More on the dangers of the 'Joe Pa' cult of personality: WSJ's Reed Albergotti gets in-depth re Paterno's battles with PSU officials re punishment

Joe Paterno as Darth Sidious Time Lapse Painting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQa_DBRoNu0&feature=colike

I read this Wall Street Journal article about yet another aspect of Joe Paterno's longstanding attempt to control all aspects of what happens with the Penn State football team

-and to steamroll legitimate scrutiny by others- with rapt attention within minutes of it first appearing online.

Afterwards, I sent the link to just about everyone I know who'd appreciate what was really going on here: Paterno's real character and authoritarian tendencies being revealed, and PSU administrators not eager to get into a pissing contest with a sports icon, even when he was clearly wrong.

To me, this is not unlike what many outsiders and constant critics of him always wanted to believe were true about Bobby Knight but weren't, and when they leveled many of their unfounded criticisms of Coach Knight, many sportswriters and journalists used sainted ol' Joe Pa the Pious as the model for angelic probity.

The only way this could have been better would have been if there was video of kindly Joe Pa saying, "Boys will be boys."

Well, now we are all learning the truth about who really believed in holding everyone on the team accountable to one high standard -Coach Knight- and who wanted special (favorable) treatment and dispensations for his players -Coach Paterno.

Sure would be nice to hear some nationally-known sports writers finally admit they were 100% wrong before they retire for good.

Don't hold your breath!

Joe Paterno really DID believe that the Penn State football players he coached should be held to a lesser standard than the one regular PSU students were supposed to follow, even when they violated the law or ran afoul of school rules. For instance, this nugget after a number of player incidents receive serious push-back from school administrators who wanted one firmly understood standard for everyone:

The incident prompted Mr. Spanier to visit Dr. Triponey at her home. Dr. Triponey confirms he told her that Mr. Paterno had given him an ultimatum: Fire her, or Mr. Paterno would stop fund-raising for the school. She says Mr. Spanier told her that if forced to choose, he would choose her over the coach—but that he did not want to have to make that choice.

Excellent reporting that is long overdue!!!

Wall Street Journal

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

NOVEMBER 22, 2011

A Discipline Problem, Paterno Fought Penn State Official Over Punishment of Players

By Reed Albergotti

STATE COLLEGE, Pa.—Legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno clashed repeatedly with the university's former chief disciplinarian over how harshly to punish players who got into trouble, internal emails suggest, shedding new light on the school's effort to balance its reputation as a magnet for scholar-athletes with the demands of running a nationally dominant football program.

Read the rest of the article at:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204443404577052073672561402.html

See Reed Albergotti's answers to reader questions about this article, here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2011/11/22/chat-send-us-your-questions-on-paterno/

Wednesday's follow-up to this article is:

Two Views on Administrator

Some at Penn State Call Ex-Official Courageous, Others Say She Micromanaged

By Reed Albergotti and Rachel Bachman

The former Pennsylvania State University administrator who clashed with football coach Joe Paterno over player discipline was seen by supporters during her time at the school as a courageous leader but by critics as a micromanager of student groups.

Read the rest of the article at:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204443404577054632030945696.html

Finally something to smile about for Hoosier fans in a season of wasted opportunities

Been a little under the weather this weekend so my plan to drop a cache of posts here to get things stirring has taken a back seat to my health.
I did want to post this one, though, before IU's upcoming game in a few minutes against a reeling Michigan State team at East Lansing that I'll be watching on The BigTenNetwork, DirecTV Channel 610.


IU 52, U of I 49 - First win against ranked team while Tom Crean's been head basketball coach at IU.
Video highlights at:
http://www.bigtennetwork.com/generic/sports/video?autostart=true&bcpid=60234638001&bckey=AQ~~,AAAAAEBQhU8~,kLn_EtefUBn-jd4QuQdKKKEE0M4y3HUj&bctid=766801782001

It's not by mistake that I've chosen not to write much about this disappointing college basketball season, the third in the Tom Crean regime in Bloomington. (Or even said anything about Kevin Wilson being hired as the new football coach, a move I welcomed.)

There's a lot of misgivings and discomfort among some Hoosier fans I know and communicate with on a regular basis, not only over players that have failed to develop as expected (or in some cases, even regressed) but about wasted opportunities on nationally-televised games, cementing the idea among key high school players -and some fair-weather fans- that IU can't show more toughness and grit in close games, and emerge victorious.

