By Bryan Burwell, St. Louis Post-Dispatch –
ST. LOUIS — The unfathomable audacity of the family of the late Joe Paterno is beyond offensive. It’s sickening. It’s distasteful.
However long it takes for their “experts” to conduct their farcical “review” of the damning 267-page investigation by former FBI director Louis J. Freeh, it won’t change a thing. No matter how much the toadies and sycophants try to twist the facts of the Freeh report into a pretzel or a French cruller, it will never exonerate Paterno from the disgusting truth.
Yet even from his grave, the coach has found a way to keep manipulating a self-serving enterprise that allows Paterno to continue perpetrating the already sickening and distasteful cover-up of the worst scandal in the history of American sports that he launched more than 14 years ago.
(PHOTO: Kim Ranck touches the arm on the Joe Paterno statue as she walks away in tears Wednesday, July 18, 2012 in State College, Pennsylvania. Ranck, a 2006 Penn State University graduate and current Penn State employee, has been out of town when the controversy surrounding the statue broke and came to visit before something happened to it.)
The family essentially promised Monday to keep alive the cover-up when a spokesman said it had commissioned a panel of “experts” to do a “comprehensive review” of the investigation, which criticized Paterno for his role in keeping child predator Jerry Sandusky protected as he went on his horrifying spree of sodomy.
“We are dismayed by, and vehemently disagree with, some of the conclusions and assertions and the process by which they were developed by the Freeh Group,” Wick Sollers, the lawyer for the Paterno family, said in a statement Monday. “Mr. Freeh presented his opinions and interpretations as if they were absolute facts. We believe numerous issues in the report, and his commentary, bear further review.”
Well, however long it takes to conduct their “review” — five minutes, five months or five years — it won’t be enough time to distort the truth enough to miraculously exonerate Paterno from his part in influencing the most powerful men at the university to let a child molester knowingly prey in their midst for nearly 14 years.
They need to stop it. The only decent thing to do at this point is to either politely fall silent with no comment or have the courage and decency to admit the glaring faults of the patriarch of the family. How much more honorable would it be if someone stood in front of a camera and sympathetically admitted that family love created an understandable blind spot to his transgressions?
When will someone have the integrity to admit that the overwhelming, sobering truth forces them to swallow the unpalatable facts that their father was the flawed man the Freeh Report reveals him to be?
But this revisionist nonsense that keeps coming out of the mouths of the family representatives just digs them deeper into a shameless hole from which there is no escape. And now it makes you wonder what else wasn’t true about the mythology of Happy Valley. It makes me uncomfortably wonder if the man who was deified for so long as the best and brightest in college athletics would have been more accurately portrayed as a well-disguised and calculating man who was far more concerned with manipulating the phony institution of Paterno U above all else. Now everything about the image of Penn State football and Joe Paterno deserves a raised eyebrow and a jaded gut.
And now something needs to be done, and people have to pay for this most heinous betrayal. But that cost should come in criminal and civil court, not from a death penalty at the hands of the NCAA. Stopping Penn State football for one day or one year would just be a continuation of too many innocents paying for the sins of these men of influence who were corrupted by their own immense power.
Punish the people who committed the atrocities with jail time. Punish the institutions (the Paterno estate and Penn State University) with civil lawsuits that will force them to pay millions in restitution to the victims whose lives they allowed to be ruined.
The NCAA should understand that this one is out of its reach and restrain itself from its usual policy of punishing the wrong people (players, coaches, local residents who work in the stadiums, restaurants and hotels) who had nothing to do with this scandal. That sort of symbolism is useless.
What would be an appropriate symbolism is the removal of the Paterno shrine from outside the the football stadium. The sycophants will talk up the graduation rates and the fine young men who played for Paterno and went on to become outstanding members of society, and all that is fine and true and none of it has anything to do with the misdeeds that were perpetrated under his watch.
“Failed to (keep) a child predator from harming children for over a decade … a striking lack of empathy for child abuse victims… total and consistent disregard by the most senior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of … child victims.”
Those are the most haunting words from the Freeh report. On the wall behind the Paterno statute is a quote from the coach that once was a source of pride for everyone in Happy Valley, but now serves as something far more haunting.
They ask me what I’d like written about me when I’m gone. I hope they write I made Penn State a better place, not just that I was a good football coach.”
Well the verdict is in, and Paterno would not like what we’re writing now that he is gone. The virtue he so often wrapped himself in turned out to be a deceptive and sanctimonious cloak covering up the most unimaginable horrors lurking in the shadows.
1 thought on “Bryan Burwell: His family still wants to cover up for Paterno”
This writer is spot on. The Paterno family is trying to CYA because their inheritance is on the line. It all comes down to money. Of course, they are also trying to protect Joe’s image, but that is useless, and they know it in their hearts. He was an immoral ostrich.