Penn State Scandal Overwhelms Other Concussion Inc. News

The outrage in State College, Pennsylvania, is very much part of the theme of this blog. Covering it has put me way behind on some general news developments in the Concussion Inc. world. Foremost among these, perhaps, was Friday’s announcement of increased pension benefits to retired National Football League players from the recently created “Legacy Fund.” I will get to that story in depth later – but note for now that these improvements for broken and destitute NFL veterans do appear to be substantial and significant.

At this point in the Penn State saga, I think it is best for me, like most of you, to monitor the increasingly strong coverage coming out of the mainstream media. As we do so, let’s stop and tip our hats to the two journalists who have driven it: Sara Ganim of the Harrisburg Patriot-News (@sganim on Twitter) and Pittsburgh broadcaster-writer Mark Madden (@MarkMaddenX on Twitter).

I am also pleased to see that many sports columnists across the country get the magnitude of this story. I could cite many of them, but I’ll start with Scott Ostler of my local San Francisco Chronicle. Though we’ve never met in person, I count Scott, who kindly blurbed my first book, as a friend. I hope my saying so doesn’t lower the property value of his house in Contra Costa County.

Ostler called Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett one of the “heroes” of the story. I think that overstates it. The heroes are the victims and their families who are sustaining the courage to talk aloud about the heinous crimes committed against them in the recent or distant past. Corbett does deserve credit for initiating (when he state attorney general, prior to his recent election as governor) the dragnet that finally resulted in indictments of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky and two university administrators who covered up what he had done on their campus and continued doing elsewhere. As toxic-cleanup operations began at Penn State, Corbett also nudged the board of trustees in the direction of sanity.

Corbett falls short of hero accolades, in my view, since the current prosecutorial team and the grand jury failed to indict Joe Paterno, too, for what clearly seems to be perjury on his part, in claiming lack of specific knowledge of the 2002 rape of a child by Sandusky, which was reported to Paterno by another assistant coach, Mike McQueary. In fairness to Corbett, the prosecutors, and the grand jury, they may have calculated that abstaining from an indictment of Paterno at this time was an in-bounds exercise of prosecutorial discretion, since his previously bulletproof reputation and legal standing are certain to collapse in so many other ways. (And indeed, Paterno’s perjury before the grand jury may itself be revisited in due course.)

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Moving forward, I hope part of the fallout of the Penn State story is to take a properly calibrated, but also properly aggressive, spirit of inquiry into other sports, as well as other football programs.

Last Thursday, Jeff Passan, the baseball writer for Yahoo Sports, had a chilling backgrounder on Donald Fitzpatrick, the longtime Boston Red Sox clubhouse manager who lured a dozen or more young African-American boys into systemic sexual abuse throughout the seventies and eighties. Fitzpatrick pleaded guilty to criminal charges in 2002 – the same year Sandusky sodomized a 10-year-old boy in a shower at the Penn State football facility. See http://www.thepostgame.com/features/201111/another-era-and-another-sport-sex-abuse-scandal-still-inflicting-pain-today. (Yahoo Sports has writers who are both good and bad on social issues. Michael Silver, the Yahoo pro football beat guy, is almost unbearably trivial.)

A few years ago there was a financial scandal involving the coach, Jesse Stovall, of my then-preteen daughter’s USA Club Swimming team in California. We left the team around that time, and it later emerged that there was also a sex scandal: the statutory rape by the coach of one of his swimmers at an out-of-town meet. I became the primary source for the cover story in Berkeley’s East Bay Express that exposed all this – see http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/swimming-in-sex-abuse/Content?oid=1678180&showFullText=true and http://www.eastbayexpress.com/92510/archives/2010/04/30/former-berkeley-swim-coach-accepts-plea-agreement.

As Express writer Kathleen Richards reported the Stovall story, little did she or I realize that it would become part of a nationwide investigation of sexual abuse by swimming coaches, which was featured on ABC’s 20/20. I recently (and before the Sandusky revelations) emailed the 20/20 producer to see if they would do a follow-up on what I believe were half-hearted and insincere reform measures undertaken at USA Swimming headquarters in Colorado Springs. The producer did not respond.

Irv Muchnick