Big time sports are a fact of life and a powerful influence in our society. In holding a mirror up to society and using big time sports as the mechanism people quickly dismiss professional sports. After all they are corrupted by money. The players are paid outrageous amounts of money to play. But in college football the players are supposed to be "gifted amateurs". They are in it for the glory, for the love of the game, not the money. That's what we all pretend. And we have been pretending this for a long time. My father used to tell a story about a football player named Hugh McElhenny. The story is that he took a pay cut when he transitioned from college ball to the pros. Now he played his college ball in the late '40s and was a pro until the mid '60s, a time before the real money hit pro football. But the point is that big time college football has been a scam for a long time.
Now "sports" is supposed to be about more than just bread and circuses. It's about something called "sportsmanship". It is supposed to teach players and, to a certain extant fans, the value of "good sportsmanship" and "clean living". Grantland Rice, in a poem he wrote in 1908 called "Alumnus Football", summarized good sportsmanship as "not that you won or lost - but how you played the game". That, at least was how the virtues of the game were seen in 1908. How do we see it now?
Vince Lombardi, the famous coach of the Green Bay Packers pro football team is said to have opined that "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing". Some say Lombardi was misquoted. Wikipedia says the quote originated with Henry Russell "Red" Sanders, a UCLA college football coach of yore. It doesn't matter. The point is it embodies the actual belief of most people in big time college football either as players, coaches, staff, or as fans. It is certainly guided Joe Paterno's actions.
And from Mr. Paterno's perspective, he was right. After it was announced that he was dropped (Was he fired? Did he retire? We don't know and we don't care!) from his job there was literally rioting in the streets by those angered that Mr. Paterno was no longer the coach. The rioters were, as far as I can tell, ordinary citizens: students, alumni, fans of all stripes. They emphatically believed that "winning is the only thing". The contrast can't be starker. These people believed that it was more important to win football games than to prevent young boys from being raped. There has been no rioting that I know of by people who are horrified that young boys were systematically raped over more than a decade.
And it's not just Penn State fans that believe this. There was a successful pro basketball player from around here. After he retired it slowly came out that he had fathered something like 10 children out of wedlock during his carrier. This was treated as a great source of humor in the community by the press and, as far as I can tell, by most fans. It did his reputation absolutely no harm. It was enough that he was a winner on the basketball court. And he's small time. As far as I know the sex that resulted in the procreation was consentual. There have been several scandals associated with the local big time college football program in the last few years. Among them are the well supported allegations are of players raping women. But the key scandal in this period, according to most fans, was the scandalously low number of games in the "win" column.
If we look across the entire country these kinds of scandals, including the rape kind, are so common they are treated as cliches. The only question is "will the perpetrators survive the scandal". And it is a cliche that the answer is generally determined by the win/loss record. Mr. Paterno stands out as one of the few examples where he was bounced in spite of his success as measured by his win/loss ratio.
There is a case to be made for Mr. Paterno believing that it is not his fault. In a larger sense the blame lies with the rioters I alluded to above. Unfortunately they represent the common wisdom of the public at large. And it is the thinking of the public at large not the thinking of the people working on all the big time sports programs in the country that is the root cause of our problems. It is their thinking that moves society at large, not the Joe Paterno's of this world. Mr. Paterno's crime is understanding how the system really works and using this understanding to his advantage. The real rules are:
- Win.
- Cheat (necessary to achieve #1) but don't get caught.
- Make sure you have an effective "cover up" program for when you do get caught.
In the case of Penn State, we had a member of the coaching staff engaged in child rape involving numerous children spanning a period of over a decade. And several of the rape incidents took place in Penn State athletic facilities. That amount of activity does not take place in such an outrageous (and by outrageous I really mean easily noticed) manner over such a long period of time without numerous people learning of it. We now know that several people including Mr. Paterno learned of this behavior. None of these people stepped in to put a stop to the behavior. None of these people brought in outside authorities. None of these people provided any aid or assistance to the victims or their families. In a football program the coach is the General. He sets the tone for his own behavior and the behavior of his subordinates. It is illuminating that this happened under Mr. Paterno's "leadership".
