Joe Paterno and Destroying the Ring of Power

“I would use this ring for good.

But through me it would wield a power too terrible to imagine.”

I believe in Joe Paterno. But I feel stupid for having believed him when he lied to us all.

The reason I say I believe in him? When he put himself forward as more than a football coach, but as a mentor and leader of men seeking “Success with Honor,” I believe that he meant it. This was not the case of a hypocrite, a man with a pretense of moral beliefs but never seeking to live them out. Rather, it was the case of a man corrupted by the power he accumulated to accomplish his goal. The honor seeped away as he allowed an assistant coach to prey on young boys with impunity.  As of yesterday, the success was taken away by the NCAA, who vacated (erased from the record books) a large number of Penn State’s victories under Paterno.

Paterno’s defenders (or former defenders) wonder how the same man who went far out of his way to inspire an injured player could be as distant and callous as the recent Freeh report suggests that he was in front of the evidence of sexual abuse by Jerry Sandusky. The simple answer is: Tribalism. We tend to like the notion of a universal morality, of treating everyone with equal regard, but most individuals throughout history (even those we think of as the most virtuous) have preferred those closest to them. It wasn’t that Paterno, by any account, limited his concern to players who would be useful to him—it isn’t a problem of utilitarianism. Rather, if you were a player, a coach, a booster, etc., you were part of the Penn State family. Protected. Cared for and cared about.

Jerry Sandusky was a valued part of that family. His accusers were not. This theory explains why not reporting Sandusky to the proper authorities was seen as “humane,” according to one email. Not humane to the victims, not humane globally, but humane within the family.

But I don’t think this explanation is adequate. Just as convincing, if not more so, was the need to maintain the success that Paterno had built. And for Paterno, 74 years old in 2001 when the more important allegations broke, holding onto that success had come to mean keeping himself in the driver’s seat, retaining his position as head football coach rather than retiring amidst scandal and bad publicity.

This is why I compare Paterno to Gandalf’s saying from Lord of the Rings. I believe he set out to do something truly good. He gained influence and authority and trampled checks and balances in the name of maintaining that good, the “grand experiment” of a marriage of academics and athletics. And for a long time, it seemed to work. There was never a point that Paterno recognized, “I have too much power. Even if I try to use it rightly, I won’t be able to.” Even as he flushed away his program’s honor and, ultimately, its future success, I believe he thought he was protecting Penn State, not just himself. His own reputation and his work at the school had fused.

So he had to develop an excuse, to protect himself so as to protect his work. In his deathbed interview, when a good Catholic would confess all, he lied, and I believed him. His story was that he was just a naïve old grandfatherly man, unversed in sodomy and afraid of violating university policy. He regretted stepping away from the investigation, now, but he stepped away. This was balderdash, and it should have been seen as balderdash by all of us. Joe Paterno ran Penn State, insofar as he wanted to—he was not the sort of man who could step away. Instead, the Freeh report tells us, he intervened on Sandusky’s behalf in the name of compassion, just as he had intervened on disciplinary proceedings for players on other occasions. 

There’s no exact allegory for the One Ring. It doesn’t signify the atom bomb, or anything else, directly. In this case, it could have been the arrangement within the university, in which the football coach was bigger than the president not only in popular perception but in administrative reality.

Or is “Success with Honor” not really possible in the sleazy world of college football? Perhaps developing a set of institutional checks and balances would be sufficient to tear down the idolatrous practice of “Coach said so.” But perhaps a sport that damages young men’s brains and exchanges the goal of higher learning for a state-wide or region-wide tribalism is itself a kind of One Ring of our university system. If so, how many university presidents will have the courage of Frodo?