While this victory over the Fighting Illini was certainly nice, especially at a packed Assembly Hall where devout fans have been eyewitness to more losing than at any time since I've been a Hoosier -and more since these students have been alive- I still find that a lot of very frustrated IU fans living far from the Midwest, are having a hard time accepting "moral victories."

You can count me among them, and you can see that in the agitated and exasperated emails from Hoosier faithful that are sent to the Hoosiers homepage of the Indy Star
http://www.indystar.com/section/SPORTS0601?odyssey=nav|s|hoosiers&nav=2

That's especially the case with knowledgeable fans whose base of understanding for Hoosier basketball, both history and personality context, extends decades, many of whom frequently respond to Indy Star reporter Terry Hutchens' Hoosiers Insider blog at
http://blogs.indystar.com/hoosiersinsider/

Hoosiers Insider remains a great resource for Hoosier fans living far from the rolling hills of Bloomington, and remains one of the few places that I can consistently go and find out something, from either Terry or a reader, that I didn't already know or had considered about the team and its history.

People with an institutional memory about the team that recall things that happened before I got to Bloomington in the fall of 1979 the way I STILL remember things about the 1972 Dolphins Perfect Season -whether scores of the games, the team roster, mini-controversies, et al- which was my first year as a Dolphins season ticket holder.

When IU plays Kentucky in mid-December, that's almost always been a nationally-televised Saturday afternoon game that got lots of eyeballs coast-to-coast. Now, it's almost forgotten and on ESPN2 or wherever it was, and not even brought up until late into ESPN's SportsCenter or into their radio programming -an after-thought.

The annual Michigan at IU ballgame which had so many memorable and clutch finishes from 1980-2000 while a CBS nationally-televised staple, has also become a victim of the recent mediocrity.

When I watched it recently on TheBigTenNetwork, it was hard not to think of all those games with Coach Knight getting the better of whomever was patrolling the sidelines for the Wolverines, and the confidence IU fans had with Damon Bailey or Steve Alford bringing the ball up-court with less than thirty seconds to play against those excellent Wolverine teams.

You knew that the fundamentals would be there and that guys would come thru in the clutch, and if they lost, it would NOT be for lack of a proper understanding of what they needed to do and where they needed to be on the court for that last shot.

Now, I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen from play to play, and whether a player will repeat the same mistake twice before getting pulled from the game.

Rebuilding is definitely a bitch.

The IU homepage at The BigTenNetwork website, full of IU-related stories & videos: http://www.bigtennetwork.com/subindex/schools/indiana

Shocker! Herald even screws up Le Batard sabbatical story

What could possibly be more indicative of the longstanding dreadful Miami Herald website than their inability to break a story about one of their own well-known columnists?

When I do a Search for any item on/by Dan Le Batard, knowing that the Herald's awful Business section did a four-sentence note about his leaving the paper after May 15th on the bottom of Friday's newspaper, the website chooses the particular stories below (in that order) as the 12 they choose to show, or, that they don't mention the very one in the Business section AT ALL, even though that's the last time Le Batard's name was actually in the paper?

If the Miami Herald's website isn't THE worst newspaper website in the country, I don't even want to know who's worse than them, esp. for a paper of their circulation size.

(I know, I know, I'm repeating my train of thought from one of my South Beach Hoosier anchor comments, which remain at the top of the page to give people some bearings.)

As it happens, I went to Bob Norman's blog The Daily Pulp Thursday morning to see if there were any more reader comments about his recent post about Hallandale Beach and State Senator Steve Geller.

Quite by happenstance, I did so just a few minutes after he'd written a post on Dan Le Batard taking a break from the paper.

In fact, Norman's post is the one Romensko ran on Poynter Online
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2008/04/heralds_le_batard_vacating_spo.php

Below, the basic information that appeared on April 19th at 11 p.m., minus color and graphics.
http://pd.miami.com/sp?aff=101&keywords=Dan+Le+Batard&sNum=11&pubDate=&author=

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________________________________________
Of course, if you have an infinite amount of time, you can always go to the Herald website and refuse to use the Search function and simply click Business you'll get this link The Work/Life Balancing Act

It reads as follows: My goal is to help you manage the balance between work and your family and personal lives. I'll focus on creative solutions to conflicting demands, new strategies for helping people juggle responsibilities, and new trends and developments.

