It was only a matter of time: reflections on the Penn State child abuse scandal

When I was a junior in college, I got myself in a difficult situation with my team and my coaches. I did not intend to find this trouble, and I would have handled things much differently now. What did I do? I unintentionally brought the racial tension on our college football team out in the open. I did this by naively suggesting to another teammate that we discuss issues of tolerance racial issues in an "open forum" based upon some recent conversations I thought I had overheard. By the early morning hours, I was forced to coerce the person I knew of that was making racially tinged comments to out himself, and a campus wide drama insued.

The phrase that kept coming up regarding the issue to me, and with the coaches was that we needed to "keep this in the family" and that I was "trying to destroy" the coaches work and being a "gossip" by suggesting that it was an issue that needed to be addressed. Even the next spring, more than six months later, Head Coach Bill Bauer was scolding me for beginning this dialogue with my teammate. He again said that "we" needed to "keep things like this in the family", keep them quiet, and not be divisive.

The incident in question happened during a fun, celbrative event that happened before our game against the Friends University Falcons. Each year, the coaches would get out raw chicken meat, have players put the meat in their mouths, hanging down their chin, and then have the next teammate in the relay grab the raw chicken with their mouth from the other side of the chicken meat. The winning team did not have to do conditioning.

My junior year the coaches allowed anyone to opt out of the Falcoln relay who did not feel comfortable with it. Every African-American player, as well as one or two Whites and Hispanics declined to participate. A person in front of me mumbled something. I thought I heard him say a racial epithet. I asked him to repeat it. He said, "They are a bunch of lazy a** n*****s". I asked him to repeat a third time. He said the same thing.

In retrospect, what I should have done right then was either join my teammates who declined to participate, or chosen to physically assault my teammate for what he said. But I started doubting myself. After all, there were a number of other teammates around me that I respected that did nothing to respond. I am hard of hearing, I thought. Maybe I just missed it.

After my practice I thought that maybe this incident, even if I misheard it, would be a good starting point to discuss cultural differences. (Again, I was very niave). I went to a black friend who I trusted and considered a friend to discuss the possibilities of putting together this kind of educational/dialogical opportunity for my dorm. After all, I was an RA charged with putting together an educational program.

My friend gathered every black male on campus, and brought me into a classroom to discuss the issue an hour later. They wanted to know who had said the words to me, and they wanted to do violence to the young racist. When I said that wasn't my intention, they brought in Coach Kim Raynor, who told me I was making his life miserable and I should have known better than to cause problems. I negotiated a deal where the person could out himself and confess what he had done wrong by the next day to the coach, then the team. Which he did. He repented to his teammates. He continually tried to injure me with cheap shots during practice. The coaches did nothing about this though. They believed I deserved it. Why? "I did not keep it in the family."

For the rest of the year I recieved phone calls with death threats. People tried to run me over. I was ostracized by much of my team. All this on a "Christian" college campus of 500 people. All of this becuase I was trying to address racism, and I did not "keep things in the family".

"Keep things in the family" I came to understand meant two things. First, it meant keep things within the football famil, and then it meant to keep things within the "white family". I didn't say much about this incident to anyone on campus afterward. But somehow it was an open secret to many through other people's conversations.

What does this have to do with the Penn State issue? Everything.

From the first time I heard this "keep it in the family" language in the locker room, I heard it as the language of disfunction at best and abuse at worse. It suggested that knowlege should not be shared outside of the football family. And by "keeping secrets" you were protecting your "fooball family".

Keeping confidences can be healthy, especially on a football team. You do not want to leak personality conflicts on the team to the media, for example. Nor is it helpful to share the team's game plan publically. Keeping basic confidences and having loyalties, however, is different than keeping bad secrets.

Nearly every team has this "keep it in the family" approach. And while it sometimes produces loyalty toward a team and brings them together, this attitude can also be abusive and destructive.

I believe it is this "keep it the family" culture of keeping bad secrets to protect the institution that we are seeing at work at Penn State University. A graduate assistant sees what he believes to be sexual assault. He can hardly believe his eyes.

I imagine a number of questions going through his head. Am I seeing what I am thinking that I am seeing? Is that boy as young as he looks? Do I really want to investigate? Can I confront this respected football coach? What should I do? He was paralyzed with his concern, this much we know.

What does the young man do who sees what happened in that locker room? He calls his football coach dad. What does his football coach dad tell him to do. "Keep it in the family. Go talk to Joe Paterno. He will take care of it from there." So that is what the graduate assistant does.

What do the people in the program do? Isolate the man further from them? Yes, but they also strive to keep this incident "in the family" to protect the school and the program from the outside world. Why? Because nearly every football team functions on a bunker mentality. Nearly every team is coached from day one that it is these "80 men you go into battle" with against the world, and you better be loyal to them no matter what. And, when the team is led by a respected leader, you had better be even more loyal to him than to your own family. That is what you are coached, trained, and brainwashed to do in college football. Unless you think hard and resist this groupthink, like I tended to do as a college football player. I paid a dear price for it.

As a graduate assistant coach, the man should have confronted his former defensive coordinator. I understand people's anger. I also understand that what he did was what he was trained to do.

The way I see it, this make Joe Paterno all the more complicit in what happened at his school. He demanded absolute loyalty and a lot of power, but did not exercise his power to help the most vulnerable on his coaching staff or with the children in his community. And he has begun to reap what he has sown. Do I wonder whether Paterno was on top of everything at that point? Yes I do. But I also know that this abuse is not just about individual behavior, but a culture that college football coaches create which demand that "bad secrets" be kep "in the family".

The child abuse scandal is about more than a deviant running rogue in Pennsylvania. This Penn State scandal is a wakeup call about the dark-side of sports, and in this case specifically college football. I hope it is not just one school that is listening, but people in all kinds of sports throughout the country. There has to be a better way of engendering loyalty than demanding that everything is "kept in the family".