It appears today will be a reflective sports day. Sorry. It happens sometimes. You can take the man out of sports, but it's very hard to take the sports out of the man. Or something to that effect.
Case 1: Time and again, questions about an alleged cover-up of a sex abuse scandal at Penn State, circled back to one name: Joe Paterno. Major college football's oldest, winningest and perhaps most revered coach, was engulfed Monday in a growing furor involving former defensive coordinator and one-time heir apparent Jerry Sandusky, who was indicted on charges of sexually abusing eight boys over 15 years. The Pennsylvania state police commissioner said Paterno fulfilled his legal requirement when he relayed to university administrators that a graduate assistant had seen Sandusky attacking a young boy in the team's locker room shower in 2002. But the commissioner also questioned whether Paterno had a moral responsibility to do more. On the Happy Valley campus and in the surrounding town of State College, some were even asking whether the 84-year-old coach should step down after 46 seasons on the sidelines.
The answer is YES. There. Said it. Meant it. Joe Paterno should step down as head coach at Penn State. Why? Because, if I understood what I've read correctly, he knew enough to at least, at the very least, help cops begin an investigation into his assistant that would have saved at least one young man from being assaulted by this worthless sexual predator. How anyone could even wonder whether Paterno had that moral responsibility is beyond me. Of course he did. What, he forgot about it? What, he thought it was a dream of some kind? What, he imagined it? Sorry, folks. He should have reported it, maybe even helped by going undercover as it were. But to say essentially nothing? I don't care if the then assistant was, it seems, one of Paterno's best friends. He was, is, a sexual predator. Mary has made me watch too many of those SVU programs not to get the absolutely heinousness of the crime and their thinking patterns. Fire them. Fire them all.
Case 2: The only signature I've ever asked for was Muhammad Ali's. But I admired Joe Frazier far more than I did Ali. I admire, and still admire, determination, guts, effort, overcoming lack of talent. Joe Frazier did all that, was all that. Muhammad Ali drew the crowds, charmed the media and stole the show. But while Ali is deservedly remembered as “The Greatest,” it was Joe Frazier who defined what being a fighter was truly about.Frazier, who died Monday in his Philadelphia home after a fight with liver cancer, is inextricably linked in boxing history with Ali. They competed in two of the most sensational bouts of all-time and defined an era with their fearsome rivalry. Ali had nearly all of the physical advantages, but in the fight that remains the most significant in the sport’s history, it was Frazier who threw perhaps the perfect left hook to knock down Ali in the 15th round, punctuating a victory on March 8, 1971, in what will forever be remembered as “The Fight of the Century.” Down goes Frazier was a sentence that entered the sports lexicon with Howard Cosell doing the honors.
Case 3: A fired government worker with a protest sign dangled for hours from New York's Tappan Zee Bridge on Monday, backing up traffic for miles before dropping into the Hudson River and being hauled aboard a police boat. Michael Davitt, 54, of Garnerville, N.Y., had been angry about being dismissed in 2008 from his counseling job with the Rockland County mental health department and was well known to law enforcement, county Sheriff James Kralik said. On Monday morning, Davitt drove a van onto the bridge, lowered a rope ladder that was anchored to the van and climbed down, then sat in a harness for more than three hours about 65 feet above the river.
Today has all the markings of a beautiful start to a possibly beautiful day. It's warmish. It's cloudy but heading toward skies that are beautiful. It's humid, but today promises so much more. The weather promises to be good, much like Michael Davitt promises to be, much like Frazier promised to stop hitting Ali and much like Paterno promises he knew little about what was going on.
The problem with all that is promises that aren't kept are not truth. They are merely broken promises. Many of us have had to deal with broken promises all our lives. You know that those things amount to, don't you?
On the other hand, God's promises never fail, are never broken, always remain true. The Bible puts it this way In the 23rd chapter of Joshua's wonderful work: "14Now I am about to go the way of all the earth. You know with all your heart and soul that not one of all the good promises the LORD your God gave you has failed. Every promise has been fulfilled; not one has failed."
Not one. Not a single one. So, while Frazier was dying, while Davitt was coming up with still another wacky plan, while Penn State's sex brokers were getting together with one more plan to keep things quiet, God's promises did the impossible one more time. Those promises met the test and passed. Not one has failed. Every promise has been fulfilled.
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