From CNN: “Editor’s note: Roxanne Jones is a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and a former vice president at ESPN. She is a national lecturer on sports, entertainment and women’s topics and a recipient of the 2010 Woman of the Year award from Women in Sports and Events. She is the author of “Say It Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete” (Random House) and is CEO of Push Media Strategies and is working on her second book.
“My prized Penn State sweatshirt sits stuffed in the back of my closet.
“The oversized ‘We Are Penn State’ license plate that once perched above the door of my ESPN office, has been put away, along with photos of me as a proud, smiling cheerleader for the Nittany Lions.
“And weeks ago when my son received his very first college acceptance letter from my alma mater, Penn State — a moment I thought would be one of the pinnacles in my life — we both tossed the letter aside and prayed that he’d get accepted into a “better school.” (Our prayers were answered.)
“I have Jerry Sandusky to thank for this change of heart.
“Seeing this unimaginable story unfold for months has altered my perspective on sports forever. I’ve worked as a sports journalist for more than 15 years, but through all the steroid stories, the accounts of domestic abuse, the gambling and corruption cases, I never lost my joy for sports — football coming first in my world order.
“Then Jerry Sandusky happened and I felt sick.
“Though most sports journalists will never admit this, the main goal in sports reporting is to celebrate and illuminate the games. Constantly uncovering ugly issues in sports does not make a sports reporter a superstar at the office. Sports media are just too close to the games financially and socially to fully examine the depths of sports culture.”
The full article is here.
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No comments? Not one?
I’ll bite. This is indicative of a larger disorder in our country. I would go so far as to say that homophobia and the hyper-sports culture are inextricably linked.
My first career was in legit theatre and I came to know the west coast gay community in a very personal way. This was in the early 1980s.
Over the years, I have observed time after time when the most virulent anti-gay partisans were either caught soliciting gay sex in a known location, or finally came out to their peers.
There should be nothing wrong with the star QB at NU being gay. Maybe that will happen someday in the 21st century. Odds are that it will.
There is no doubt that the ‘cult of Penn State’ played into these events, the speed with which they were discovered and disciplined, and the seriousness with which they were taken. If you have not lived in or regularly visited central Pennsylvania you almost cannot understand the strength of this cult. Everything Penn State was revered, Joe Paterno was a God, and every challenge to Penn State was taken personally by many. With that said, this is really not a sports story.
The interesting thing to me is that this is not very different than the protection of established institutions that have plagued a broader social understanding of this issue all along. We did not speak of child sexual abuse and spousal abuse until the 1970′s because of the strength of the family as an institution; did not speak of it until the 1980′s because of the strength of the church as an institution; did not speak of it in the military until the 2000′s because of the reverence with which we hold our military, and in the case of Penn State, did not speak of it in a timely manner because of the strength of the university and its sports program as an institution.
This really serves to illustrate to me that the larger, more powerful, more embedded in a community, and more influential an institution becomes, the more transparency, accountability, and third party oversight needs to be created.