Strip Football

STRIP FOOTBALL

Jerry Harkins

On September 5, 1998, the University of Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles seemed to lose its season-opening football game to Penn State by the score of 34 - 6.  The Nittany Lions went on to post 8 more wins and 3 losses that year and then defeated Kentucky in the Outback Bowl. 

Not so fast my friend, the story was not over.  On July 23, 2012, the National Collegiate Athletic Association declared that Southern Miss had actually won that game and Kentucky had prevailed in the bowl game.  In fact, Penn State was declared the loser of every single game it had played in the 14 years following its loss to Mississippi.  (But see Subsequent Note 2.) In the technical parlance of the sports world, the NCAA “vacated” 112 victories.  This was meant to “strip” Joe Paterno of the title of “winningest coach in major college football history” for the crimes of one of his assistants.  Those crimes, centered around a long-running pedophilia scandal, were horrendous.  The punishment, however, requiring the re-writing and falsification of history, made a mockery not only of the sanity of the NCAA--nothing new there-- but also the probity and integrity of the academic enterprise.  If a university does nothing else, it must be undeviating in the pursuit of truth, as elusive and frustrating as that pursuit often is.  Penn State, however, meekly bowed to a travesty.  They might as well have closed their doors and thrown the keys away.  Instead, early the day before the NCAA announced its decree, the school blanketed the stadium plaza with blue construction tarps to hide what was going on, called in the police to guard the site from crazed fans and removed a 900-pound bronze statue of Mr. Paterno to a secure but undisclosed location.  He thereby became an official non-person six months to the day after he had died.  He was suddenly one with the legion of Russians obliterated by the censors of the old Soviet Union.  He had been disappeared, turned into a non-person by the Penn State Thought Police.

Organizations that govern sports tend to be staffed by low life ne’er-do-wells, has-beens who never rose above the second string but played just enough to get a letter and keep a tenuous grasp on their athletic scholarships.  Universities, on the other hand, tend to be run by academics who are bored by sports except for their salutary effect on alumni loyalty.  This is a lethal combination.  Not only does it confer power on the otherwise inept, but it provides them a platform on what they perceive to be the moral high ground.

In the interests of this higher morality, the immortal Jim Thorpe was “stripped” of his gold medals from the 1912 Olympic Games.  Seventy years later, the International Olympic Committee admitted its mistake.  It didn’t do much good for Thorpe who had died in poverty thirty years earlier.  The redoubtable Tonya Harding was “stripped” of her 1994 national figure skating championship but not her 1991 title.  It was never clear exactly what her crime was other than extremely bad taste in ex-husbands but one thing led to another and she did jail time including service on what passes for a chain gang in Oregon for offenses committed in Detroit. Lance Armstrong was “stripped” of all his cycling victories including his seven consecutive victories in the Tour de France. He was accused of doping and investigated many times at the behest of his opponents and the French racing authorities but never convicted or even charged in a court of law. Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived was declared a “permanently ineligible” non-person for gambling.  The penalty means that he cannot be elected to the Hall of Fame which, like the Methodist Church, does not approve of gambling.  (Rose also did six months in the federal pen and 1,000 hours of community service for failing to report income from, among other things, gambling at race tracks.)  Marion Jones was “stripped” of her five Olympic medals for committing perjury about performance enhancing drugs.  She did six months in some federal medical lock-up and a half-way house because the judge thought she was a chronic liar.  The athletic bureaucrats (Pooh-bahs) also tried to strip her teammates in the 100 X 4 and 400 X 4 relay races but the accessory malefactors prevailed on appeal.  So, as things stood, three fourths of the American team won those events and one fourth did not.

Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, said he was disappointed by the arbitrator’s decision.  Dr. Rogge is a physician and sixteen-time winner of the Belgian national yachting championship.   As Patrick Sandusky, a spokesperson for the United States Olympic Committee (and no relation to the Penn State child molester Jerry Sandusky) said, “Although we continue to believe that the U.S. medals in the 4 x 100 and 4 x 400-meter women’s relays were unfairly won due to Ms. Jones’s doping, we have always recognized that the athletes who made up the U.S. teams might have a legal basis on which to defend these medals.”  In his youth, Mr. Sandusky who had been a long snapper and reserve center for the Northern Illinois Huskies, turned out to be right.  The court ordered the I.O.C. to pay the athletes 10,000 Swiss francs, about $9,500, toward their legal expenses.  The women are currently  pursuing a case against the U.S.O.C. arguing that in failing to support them it breached a contractual duty. A decision is pending in that case.

