Penn State scandal is much bigger than Joe Paterno, school

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The Penn State child sex-abuse scandal cuts far deeper than the school, football or coach Joe Paterno. | AP

Updated: December 10, 2011 9:58AM

Jerry Sandusky wasn’t always a white-haired senior citizen. The former Penn State defensive coordinator and heir apparent to Joe Paterno — if the crusty, stubborn Paterno would ever retire — was a striking, charismatic, much-honored man of charity.

He was a three-year starter at defensive end for the Nittany Lions, a seeming straight arrow who graduated No. 1 in his class in 1966. He became a dedicated coach who engineered the ferocious blue-and-white defense that led the school to national championships in 1982 and 1986.

Sandusky, now 67, was accused Saturday of molesting eight boys and charged with 40 criminal counts of sexual abuse.

In 1977, he started a charity for wayward boys called the Second Mile, after a Bible verse, of course: Matthew 5:41. This allegedly would serve as the clearing house for the deviant and unbearably cruel sexual urges that controlled the smiling man.

The Second Mile is where all of Sandusky’s alleged victims came from. Law-enforcement officials say it was a trout pond for the fisherman.

They say Sandusky waited until he knew the lost boys were under his power and trusted him, usually a year or so. Then he swooped in for the kill.

If you have ever read the stories of those who have been sexually abused by trusted elders, tried yourself to comprehend the self-loathing, depression, fear, hatred and despair those victims live with daily, often despite many years of counseling, you will understand the soul-death that such crimes cause.

The innate response from parents of small children, parents simply trying to fathom such horror, is one of primal vengeance.

“If someone molested my child, he would need the police to protect him from me,” blogged Sports Illustrated.com’s Andy Staples on Tuesday. “If I found him first, his death would be neither quick nor clean.”

You don’t usually read such things in sports columns.

But this Penn State nightmare is special.

There are observers and analysts wondering what this means to Penn State’s football recruiting and the future of 46-years-at-the-helm Paterno.

Ha! Like that matters.

This is so much bigger than a football program and an old man’s legacy that it is laughable.

This simply is the largest, most disgusting scandal in the history of college sports. This is a scandal that should change forever the way we look at men being in charge of boys.

From the Boy Scouts to the Catholic Church to charities and coaching situations of every type, this is the moment when America must realize pedophiles are cunning, unchangeable and normal.

When your athletic director and senior vice president for business and finance — the executive overseeing the giant university’s campus police — have been charged with perjury and the renowned assistant coach is looking at life in prison, you know this is special.

And Joe Paterno himself, the man with the most D-I college wins ever, let’s hope he somehow gets the blame he deserves here for enabling a man to destroy lives right in front of him.

“I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it,” Pennsylvania state police commissioner Frank Noonan said of the way nobody at Penn State really cared about the alleged rapes and degradations, failing to report much and seeming to protect the football reputation over all else.

Is this finally enough to get us to stop the cult of coach worshipping?

I don’t think Sandusky would do well in prison. Cons don’t like “short eyes,” their term for pedophiles. Remember that former Catholic priest and convicted child molester John Geoghan was strangled by a fellow inmate while in a Massachusetts prison in 2003 as a kind of trophy kill.

Yes, this is beyond ugly.

“We were fooled,” JoePa said of Sandusky’s alleged crimes.

No, you old Coke-bottle-lensed charlatan — you were fooled.

And only because you wanted to be. Because you didn’t care.

The shame. The filth.