Only a game

Early in September, a Russian hockey team was killed in the crash of a jetliner. The reaction from all over the sports world was the same: personal relations, friends, family, are the really important things in life; this is only a game. The same response happens every time an athlete suffers a career-ending or life threatening injury.

As I write this, on a Saturday morning in mid-November, a football game is set to be played later in the day in State College, Pennsylvania. But the hoopla surrounding the game has been overshadowed this week by the revelation that a former assistant coach abused his trust for a number of years in sexual activities with boys attending a camp. He has been forever disgraced, a long-standing and revered coach has been fired for failing to report what he knew, the university president has been fired in the scandal, and the town has been in turmoil all week.

Enough words have been poured out in this affair already. I need not add mine. I used to have a fantasy, of living out my days in a college town, looking forward to those five or six Saturday afternoons in the fall when I could cheer on the local football team. I remember my first university apartment, across the street from the field where the marching band practiced. Most people could see it only on Saturday, but I saw it and heard it every other day of the week. It is one of my most pleasant memories of that lonely time.

The devotion to sports teams is a phenomenon I have tried to understand for most of my life. I lost my voice more than once cheering on my local heroes when I was young, but I became more subdued after I read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer (especially statements like "Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.") Now I wonder about the thousands of people who rioted when Joe Paterno was fired on Thursday: what have they read? Where is their faith? Where are their values? Who are the real losers in this drama?

I do feel sorry for the players who have spent three or four years of energy trying to make Penn State a football powerhouse and who thought that today would be their last chance for glory in front of a friendly crowd, but what am I to think of the abused children, now ten years older and working their way through a painful path away from their experience at the Penn State football camp?

It's an emotional morass. I imagine that very few of the more than 100,000 people expected to attend today's game, and even fewer of the people who see today only as Senior Day at Happy Valley, are pure ostrich-like deniers of reality. But deep moral issues are complex.

Penn State's colors may seem black and white at first glance, but they are not.