In case the link to the Le Batard piece above is dead, it's at
http://worklifebalancingact.blogspot.com/2008/04/lucky-dan-goes-on-sabbatical.html

Also, here's a link to a story on Le Batard's talented artist brother, David, whom he's bored
radio listeners for years about, recounting his brother's general ignorance of sports.
http://www.miamiherald.com/tropical_life/story/482569.html

Yeah, I get it already. (Actually, I got it a few years ago.)
Two brothers with very different interests.
But what's so funny about that?

If you want to know why I think this move of Le Batard's is years overdue, consider the very embarrassing Q&A that he did with Miami Heat owner Mickey Arison, linked above.

Once again, despite having the opportunity to be something other than a poodle, Le Batard never brings up the subject of Arison's failure to come through on the public promises that he and The Heat made prior to the voter referendum, to City of Miami and Miami-Dade County public officials and the general public as well -i.e. taxpayers- about a bayside public park being constructed next to the American Airlines Arena, once that was built, largely on the backs -greenback$- of the public.

(It's the same area the Bay of Pigs vets want for their museum.
http://www.miamiherald.com/top_stories/story/494687.html
http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2008/04/bay_of_pigs_museum_kinda_moves.php
Obviously, I'm in favor of a green park on the bay with no buildings.)

For the entirety of the four years that I've been down here, only Hank Goldberg has EVER
dared to publicly ask questions about this egregious broken promise, made by one of the wealthiest men in the United States.

While I lived in Washington for 18 years, but especially pre-Pardon the Interruption,
Le Batard was a frequent guest on Washington Post sports columnist Tony Kornheiser's
morning radio program on WTEM-AM -The Team- in all its various manifestations: stand-alone, as part of a very weird syndicate, and later as part of the ESPN Radio network.

I often taped Le Batard's appearances on my Sony radio/cassette recorder while at work, for play later in the day where I could really think about what he said without any distractions from clients, co-workers or whatever project I was working on.

Further, I usually bought the Herald 2-3 times a week at the newsstand next to the Farragut North Metro -just as I did the LA Times- usually on the days that Le Batard's columns appeared.

I usually enjoyed his radio appearances because of how often he brought up a South Florida sports topic, whether the U-M, Dolphins, Marlins and Heat, or speaking to the general South Florida belief that South Beach was a secret weapon for local teams, because of visiting teams' inherent immaturity.

But a funny thing happened once I was actually down here, reading all his columns and listening to his afternoon radio program on 790-AM, The Ticket from the very beginning.
Actually, it's not so funny.
I wondered where all the insight he'd previously shown had gone.

Upon closer examination, he became derivative and predictable, almost a caricature of a sports columnist.

I also began to wonder why I'd ever thought that someone who'd gone to the U-M but
NEVER really worked professionally more than 40 miles away from where he's gone to high school or college, could hope to have a real worthwhile national perspective.

Basically, Le Batard's shtick got old very quick.

Though I often ran hot and cold on Kornheiser's sports columns in the Post, on the radio, at least, his particular style became surprisingly comfortable for me, and he excelled in one area that Le Batard, in my opinion, never has mastered -not attempting to constantly upstage
a guest and get in the last word.

At least until after the commercial break and the next segment when he can be ripped.

Le Batard, whose radio show I stopped listening to last spring, after the umpteenth unfunny story about his brother the artist's not being very knowledgeable about sports, seems particularly tailor-made for a radio station that seemed full to the brim already with hosts with short fuses and specializing in passive aggressive chit-chat.

Sort of reminded me of a previous incarnation of 790, WNWS, when it was combative local politics all the time in the late '70's, with Neil Rogers, Al Rantel, Stan Major and a cast of callers that were always interesting to listen to.
Now that was radio worth listening to!

Some of you may recall that a few years ago, Le Batard insisted (for what seemed like an hour) that an upcoming interview he'd be doing with then-Marlin Miguel Cabrera would be done entirely in Spanish, just to prove, apparently, that American media and commerce was biased against Latin ballplayers by there not being more Spanish-language reporters or columnists in the locker rooms.

