will never be put back together. I can also understand people who forgive the man, and believe that his accomplishments outweigh his failures.
What I learned about my grandfather through all this – terribly flawed, certainly imperfect – is that he is not a hero. He is a man. Most of the time that was good enough, sometimes it is not.
I think that we’ve lost our way. And not just because of this, but because of other things too. I think the media is bad for you. I think twitter is bad for you. I think I’m bad for you and you’re bad for me. I think that, whatever you think, you should think that. Stick with it.
Go home and hug your family. Take a deep breath. Be your own hero. The world is a lonely place.
Twitter: @matthew1stewart
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