On the Yankees' debacle and Penn State getting rid of "Sweet Caroline"

I was in a foul mood after last night's debacle -- the Yankees should have won that game. Unfortunately -- or perhaps fortunately! -- I was having problems with my television's cable box and remote, so I went from seeing the Yankees ahead by three runs, to seeing that the Toronto Blue Jays went ahead for good in the 11th (which means I missed both Rafael Soriano giving up the go-ahead homer, and Derek Jeter tying the game!)

Now the Yankees have just a 3.5 game lead over the Baltimore Orioles, and a 4 game lead over the Tampa Bay Rays. The standings of the last week or so are a little too close for comfort for me. Oh, and Mark Teixeria is out for the next week or so due to a strained calf. Oh joy.

Then I saw something this morning that got me even more ticked off. I was watching Pat Kiernan's "In the Papers" report on NY1 this morning, and I saw that the New York Daily News had half of its front page devoted to eviscerating Penn State for getting rid of playing "Sweet Caroline" during football games. The song's lyrics talk about "touching me, touching you," although the school denied that this had anything to do with them ditching the song in the wake of Jerry Sandusky molestation scandal.

In an article entitled "Banning Neil Diamond's 'Sweet Caroline' proves that Penn State is out of tune with reality and needs to rethink priorities," (that's a mouthful!) sports columnist Dick Weiss complains about the "culture police," saying: "This is a new era of political correctness at Penn State, which apparently doesn’t want to embarrass the school any further. But by banning the song, it has done just that." He also claims that after the Sandusky pedophila scandal, getting rid of this song is "putting a Band-Aid on a patient after open heart surgery." (Full disclosure -- Squawker Jon and I used to work at the News, but we never knew Dick Weiss.)

Weiss is dead wrong here, and I applaud Penn State for getting rid of this song. He's setting up a straw man here -- nobody is saying that dumping the song will fix things but him. However, if the school were to keep this song, they would indeed be mocked for it.

First of all, playing "Sweet Caroline" is a Boston Red Sox tradition that the school ripped off. Second, longtime Squawker readers know that I have been complaining for years that this is a perverted and creepy song. This is what I wrote back in 2009, when the Mets briefly played the song during the eighth inning:

Neil Diamond has said he wrote it about Caroline Kennedy. She was all of nine years old at the time. Tell me, how is this appropriate to write this about a little girl?

Hands, touchin' hands
Reachin' out
Touchin' me
Touchin' you

Or this?

Look at the night
And it don't seem so lonely
We fill it up with only two
And when I hurt
Hurtin' runs off my shoulders
How can I hurt when holdin' you

Yuck.
Anyhow, getting rid of this horrible and sick song is the right move on Penn State's part given the Sandusky scandal. Come to think of it, I also hope Penn State also ditches Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part II" if they play that one, too. You're welcome.

What do you think? Tell us about it!

On Joe Paterno, Responsibility, and Hero Worship

I'm gonna switch Squawker gears here today and talk about the whole Joe Paterno/Penn State issue, because I think the whole thing says a lot about what it means to be a fan.

Some people think Wednesday, the day when Penn State fired Joe Paterno after he announced that he would resign after the end of the season, was a sad day. I don't. I think it was a good day. I was glad to see that JoePa did not get to go out on his own terms, and that he was fired for what he allowed to happen on his watch. As somebody who went to Catholic schools from K to 12, I am glad to see somebody who enabled pedophilia finally get a little punishment, even if it pales in comparison to what the victims went through.

My brothers went to a Catholic high school where the priest molested a slew of young boys over many years. He used the power of his office to get his way, and also used an RV and a beach house paid for by his parishoners as lures. When one of the families, who was from Colombia, complained and threatened to go to the police over the priest molesting their young son, the school's principal, who was also a nun, threatened to have the family deported if they told the cops. The bishop in charge eventually moved the priest to another parish, where he got to have another 20 years of being a sexual predator before he finally got forced out of the priesthood. So yeah, I feel pretty strongly about this issue, and about what I think of those who enable pedophiles.