Insisting that Cabrera was really much more funny or smart or interesting in Spanish may've been something that a real friend of Cabrera's could attest to, but it seemed highly doubtful to me that someone with Le Batard's well-known baggage about race and nationality was the person to be running point on that proposition.
No sale!

(It was like a raised fist looking for the nearest face or wall to hit, and was a real low at a station that has had more than their share.
Last summer, a 790 sports host actually said on the air that the 2007 Yankees batting lineup was one of the greatest in the history of the sport.

A clever older caller -wish I knew who, so I could congratulate them- then called up and said with 100% accuracy that Connie Mack's immortal Philadelphia A's of 1928-1932 would've
toyed with the 2007 Yanks.
From what I recall, the 790 host acted like he'd never heard of the team, much less the players the caller threw out with glee, reciting their prodigious batting exploits.
http://www.philadelphiaathletics.org/index.html

I was laughing out loud so bad I was practically crying tears, because I knew that almost all of the players being named by the caller were eventual Hall of Famers or All-Stars of their era, even if the not-too-bright 20-somethings listening to the show in their car had never heard of them.
Naturally, after the caller got the better of the host, the caller got ripped by this New York partisan who'd been knocked on his butt.
And that was when I knew that 790 was dead to South Beach Hoosier.)

For other examples of Le Batard's oeuvre, see any of the following:
http://sports.aol.com/fanhouse/2008/04/08/espns-jay-bilas-and-dan-le-batard-get-into-it-over-race-in-bask/ , http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_8969122 or
http://www.fishstripes.com/2008/3/28/363371/radio%C2%A0radio

Awful Announcing blog chronicles the recent much-discussed Le Batard interview with ESPN basketball analyst Jay Bilas. http://awfulannouncing.blogspot.com/

The less said about The Ticket's huge (permanent) chip on its shoulder, once the Dolphins broadcasts rights went back to WQAM, the better.

Kornheiser's radio show always had on great regular guests with whom he developed a real rapport with, guests whom, even if I didn't personally care for, usually the golf writers, always held the possibility of being interesting, even if accidentally.

The result was that listeners often felt those guests were more forthcoming than perhaps was their original intent.

The various idiosyncracies of the individual reporters, columnists and coaches with whom Kornheiser spoke to regularly, started becoming as familiar to me as the very people I worked with or interacted with everyday: Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe, Bob Klapisch of the Indy Star, Gary Williams at the University of Maryland, Seth Greenberg when he was at USF, Jim Boeheim at Syracuse, former coach Don DeVoe on the NCAA tourney brackets, et al.

Surprisingly, other than Michael Wilbon, other Washington Post reporters who appeared were absolutely dullsville, perhaps a result of their grasping just how popular Kornheiser's show really was in town, and not wanting to embarrass themself in such a way that they'd never hear the end of it.

I especially hated Rachel Nichols' appearances on 'Uncle Tony's' show, when she played the role of favorite fawned-over niece.

That was especially irritating for that long period of time when she was actually living up in New York while still supposedly being the Washington Capitals' beat reporter for the Post.

Her vapid reports on Wimbledon that seemed to be far too much on the Williams sisters and their awful fashion inclinations or their father's latest antics, were also regular low spots for his show.

I think she's very over-rated, and I usually grab the remote and put the TV on mute when I see her on ESPN these days.

One thing I can tell for sure, Le Batard could never have a scenario that Kornheiser once had in the '90's, when both David Halberstam and Dick Schaap came on the radio show to talk about their friend, Bobby Knight.

They spoke with some of the most penetrating insight into Coach Knight I've ever heard -and another of their pals, Ted Williams- and recounted some non-basketball conversations they had on their long walk with Coach Knight along the National Mall one night after IU had won an NCAA tourney game at the Verizon Center.

Even now, I could kick myself for not having had a blank tape in my Sony radio that March day,
then I'd have a record for posterity of their clever insight and anecdotes, which I'd surely have found a way to put on my South Beach Hoosier blog for all true IU fans to listen to.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Noticed while checking some NCAA lacrosse scores a few minutes ago on their website, that the Baltimore Sun's Ray Frager has weighed in on Le Batard announcement and future decreased workload:
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/sports/mediumwell/blog/2008/04/blog_at_your_own_risk.html