COLUMN: The curse of competition

I cover sports for a living. I thrive on competition. I’m a driven guy. I want to win at everything.

Competition isn’t mine alone, either. We love to win and we love winners, so much so that there’s a major-party presidential candidate who has won his nomination using a platform centered on, well, winning.

But competitiveness and drive, unchecked, might be the scariest curse we carry.

The most horrific sports scandal of my lifetime took another dark turn earlier this week when unsealed court testimony from a victim of former Penn State assistant football coach and child rapist Jerry Sandusky included the following exchange between the victim (identified only as John Doe 150) and an attorney, as reported by the Associated Press.

“Is it accurate that Coach (Joe) Paterno quickly said to you, I don’t want to hear about any of that kind of stuff, I have a football season to worry about?” a lawyer for Penn State’s insurance carrier asked the man. “Specifically, yes,” the man replied.

“I was shocked, disappointed, offended, I was insulted,” John Doe 150 testified. “I said, is that all you’re going to do? You’re not going to do anything else?”

He said Paterno then “just walked away.”

That conversation with Paterno, the once-venerated Penn State coach, took place in 1976, according to testimony. Sandusky was arrested in 2011. Paterno was fired later that year and died in 2012.

The Penn State scandal, littered with young victims and vast cover-ups, is sickening and scary. Scary, too, is the reason it happened.

Competition in sports doesn’t just have to be about wins and losses on the field. It can be about be about having the best facilities, coaches getting the most money or holding the most power and influence within a program and a community.

In State College, Pennsylvania, there were plenty of all of the above motivating Paterno and others to keep Sandusky’s acts under wraps, fearing — maybe correctly — that revealing them would have a negative impact on the football program. It could scare off donors. It might make recruits less likely to come. It could have cost Paterno his job.

But it would have been the right thing to do.

Instead, coaches, administrators and likely many others buried their heads in the sand, plugged their ears and kept a child predator on the coaching staff for decades.

This pull to win and ride the wave of success at any cost is not a problem confined to college sports, either. There are high school and youth coaches everywhere who feel the tug every day between those two powerful instincts — the fierce lion that wants to win, wants to be the best at everything, and the other little lamb asking if every choice we’re making is truly right, is truly honoring the greater good and is truly the honorable thing to do.

Heck, I feel the pull every day in my own life. You probably do, too. We compete to be the best at our job, or be the best spouse, or the best parent, or have the nicest house or make the most money, and those pulls to those things can be consuming.

What would we do, or what wouldn’t we do, to have all the things we want? It doesn’t matter if that thing we want is the winningest coaching career in college football history or to pay off our mortgage.

We all know which way we’re supposed to go, and those of us fortunate to have been raised in morally-motivated families and communities have heard it from childhood. But that counter-force is real, too. Our competitive instinct tells us to skip it this one time, to just this once let it go and do what we need to do to get ahead and stay ahead.

So we walk away from one young boy in 1976. And 40 years later a generation of kids in Pennsylvania has been attacked by a monster, one we didn’t create but one we never stopped.

I hope it’s a lesson our area coaches take to heart as a new high school sports season dawns next month. Every decision, every time has a right answer. Competing is fun, wins are what coaches are judged on and it might feel great in that moment to hoist that championship trophy or line up in victory formation.

But nothing, ever, trumps doing the right thing.

Andy Viano is a sports reporter and columnist. He can be reached at 758-4446 or aviano@dailyinterlake.com.