Anyhow, I really have been fired up on the whole Paterno story, as those who follow me on Facebook know! Here's the thing -- growing up in New Jersey, where Penn State was even more of a huge deal than the rest of the country, I've been hearing literally my whole life about how Joe Paterno wasn't just a great college coach, but a great human being. How, as New York Times writer Jonathan Mahler notes, Paterno's "Grand Experiment" put a premium on character and education, and believed in "Success With Honor. How Paterno was a leader of men. How he was Penn State. How he was so powerful that he could tell the school president and the athletic director and the board of trustees that he would stay as coach as long as he wanted to. How he controlled the school and the area with an iron fist.

And now we are supposed to believe, according to his sycophants, that the great Joe Paterno is really just like some mid-level bureaucrat who was only following the chain of command when it came to reporting sexual abuse? Whose hands were tied when it came to protecting children from being anally raped in his own locker room? Are you flipping kidding me? Paterno was the most powerful man not just in college sports, but one of the most powerful men in the country. He counted presidents as personal friends. All he literally had to do was make one phone call to the cops about Jerry Sandusky, and his old coach would have been in handcuffs a decade ago, instead of going on to be in a position to molest many more children.

Paterno's story that he only knew of one incident involving Sandusky also defies credulity. You don't get to the top of the food chain -- and stay there -- without knowing everything going on around you. Besides, I cannot believe that it is just a coincidence that in 1999, the year after police investigated Sandusky for the first time he was reported for groping a young boy in the shower, that Paterno told his protege and would-be successor that he would never be head coach. Why did Sandusky then retire at the age of 55, and never work for another college football program again? And no, I don't believe Scott Paterno's story that his father told Sandusky he could never be head coach because he was too devoted to his foundation. Oh, please!

Anyhow, even if want to stick your fingers in your ears and pretend that Paterno only knew about one case, the 2002 anal rape of a 10-year-old in Paterno's athletic center's shower, and that his graduate assistant supposedly downplayed the graphic details of what actually happened, the fact is, as Paterno admitted to the grand jury, that he knew that "something of a sexual nature" happened with his old coach and a young boy. And that Paterno, other than some perfunctory mention up the chain of command, never called the police, never asked his graduate assistant for more details, never asked Sandusky what happened, and never even attempted to find out who the boy was.

For the next decade, Paterno went to bed every night knowing that his old coach was around young boys all the time, at Sandusky's foundation for at-risk boys, at his home, with the children he adopted, at schools, at his coaching camps, run on Penn State satellite campus. He also let Sandusky himself have an office on the Penn State campus, and his old coach was seen in his locker room working out just last week. If you knew for a fact, as Paterno did, that somebody you knew was a child molestor, and you had the power to stop them, would you be okay with letting them be around children?

Not to mention that Jerry Sandusky was able to get so much access to children precisely because he was connected to Paterno's Penn State program. He took his victims to Penn State games and events, for goodness sake! And JoePa was okay with that?

I just don't understand the Penn State students rioting over Paterno being fired, or the sycophants defending him. Because when it comes down to it, it ultimately doesn't matter how good a coach Paterno was, or how many young men he did help in his career. He didn't help the vulnerable boys who needed his help the most. How many children were molested because Joe Paterno chose not to act on what he knew? One is too many.

As much as I root for A-Rod, and as much as I admire and appreciate Vince Young and Mack Brown for bringing my Texas Longhorns their first national championship in 35 years, you'd better believe I would be marching in the street against them if they did anything to enable a pedophile.

Real life should come before sports. And the lives of young boys should come before Joe Paterno's career. He didn't deserve to get a flipping victory lap after what he did -- make that didn't -- do. 
 
Put aside the hero worship, or the appreciation for Joe Paterno as a coach. When it comes down to it, he is a man who enabled a pedophile to wreak havoc on countless boys' lives. He is no better than those bishops and nuns who looked the other way when priests took away the innocence of young children. Paterno has had a great 84 years of life. How great have the lives been of all the young boys who were sexually abused by Jerry Sandusky, his old coach? And how many of those acts of abuse could have been prevented, if only the great Joe Paterno had made one phone call? Think about it.


Tell us what you think.