The Overhand Right

The experts gave Junior Dos Santos only a puncher's chance. So he took it, with a powerful overhand right, thrown with his whole body behind it, that landed behind Cain Velasquez's ear and knocked him out. And now Dos Santos is the heavyweight champion of the world. (As I predicted.)

It's interesting that it was the overhand right that won the fight. According to Loren Christensen and Mark Mireles, martial artists, police officers, and authors of Total Defense, by far the most common attack in real life is the overhand right. When two guys on the street fight, the first punch thrown is overwhelmingly likely to be an overhand right.

And here you've got mixed martial arts, the culmination of thousands of years of combat sports, where we've finally learned what works in real fightimg, the distilled, effective core of wrestling, boxing, muay thai, karate, kickboxing, judo, and jiu-jitsu, and what worked on Saturday night, between the two biggest, baddest, best-trained men on the planet was the same thing that works for random guys on the street. The overhand right.

The Fall of Joe Paterno

They fired JoePa last night.

Joe Paterno. Dismissed. Terminated. Fired. Joe Paterno!

And the college kids at Penn State are rioting over the perceived injustice of getting rid of an old man they loved and were proud of.

And the national media is crowing about how, finally, the Trustees did the right thing in choosing Penn State the university over Penn State the football team, and doesn't this prove that Paterno was nothing special to begin with, a fraud, and isn't this what big-time college football is all about, power and money and its misuse, and didn't we tell you all along?

But they're all wrong.

The truth is that Joe Paterno is a good man who failed to do the right thing here, with horrible consequences, and so he had to be punished, and he was, but the story's not over yet.

Let's review the facts. In March 2002, then-graduate-assistant Mike McQueary, age 28 and only a few years removed from his own days as a student-athlete at Penn State, goes back to the football complex at 9:30 pm to get some recruiting tape to work on at home. He hears sex noises coming from the showers, goes over to investigate and finds Jerry Sandusky, legendary former Penn State defensive coordinator and one-time head coach in waiting, now retired, anally raping a ten year old boy. Repeat, just to let the full horror of that sink in – anally raping a ten year old boy in the showers: i.e. fucking a little kid up the ass. Jesus Christ. McQueary, appropriately horrified, but not knowing what to do, runs out, goes home and calls his dad. [Pause: he should have stopped the rape right then, of course. But that was a horrible situation he walked into, totally unprepared I'm sure, so I need to think about his actions a little more before I express more of an opinion. And this post is about Paterno. I'm going to write more about McQueary in my next post.] His dad, apparently, tells McQueary to tell Paterno. McQueary does just that. Paterno then tells his boss, former Athletic Director Tim Curley . Curley then takes immediate action: he bars Sandusky from bringing any more children onto the Penn State campus.

The implication: Goddamit, Jerry, if you're going to rape children, that's fine, but do it on your own time and on your own property, we don't want to have to see it, we don't want to be involved, and we certainly don't want Penn State's good name to be besmirched!

And that's just what Sandusky does. He keeps raping kids, just off-campus. Additional victims have come forward; some were raped by Sandusky after the Penn State locker room shower attack. (And these are just the ones we know about. Criminals, especially powerful ones, get away with a lot of crimes that are undetected. They get caught for the tip of the iceberg, but there's much more that never comes to light.) These were all vulnerable little kids that Sandusky got access to via The Second Mile, the non-profit he set up ostensibly to help at-risk youth from financially poor, absent-father homes. Under the guise of helping these children, Sandusky would take them under his wing, inviting one at a time to tailgates, family dinners, sleepovers, bowl games … and at some point in their escalating entanglement with the man, he would start raping them. It's disgusting and horrible, not least for the sick logic of it all, and my heart goes out to the children first but also to their parents, who must feel horribly guilty for failing to protect their loved ones.

Obviously, when this all came out, Sandusky was arrested and charged with many, many crimes, among them involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and indecent assault, and Curley was fired by Penn State and arrested and charged with perjury and failure to report suspected child abuse by the state of Pennsylvania. Both as they should have been. (And as they would have been, I believe, no matter the sex of the victims. Erin Gloria Ryan over at Jezebel, one of my favorite writers, wrote about how maybe there wouldn't have been any justice if the victims had been girls. I disagree. Protecting children trumps gender discrimination. If this had all come out the way it did, but the victims were little girls, heads would have rolled just as they did here.)

But what about Paterno? He arguably didn't do anything illegal, because he reported the incident to his boss. But he should have done more.

Put yourself in his shoes. You're 76 years old. You've been the head coach of an enormously successfully college football team for 36 years. You've won 2 national championships. Earned many millions of dollars. You get paid $1 million per year. And a kid who you used to coach, who just started working for you, comes to you and tells you he saw a guy raping a 10 year old up the ass in what is, essentially, your office. What do you do?

Absolutely you tell your own boss, as Paterno did. But then, when nothing much happens and you still see the accused around your office, don't you do more? When your office is part of a school? When your job is to teach children, older children than the kid who got raped, but children still? When you're a parent yourself, and a grandparent? Don't you call the police? You have to.

Let's give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe McQueary didn't tell you in explicit detail what he saw, because, really, nobody wants to talk about anal rape with his grandfather. And maybe McQueary's lying, for all you know. Maybe Jerry didn't do anything. Maybe McQueary hates him and is trying to set him up. You don't know.

But that's the point. You don't know. So you call in the police to investigate, so that the truth can come out. In doing so, you protect whoever the real victim is. If the allegations are false, you protect Sandusky from false accusations. But if the allegations are true, you get justice for that kid and you protect future kids from having the same horrible thing happen to them.

Or maybe not. Maybe you say hey, I told my boss and if he doesn't do anything, I better not do anything, because I don't want to cross him, I might get in trouble.

But no, I don't think so. You're Joe freaking Paterno. You're not going to get in trouble for telling police that one of your subordinates alleged to you that an old man was anally raping a little kid in your office. Even if what you were told turns out to be false, you're never going to get in trouble for telling the truth as you understood it. You're Joe Paterno and this is Penn State!

But Paterno didn't do that. I wonder why? I don't know. Maybe Joe Posnanski, honestly the best sportswriter in America, who has been in State College for the last few months writing a book about Paterno, can figure it out and tell us someday. I don't know. But I do know that because Paterno didn't call the cops, more kids got raped who would probably have been safe otherwise. And that's a big deal, a huge deal, a colossal failure on Paterno's part, and for that failure Joe had to go.

And I love Paterno. Love him in a hero-worshipping, grandfather-figure kind of way. Because I was a kid in the 80s, during Paterno's golden years, a kid growing up without a dad himself, Italian-American like Paterno, wearing glasses like him, from the Mid-Atlantic like him, a football-loving, football-playing kid, who ended up becoming an Ivy League grad like Paterno, because I was proud of him for being a member of my tribe who made good – for all those reasons I am conflicted about punishing him and understand why those kids at Penn State rallied in his support. He's their grandfather too, and you support your grandfather. But sometimes your grandfather makes a mistake, and when he does, he has to pay the price like anyone else. No double standards.

But that's not the end of the story. How will Paterno live out the rest of his life? Will he accept his share of responsibility? Will he do some good yet, before the end? Maybe for those kids who he failed to protect? He's got lots of money and prestige and power left, even now. People still love and respect Joe Paterno. And he's used his power for good in the past – donating over $3.5 million to the university, for example. I hope he finds those kids he failed or other in similar situations, and does right by them.

Because their stories aren't ended yet either, and I'm sure they could use the help.