Fail II: Posnanski, Paterno and Power
By My own review of Paterno is up.
A couple of additional points. As I’m sure Paul also found, Posnanski’s rhetorical strategy makes it difficult to convey the various ways in which Posnanski whitewashes Paterno in a limited space. Although his friend Bill James draws precisely the inferences I think Posnanski wants the reader to draw, Posnanski is too cagey to make the worst howlers explicit. Rather, there’s in irritating “some people say” tic where he sets up alternatives without trying to actually resolve them. Even in the non-disgraceful first two thirds of the book, we can see this. Paterno says that his first undefeated teams should have been national champions. Others (including a majority of voters) thought they were knocking over a lot of tomato cans. Who’s right? Posnanski makes no effort to answer the question. And then, when things get sinister, we get “[p]eople were writing and saying that it was ridiculous to call Tim Curley Paterno’s boss.” Well, were these unnamed “people” wrong? Posnanski subtly implies that they were, but does not provide evidence to this effect. And the question actually answers itself, since if there were any examples of Curley imposing his will on Paterno (as opposed to dealing with issues Paterno didn’t care about) you can be certain that we would have heard about it.
To elaborate on a point Paul also makes, as we get closer to the Sandusky scandal the attempts to downplay Paterno’s power on campus increase. In the first part of the book, Posnanski ably documents his remarkable authority, not only in terms of the football program but the campus as a whole. Paterno offered up opinions about which professors and departments were adequate and which weren’t, that were taken seriously. He was a prodigious fundraiser, not only using his own money to construct buildings but using high-pressure sales tactics to separate people from more money than they wanted to give — as Posnanski portrays him, he would be one of the world’s greatest telemarketers or Kirby salesmen.
But when we’re not talking only about football, the picture changes. Even as he wins power struggles with administration officials (up to and including, as Paul says, not letting Spanier fire him), Posnanski notes that he couldn’t single-handedly stop a Big 10 Network or prevent a new baseball stadium solely with some cranky complaints about other Big 10 baseball programs, so how powerful was he really? Alas, the answer remains “powerful enough to call the police and powerful enough not to be intimidated by Tim Curley and Gary Schultz.”
Another example is Posnanski’s treatment of the fact that the virulently homophobic women’s basketball coach Rene Portland — who Paterno hired, in a brief tenure as de jure Athletic Director Posnanski finds praiseworthy because his view on gender became somewhat less reactionary — kept her job after her discriminatory treatment of players became clear. Now, to be clear, I’m inclined to agree that Paterno bears only peripheral responsibility for this and I’m willing to hang Portland primarily on the university president and athletic director at the time her appalling actions came to light. But Paterno’s explanation and how Posnanski treats it is instructive:
…there were those, especially at the end of his life, who said that he should have used his power to stop any discrimination happening on the women’s basketball team.
“What power are those people talking about?” Paterno asked. “I didn’t stick my nose in other people’s programs.”
See the move here? “Wouldn’t” is conflated with “couldn’t.” But to state the obvious, the disinclination to use power in a particular context doesn’t mean that the power isn’t there. And even if we interpret every ambiguity in the Freeh Report in Paterno’s favor, Paterno was similarly indifferent about using his very real power (which in this case required nothing more than the power to call the police if he couldn’t get his nominal superiors to act appropriately) to stop a child rapist. That Posnanski sees the Portland story as evidence that Paterno didn’t have the power to stop Sandusky is a good example of why his book became such a disastrous whitewash.
…Allen Barra’s superb review makes an excellent point about Posnanski’s handling of Paterno’s clashes with Vicky Triponey, who had the temerity to believe that Penn State football players should be held to the same rules as other students. I’ll add that Posnanski returns again to the story to imply that Triponey was dishonorably kicking Paterno while he was down: “[after the Sandusky scandal broke]…people from Paterno’s past, including Vicky Triponey, emerged to air their grievances. The press gave them a big stage.” Well, 1)why shouldn’t they, and 2)maybe we should spend some time considering how Paterno winning a power struggle with Triponey fits into your narrative of an isolated, disengaged leader who couldn’t really be expected to inform police about a child molester in 2001? Remember, Triponey was hired in 2003.