“Stripping” has been imposed by The International Olympic Committee 55 times since 1968.  Somehow, though, the Committee never noticed the East German “Doping for Gold” program which involved thousands of athletes over a period of at least 24 years.  But no matter.  The idea is to get ink for the enforcers and you don’t do that by going after non-celebrities.

Let us be clear that we do not approve of child molestation or the use of performance enhancing drugs or, in Ms. Harding’s case, hanging around with unsavory boyfriends.  We regret that such offenses are widespread in our culture and understand that their prevalence does not excuse them.  We are, however, not overly worried that such offenses threaten the very fabric of civilization.  Moreover, we are dismayed by persecutors, inquisitors and prosecutors so desperate for public notice that they seize  upon any opportunity to make life miserable for celebrities.  We are also dismayed by the hypocrisy of the sports bureaucracy and the media.

In announcing its decision the NCAA said, “These events should serve as a call to every single school and athletics department to take an honest look at its campus environment and eradicate the 'sports are king' mindset that can so dramatically cloud the judgment of educators.”  From now on, educators will share the vision of the NCAA in which 7-foot tall basketball players win graduate fellowships to pursue their love of ancient Greek poetry and/or superstring theory.  As punishment for their past failures, the educators will be stripped of their Ph.D.’s.  In keeping with the theory that history is malleable, I have decided to strip Adolph Hitler of the Chancellorship of Germany he acquired on January 30, 1933.  While I’m at it, I hereby vacate Bobby Thompson’s home run, the so-called “shot heard round the world,” of October 3, 1951.  Henceforth, the record books will record that the Dodgers won that game and went on to beat the Yankees in the World Series.  As a result, they never left Brooklyn.

What bothers me about these scandals is that they bring out the worst in the moralistic classes including the press which treats them like the end of the world.  The New York Times is one of the worst offenders.  On October 10, 2012, its lead headline screamed, “Details of Doping Scheme Paint Armstrong as Leader.”  The story was about accusations made by United States Anti-Doping Agency.  That name suggests an official government agency but USADA is actually a private organization dedicated to the purity and integrity of the Olympic movement.   According to is web site, its “Vision/Mission” is, “To be the guardian of the values and life lessons learned through true sport.”  Which is to say, it can destroy careers and reputations without reference to anything so gooey as due process of law and can do so on the basis of testing programs that are of doubtful reliability.  Of course it could not do this without the active cooperation of the vast consortium of sponsors, regulators, promoters, governing bodies and media pundits that lives parasitically on sports.

Obviously sports contests require rules.  Obviously someone has to set standards.  Thus, in baseball there is a rule against pitchers throwing spitballs.  Why?  Well, to make a long story short, because a moistened ball moves erratically and is hard to hit.  Which, of course, is the basic intent of all pitching.  A spitball is not immoral or even unfair;  it’s just a rule we have agreed to in order to encourage more hits.  We draw a line between a spitball and a knuckle ball which is equally hard to hit but a lot more difficult to pitch.  The justification for anti-doping rules is slightly different.  The purpose is to assure a level playing field by eliminating artificial means of enhancing skill.  But make no mistake:  anti-doping rules require the drawing of arbitrary lines.  For example:

·       Millions of Americans take perfectly legal prescription medications to relieve anxiety and thereby give them a competitive edge in their business and other dealings.  Should we “strip” them of their MBA’s?

·       Many more millions of people drink alcoholic beverages to relax and perform more easily in social situations.  This was illegal in the United States for thirteen years and is still illegal in some places, notably (and laughably) in some parts of Texas.  But prohibition did not work and now our rules specify permissible levels of alcohol in the bloodstream.

·       Thousands of musicians smoke illegal marijuana to help them chill out and improve their performance skills.  Should we fill the jails with jazz players?

