The Feds and the Penn State Hillbillies – Coming Soon on Blu Ray

by Irvin Muchnick

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which has this habit of rushing right over as soon as they hear the news of these things, is investigating the “institutional control” of Penn State football. That’s peachy. Many of us, however, believe a more epic jurisprudential step is yet to come: a federal probe of the related web of financial deals, cover-ups, and investigative fumbles reaching all the way to the top of the administration of Governor Tom Corbett. ESPN’s legal analyst, Lester Munson, says the chain of events from the long-enabled serial child rapes by Jerry Sandusky is “already arguably the worst scandal in the history of sports, and it might be even worse than we think.”

Among other elements, there was a key sale of land by Penn State to Sandusky’s Second Mile charity, and there was a foot-dragging and under-resourced state attorney general’s office look into criminal underage sex abuse charges against Sandusky – back when Governor Corbett was Attorney General Corbett.

These incestuous or, if you will, “conflicted” relationships among the players could be a pretext for the intervention of the U.S. Justice Department. In my view, they’re also an apt metaphor for the insular central-state, middle-of-nowhere culture that brought us to this pass.

Every now and then on Election Day, a political pundit explains a closely watched Keystone State race to a national audience with a familiar piece of pith: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it will be said, is best described as “Philadelphia, Pittsburgh … and Alabama in between.” The Sandusky trail, from his father’s Brownson House for wayward boys in the town of Washington, to his own last volunteer football coaching stint with Central Mountain High School in Mill Hall, well reflects this sort of Yankee twist on hillbilly hell, where right and wrong get graded on a provincial curve. I keep having nightmares about the movie version, with Buddy Ebsen reincarnated in dual roles – in both his Jed Clampett persona as Joe Paterno and his Barnaby Jones persona as the governor.

Though readers must think I have a strange way of showing it, I actually have great affection for Pennsylvanians. My late mother’s lifelong best friend, whom she met with the Army WACs during World War II, came from Wilkes-Barre, and our families would visit each other numerous times. Later, I had a crush on a girl from Pittsburgh. Still later, when I made more money than I knew how to spend as a legal word-processing temp in New York in the early 1980s, I almost bought a weekend shack in Pennsylvania’s Northampton County before finally settling near the east branch of the Delaware River in the New York State Catskills. Today my oldest son serves with Teach for America in the toughest high school in West Philly.

But I’ve also seen part of this Sandusky movie before. In 1992 I was in Lehigh County, poking into the circumstances of the death nine years earlier of the traveling girlfriend of pro wrestler Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, who was then the second-biggest star of the company owned by Vince McMahon and his now Senate-chasing wife Linda, which is now named World Wrestling Entertainment. My Snuka story, commissioned but never published by New York’s Village Voice, would get a second wind years later, first as Internet samizdat and then as a chapter of my first book, Wrestling Babylon. In brief, Snuka’s companion died from a blow to the head in a motel room in Whitehall, just outside Allentown, where the wrestling troupe was then taping its syndicated television shows. In the same locale, the state athletic commission-appointed ringside physician, George Zahorian of Harrisburg, did much of the illegal steroid distribution that would land him in federal prison, and Mel Phillips, head of the backstage ring crew, molested underage boys in a trashy precursor of Sandusky.

When I knocked on the door of the Agricultural Hall in Allentown, where the wrestling shows used to be staged, the building manager refused to let me in so I could write a description of the scenery. “We know what you’re up to and we don’t have any use for it,” he said.

I thought of this distrust of outsiders two weeks ago, when the students in State College rioted after their football coach, Paterno, got fired for not reporting that his former assistant, Sandusky, had raped a kid in the campus sports facility shower, thus enabling him to victimize who knows how many others over the course of nine additional years.

Of course, college football fans are smarter than wrestling fans.

I mean … they are – aren’t they?

Irvin Muchnick’s ebook short, DUERSON, can be ordered on Amazon Kindle at http://amzn.to/sMgTh2, or as a PDF file by sending $1.49 via Paypal to paypal@muchnick.net. The second ebook short from Concussion Inc., UPMC: Concussion Scandal Ground Zero, will be published shortly.