We as a culture believe that sports is a pillar of the community. Acknowledge the fact that NFL games air on Sunday right after church, and it becomes clear that sports is a kind of secular religion for a consumerist society. A “hero culture” naturally grows out of our love for sports; we see coaches and athletes as people whom we should admire. It takes guts and determination to play the game, and from that we infer that other virtues off the field must follow.
For the most part, hero culture is a net good, and more often than not sports is indeed a unifying force for many communities. The Penn State scandal last year, however, showed the dark side of hero culture. Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno definitely had guts and determination to lead the Nittany Lions against brutal competition; their actions off the field, however, reflect moral corruption rather than virtue. Sandusky destroyed the lives of his victims to satiate his perverted desires. Paterno and company are equally culpable as Sandusky for giving him a free pass to commit unspeakable crimes, as they hid the injustices done to Sandusky’s victims to preserve the immaculate image of a football program. What is supposed to be recreation and a community bonding experience somehow became the most important thing, above even the welfare of children.
Sandusky virtually has no defenders outside of his family, yet Paterno still has a base of loyalists willing to defend him even in light of all the damning evidence. Even after the scandal has all but dissipated, one State College resident still describes Paterno as “first and most of all a great coach and a great person.” Do they perhaps see Paterno’s silence as a noble act, that the Nittany Lions are such an intrinsic good for the community that its honor must be kept intact, regardless of how many skeletons must be hidden? This is a broken sense of morality, where the image of virtue is more important than virtue itself. A person who knowingly hid child abuse cannot in any conventional use of the word be called great.
Less than a year after the Sandusky case, the ongoing scandal in Steubenville, Ohio again reminds us that, when given primacy above all else, the hero culture of sports is a corrosive force. The story is sadly familiar to many of us: a girl parties, drinks too much; boys, star football players in this case, allegedly take advantage of her and post the gory details on the Internet.
Perhaps I’ve been too desensitized to accounts of sexual assault, but I found the fact that the community is defending the actions of the football players more distasteful than the assault itself. The head coach, Reno Saccocia, delayed benching the players involved because he did not think they did anything wrong. Compare this to some choice quotes from a former Steubenville player describing the actions of those accused: “They peed on her. That’s how you know she’s dead, because someone pissed on her … They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl.” Perhaps we should remind Coach Saccocia that urinating on unconscious girls, whether it actually happened or it is just a boast, is not behavior to which upstanding members of the community subscribe.
The Big Red football team of Steubenville, like the Nittany Lions of Penn State, is a storied and feared program, winning nine state championships since 1990 and accumulating an 85 percent winning rate under Coach Saccocia. It is perhaps the brightest gleam of hope for a decaying Rust Belt town. Tarnishing Big Red might then be tantamount to extinguishing hope in Steubenville. Seen in this light, it is then understandable why so many in the community are so ready to defend the actions of the football players. It is still no excuse, however. Besides, attempts to preserve the integrity of the football program in this way are now for naught, with the case becoming a national media frenzy. The best thing to do in this case is a simple bloodletting: the community should not try to protect the players; it should aid the police investigation. Hold the players accountable for their actions, and the matter will be more of their moral failure rather than the corruption of a community willing to neglect justice for the sake of preserving the image of a football team.
To put it in more familiar parlance, Steubenville needs to make a sacrifice play, the sacrifice being its football hero culture. Does it have the guts to do it? We shall find out soon enough.
_Rolph Recto’s column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at
r.recto@cavalierdaily.com._
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