·       One of the crimes Mr. Armstrong is accused of is drawing his own blood, chilling it and returning it to his body.  This apparently increases its oxygen content which leads to improved performance.  Why is that different from eating a candy bar in the middle of a marathon?  Why does anyone think of Mr. Armstrong’s blood as an illegal substance?  Or, for that matter, oxygen?

The fact is Mr. Armstrong has never failed a drug test.  But the Doping Agency and The Times report that he once withdrew from a competition.  He said it was because of an injury.  They said he was afraid of failing their tests.  How they know that?

These and thousands of other questions are complex and decent people can differ on all of them.  Some people, however, find them so difficult that they are happy to have other people make the decisions for them.  Those other people—famously called the “deciders” by George W. Bush—include the Pope, Pat Robertson and the editors of The New York Times.  The Times churns out some fifteen hundred editorial opinions a year, providing moral guidance to anyone or any institution they think needs their help.  The scope is breathtaking.  The most common action verb is must.  The President must to this, the banking industry must do that, the trustees of Yale University must do the other thing.  Not only does The Times know better than you do, it is better morally and in every other way.

I do not know what Lance Armstrong did or did not do and neither do you.  Nor do I know what Marion Jones did or did not do.  I think Ms. Jones must have lied at one point because her stories seemed to contradict each other.  But if we’re going to put people in jail for lying, there’ll be nobody left on the outside.  I do know people do foolish things.  But I also know people like Mr. Armstrong and Ms. Jones do a great deal of great work for society—work that needs to be done but no one else seems interested in.  On net, I’d rather have a beer with either one of them than with an editor of The Times or a bureaucrat of some private sports-policing authority.  I admire Jim Thorpe a lot more than the modern day witch hunters.  Mr. Thorpe’s crime by the way was playing baseball for money.  Horrors!  He thereby violated the purity standards of the wealthy Olympic Pooh-bahs who never had to work a day in their lives.

In many cases, the actual crimes people go to jail for are not doping itself or knee-whacking but the allegation that they lied about their wicked behavior.  They lied to a federal agent, in Barry Bonds’ case to FBI agents.  Well, he didn’t really lie.  He gave an “evasive” answer.  They tried Roger Clemens for a similar offense of lying to Congress which, given the intelligence of Congresspersons, must be at least as heinous as stealing candy from a child.  They couldn’t convict him but the baseball Pooh-bahs will keep him and Barry Bonds out of the Hall of Fame until hell freezes over.  Add them to the Pete Rose scandal.  Three of the best baseball players in the history of the game.  At least we know Pete really did bet on games.  Gambling:  a clear sign that the Antichrist is at hand.

But lying.  That’s the really infamous crime.  A sin that cries to heaven for vengeance.  Lie under oath and you clearly place yourself with the guys on Arlo Guthrie’s Group W bench.  They had to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about his sex life, for God’s sake.  Anyone who fails to tell the whole truth about his or her sex life is spitting in the face of the public’s right to know and the right of the press to expose every scandal of the day.  They should be branded with a big L on their foreheads so mothers can keep them away from their children.

Bill Clinton went on national television and proclaimed, “I did not have sex with that woman.”  Not a single human being in the whole world believed him for a nanosecond.  He knew that at the time.  He never intended to deceive anyone.  He was only saying what any other male would have said, indeed what any male would be expected to say.  It wasn’t even a real lie, just a misleading little fib.  As anyone educated by the nuns will tell you, there is a clear line between sex and other scandalous activities.  The key is penetration however slight.  But, you say, he lied under oath and that, by God, is perjury!  Maybe, but if so the law has not kept up with the latest discoveries of the medieval philosophers.  A “lie” is something you say that is known by you to be untrue.  But you can only lie to someone who has a moral right to the truth.  And for a lie to be perjurious, it must also be material to the matter at hand.  No one, including the court in the Paula Jones matter, had any right to the truth in the Clinton case.  Only the President’s wife had a legitimate claim.  Furthermore, his behavior had absolutely nothing to do with the Jones case except in the perfervid imaginations of red meat Republicans.