Mr. Paterno did not invent the system. He was just smart enough to understand it and use it to his advantage. That, combined with his coaching skill, led him to a lot of success over many years. And this is not the "Penn State System". The same system to a greater (better win/loss record) or lesser (worse win/loss record) extent is implemented in program after program across the country. This is only possible because the fans across the country understand and support the system as it actually is. Scandals by the dozen have erupted across the years and in every part of the country. I can think of no case where the public has risen up in their wrath and said "we want a less successful but ethical program instead of a more successful but unethical program". It has not happened. The response to a cheating scandal is not "you are unethical - you are bad". It's "you were dumb to get caught". It's not about the bad behavior. It's about embarrassing us by getting caught.
It is bad enough that this kind of thinking infects sports everywhere and at all levels. But the same kind of thinking pervades many other areas of society. We had a financial meltdown caused by bad behavior on Wall Street. Wall Street followed the big time sports model exactly. They won (earned lots of money) by cheating (selling garbage as AAA investments to suckers). Firm after firm learned they couldn't make as much money as the cheaters so they joined them in the cheating. And they covered it up by capturing the journalists and resorted to the usual intimidation and bribery tactics when it came to regulators and politicians ("you'll never do business on the street again unless you give this an AAA rating" or "we'll drop a ton of money into your opponent's campaign if you don't support our legislation" or "how would you like a nice cushy job in a couple of years that pays big bucks for little work"). Using captive "business" reporters and slick marketing campaigns they have built and maintained a "fan" base that to this day supports their practices. But, like the Penn State scandal where the activity was just too egregious for many sports fans to stomach, the fan base for Wall Street has been shrinking, again due to egregious behavior (robosigning, giant bonuses, etc.)
And we see a lot of the same thing happening in the political arena. To win (in this case elections not games) takes lots of money. The best source of the most money is unpopular special interests. Many of these special interests are unpopular because their agendas are hostile to the interests of voters. So smart politicians cover up their connections to these special interests. To retain the support of these interests they must do their bidding while maintaining the fiction that they are not. This is done by writing the legal provisions in such a way that it takes a lot of work (not the strong suit of most journalists) to figure out what the provision actually does and hiding who got the provision inserted into the bill. In many cases the provision does not directly provide the benefit the special interest wants. Instead it makes the bill effectively unworkable by inserting many loop holes that the special interest can use to advantage. This is one reason why we have so many thousand page bills. In addition the speical interests run sophisticated marketing campaigns supporting their positions and candidates.
And most campaigns are no longer fought on the basis of the positions held by the candidates or, when a candidate has one, the candidate's record of actual achievement. Instead we have mud wars: contests where it's a matter of who can throw the most mud at the other candidate in the most effective manner. This is aided and abetted by the media's "horse race" approach to coverage. Instead of who is doing what, coverage consists of who is ahead in which poll. The substance of either campaign or candidate is almost entirely ignored. So candidates who are good at being popular win over candidates who are duller but more substantial.
There is something wrong with our society. It is the gradual transition from our being guided by a "how you play the game" orientation to a "winning is the only thing" orientation. I think most people subconsciously understand this. But they rarely support the "do the right thing" people over the "win at any cost" people. In the short run, supporting the "win at any cost" people results in more wins. Our team wins more games and out stock portfolio does better. But in the long term the result is more losses. In sports other teams resort to even more outrageous tactics to win and our team's win/loss record deteriorates. In business the losses from the Wall Street crash depress the value of our portfolio for a decade or more. We need to support more honest and ethical people over the "win at any cost" people in spite of the short term pain this requires. I think it will turn out that the short term losses will be smaller and the long term gains will be greater than most people think.
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