The sins discussed in this essay exist along a spectrum of heinousness and the worse they are the more careful we should be in denouncing the alleged perpetrators.  We need also be very careful before equating a lie with a crime.  If I’m forced to admit doping, for example, to an FBI agent, I am very, very close to being compelled to be a witness against myself in a criminal matter.  I know all about the Fifth Amendment and the first thing to know is that anyone who expects the world to suspend its disbelief has got to be one of God's innocents.

H. L. Mencken said, “The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.”  Americans still think we should all think like Puritans and act as they imagine the Puritans might have acted.  The witch trials of Salem are not quite finished business.

Subsequent Note

Shortly after this essay was posted, Lance Armstrong confessed to Oprah Winfrey that, yes, he had used performance enhancing drugs, essentially saying everybody did it.  It's a safe bet that he's wrong about everybody but, if it's true, then we still have the right to ask what all the fuss is about.  The playing field would have been even and the only ones hurt would have been the athletes.  Of course, it's almost certainly not true which means that he cheated and is still lying about it.  A sad story in the life of a man who has otherwise done a great deal more good in this poor world than those who have been hounding him for years.

Subsequent Note 2


On January 16, 2015, the NCAA settled a suit brought by a Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader,  Jake Corman, and the State Treasurer, Rob McCord accusing it of stupidity (my word not theirs).  Senator Corman said, "Clearly the NCAA looked to make their own name on the backs of Penn State University instead of doing their own internal investigation or any sort of due process to find out what happened."  The 112 vacated games were "restored" making Mr.Paterno once again college football's "winningest coach."  The fate of the Paterno statue is not yet clear but it will probably be restored if the University can remember where it put it.

WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN? 

 Jerry Harkins

“DO YOU KNOW ME?” Thus asked William E. Miller in a famous American Express commercial only ten years after he ran for Vice President of the United States on the ticket headed by Barry Goldwater. No one did remember him. It was not surprising. Republicans specialize in nominating obscure right wing politicians. Think of Spiro Agnew or J. Danforth Quale. And, unlike Miller, they were winners.

The election of 2012 will long be remembered for the losers. The Republican primaries came across as a casting call for “America’s Got Clowns!” The Litany of Losers included Michelle Bachman, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Gary Johnson, Thaddeus McCotter, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Perry, Buddy Roemer, Rick Santorum and Donald Trump. The big loser, of course, was the poor bastard that came out on top of this pile of monkeys, Mitt Romney. Had he thought to ask “What’s second prize?” he might have opted for two weeks in Philadelphia. Actually, second prize went to the doctrinaire reactionary, Paul Ryan. Ryan may be Sarah Palin with lipstick but at least he has a measureable IQ. He is a small government conservative who has never worked in the private sector except for some part time jobs when he was in school. He used to be a disciple of Ayn Rand but now claims he gets his political philosophy from Thomas Aquinas who was an early proponent of the divine right of kings.

To be as fair as possible, a few of these seekers were credible representatives of quirky but authentic political philosophies. Ron Paul is a serious libertarian, Jon Huntsman is a serious if eclectic conservative and a successful former governor of Utah, and Gary Johnson is Ron Paul Lite. Tim Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota, is another interesting case, moderately conservative, moderately libertarian and a deeply committed evangelical Christian. Of course being an interesting person isn’t enough to impart credibility as a presidential candidate. After all, Paris Hilton is an interesting person. The rest of the Republican pack was comprised of angry ignoramuses with a collective IQ hovering around room temperature. That doesn’t count The Donald, perhaps the scariest presidential hopeful in the history of the Republic. His big issues were President Obama’s birth certificate and the Air Force’s cover-up of the alien landing at Roswell. Romney was the only one of these candidates that could claim to be electable and even he had a lot of baggage. The Republicans flirted with each of his opponents in their turn trying to avoid the obvious but, finally and reluctantly, they settled on him even though many of them considered him far too liberal and some were convinced that he was a member of a religious “cult.”

Like his father before him, Romney is a serious person. He is often inarticulate but nowhere near as goofy as George W. Bush. As President Obama said, he is a generous citizen and an outstanding family man. In fact, had he not been saddled with the inane, demagogic Republican platform, he might have won. As it was, things were close. Still, there was a distinct progressive tone in the results especially in various referenda on issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Moreover, the conservatives took a worse beating than the raw numbers suggest. Retrograde ideas are almost always on the wrong side of history.

One of the more interesting losers was Bibi Netanyahu who campaigned aggressively for Romney and who lost no opportunity to speak of the President in insulting and derogatory terms. He keeps insisting that Israel is the only friend we have in the Middle East. To which I reply America is the only friend Israel has in the world. But most Israelis think Americans are all fat, ugly and stupid and can be easily duped. Bibi would make an interesting case study for one of the Freudian journals. His conservatism seems to derive from a compulsive pursuit of his father’s approval. The father was the late distinguished scholar Benzion Netanyahu who often expressed a preference for his older son Jonathan, the hero/martyr of Entebbe. Come to think of it, something similar could be said about Romney.

Bibi leads a nation that has long been suffering from a Wonderland syndrome in its attempts to govern itself. All decisions are subject to the veto of a small minority—about 11½% of the citizenry—called the ultra orthodox or Haredim. The great majority of these people will not serve in the Israeli Army and do not even accept the legitimacy of the Israeli state but insist on being paid by that same state all their lives to study Torah. They constitute the largest segment (about 40%) of residents of both the “legal” and “illegal” West Bank settlements. They account for far more than their fair share of the Israeli budget mostly because of welfare payments and their need for protection. For a variety of complex reasons, they enjoy strong support in Israel and by the leadership of American Jews. These same leaders spent lavishly to defeat Obama, supporting Santorum and Gingrich long after they crash landed. The money was wasted: ultimately 70% of American Jewish voters went for Obama.

But the biggest and dumbest losers of all were the members of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops especially its leader Cardinal Timmy Dolan of New York. They bet the farm on Romney and waged total, unrelenting warfare on Obama, denouncing him incessantly from the pulpit. Their message was clear: you can’t be a Catholic and vote for a candidate who questions our infallibility on matters of sexual morality and who threatens our religious freedom. If you’re not a Catholic in good standing with us, you can’t receive the sacraments and can’t go to heaven. Bishop after bishop took to the hustings to excoriate the President as a moral degenerate out to promote abortion, stem cell research and, horror of horrors, contraception. The National Catholic Reporter had it exactly right the day after the election:

The self-indulgent tantrums of some bishops—comparing the president to Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, warning Catholics that their souls are in danger should they mark their ballots for certain candidates, grossly overstating the threat to religious liberty and playing loose with such terms as “intrinsic evil” and “prudential judgment”—became public embarrassments. 

These men—these elderly celibates in their medieval finery—failed utterly in their attempt to elect Romney. In pressing their extremist rhetoric, they relinquished whatever credibility and integrity they might have had as well as any claim they might have had to a place at the decision-making table. The Catholic vote turned out to be pretty much a mirror of the national vote. The bishops aligned themselves with the born again Protestants for whom no indictment is too scurrilous, too vituperative, too fraudulent to broach. These are the people who truly believe that God hates fags and loves rapists. You expect such bombast from the likes of Donald Trump, Fred Phelps or Pat Robertson but not necessarily from those professing a respect for the ten commandments. Perhaps it is only sad to hear Billy Graham endorse Mr. Romney and the red meat Republican platform. But it is unforgivable for his son, Franklin, to say he was not sure that Mr. Obama was a true Christian and that he could not definitively say that the President was not a Muslim. Wink, wink!

One more thought.  Whatever else you think of him, President Obama is a pretty smart guy. (Do you think Michele would have married a dummy?) So it is eminently possible that he and his team picked their fights early in the campaign. On the issue of providing contraceptives as part of the health care reform, he could have avoided trouble by offering Timmy Dolan a more appealing compromise. He has often said government is the art of compromise, a position that has cost him the enthusiasm of the leftie ideologues. So he could have shut Timmy’s war down. But he didn’t. I can easily imagine a meeting at which he said, “Let’s see if we can sucker the Catholic hierarchy into a hissy fit about contraception.” He had nothing to lose as conservative Catholics weren’t going to vote for him anyway. By exposing the extremism of the bishops, he made it easier for the laity to laugh at them and vote for him. If so, it was like shooting sitting ducks. The bishops screamed, ranted, foamed at the mouth and pronounced their collective anathema while the electorate was treated to a Loony Tunes episode of Elmer Fudd’s rage. Given their edifying antics, the President is now free to proceed with his agenda without regard to the delicate sensibilities of the bishops.

There is a cancer eating at the heart of all the Abrahamic religions, a yearning for ancient verities that is often prosecuted with violence. The Catholic hierarchy, the Haredim, the Taliban and the Christian fundamentalists are more alike than different. Arrogant, intolerant, hypocritical, cynical, sanctimonious. They will oppose anyone or anything that they imagine competes with them for absolute power over the lives of the unannointed. In a wealthy and religious country like America, there is more a stake and their pursuit has become obsessive to the point of self-destruction.

It is revealing that the religionists find themselves in league with the Masters of the Universe, the Wall Street malefactors of great wealth who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Obama with attack ads that would make Vlad the Impaler blush. They don’t like his attitude toward regulation. They believe they should be free to perpetrate any damn thing they want. They pine for the good old days when they could turn subprime mortgages (pigs’ ears) into investment grade securities (silk purses), peddle the result to chumps (clients), bring the global financial system to its knees and make obscene fortunes for themselves in the process. This particular group may have been the only non-Mormon cohort of voters who were actually enthusiastic for Romney. After all, he was one of their own. The happy days of laissez faire seemed just around the corner.

As the votes were being counted on election night, a group of hedge fund managers and private equity investors were celebrating Romney’s victory at Del Frisco’s steakhouse in Boston. It was a private affair, a sort of pre-party for the election post-party. Fully 107 men (of course) had flown into Boston in private jets to mark the occasion. To everyone else watching the returns, it was obvious that they had nothing to celebrate but, like their friend Karl Rove, they were in denial. They cheered when Mr. Rove went into melt down on Fox Television. Like the bishops, they had persuaded themselves that victory was merely a matter of manipulating the unwashed masses. As teenagers, both groups seem to have been mesmerized by George Orwell’s, 1984, and its ideology of the Big Lie. War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. They really did not believe the economic meltdown was caused by Obama’s policies just as the bishops really did not believe that Obamacare would render Catholicism illegal. The prelates were worried about losing the remnants of their power and were driven to squander whatever moral influence they still had. The Wall Streeters were worried about staying out of jail, a prospect that has seemed more imminent ever since Bernie Madoff drew a sentence of 150 years and a $17 billion fine. With so much at stake, it’s really not immoral to lie or, as Frank Rich wrote in New York, to enlist in “the post-fact alternative universe.” As Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative himself, once said, “…extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And...moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

In recent days there has been much soul searching among those who lost so much on November 6. Although some leaders have suggested it might be time for the Republicans to come to grips with the issues of concern to women and Latinos, the predominant reaction has been finger pointing. There are also claims that the Democrats “suppressed” voter turnout in Ohio which would be laughable if it were not another example of the Big Lie at work. Then there are those who are bravely asserting that nothing has changed. Senators McCain and Graham announced that any nomination of Susan Rice to be Secretary of State would be dead on arrival in the Senate. Rejecting a nomination before it is made is business as usual. Mr. Romney himself is complaining about “gifts” the administration “gave” to various constituencies, including women and young voters. He counts health care reform complete with free condoms as such a gift. It is a sobering thought that, in spite of such patent nonsense, 59,189,598 Americans voted for him. It may be, as Sophie Tucker had it, “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong,” but fifty-nine million Americans made a terrible mistake on November 6. Add to that the ninety-three million eligible voters who didn’t bother to vote and you could get pretty depressed. Given the alternative, however, we can take comfort or, at least, refuge in Shakespeare’s insistence that all’s well that ends well.

The election of 2012 did not end well for the Republican party and its supporters. Obviously, it will require several more doses of shock therapy before there is any hope of intelligent debate among the losers. It is hard to know where GOP should begin which, I freely admit, makes me happy at least for the moment.