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One of the biggest stories in the US this year concerns a man most Australians have never heard of, and a university in a state most of them couldn’t find on the map.
Only the death of Osama bin Laden has been bigger, which means it’s up there with the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, and the deficit crisis.
It took over a week after this story broke for it to be run in any Australian newspaper, and then only after Ashton Kutcher became involved.
In most international newspapers and online news sites, you might find it tucked away in a corner, given a few lines at most.
And yet to Americans, this is big stuff − much bigger, certainly, than the ongoing battle to decide who will be the Republican candidate for President next year.
But what is this story, and why is it causing such a fuss? Well, first, it involves sex − always a seller. Second, it involves sex with children − always a scandal.
But most importantly, and what has made this story such a big story in America, is that it involves football, the game which has, without doubt now, replaced baseball as the nation’s emblematic pastime and ubiquitous obsession.
In the past week, it has emerged that Joe Paterno − ‘Joe Pa’ − the coach of the Pennsylvania State football team since 1966, failed to report to police allegations that one of his assistant coaches had abused a ten year old boy in the team’s shower facilities in 2002.
Paterno did report the allegations to his superiors at the University, and that is why he, unlike them, has not been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.
But the damage to Paterno’s reputation and mystique, his image as a grandfatherly figure who has overseen the physical and moral development of generations of young men, is irreparable.
It would be like if, in Australia (and this doesn’t even come close, since Paterno’s place in American life and culture over the last fifty years has no comparison here) Wayne Bennett was exposed as a match-fixer.
The ugly details of the case aside, Paterno’s fall from grace, and his rise to it in the first place, are very revealing about America in general, and what distinguishes it from Australia, its New World cousin.
First, it needs to be remembered that Paterno is a college football coach, not a professional one. Think hard: can you even name one Australian who is the coach of a non-professional team? I know I can’t.
But in America, college football coaches and, to a lesser extent, basketball coaches, are household names.
There have been many legendary ones, with Paterno the last in a long line going back to the great Alonso Stagg, who codified the rules of American football in the early twentieth century.
In America, these men are seen as educators as well as coaches, moulders of souls as well as bodies, and leaders in their communities.
This mystique surrounding the college coach is connected to the mystique that surrounds college in America.
In Australia, ‘uni’ as we call it, is mainly about rounding off one’s education and getting a qualification for employment.
Young people don’t go into tertiary education with great expectations, and, in turn, not much is expected of them.
But in America, eighteen and nineteen year olds are seen as, if not children, then certainly unfinished products.
Great hopes are pinned on people’s college years; the notion is that they will develop their characters, as well as their minds, and emerge from the experience a different person from the one that went in.
As an Australian, I find most of this very implausible. I tend to think that, at eighteen or nineteen, most people’s characters are already fairly well defined.
However, Americans’ belief in the power of education − really, in the power of teaching to change people’s nature − is what gives them their faith in institutions of “higher learning,” and in the people who work in them.
Paterno is 84 years old. Again, think hard: can you name one Australian who, at any stage in the nation’s history, was a figure not only of respect, but of real power and importance, at that age?
But in America it is not uncommon. The nation’s best universities have many active professors in their 70s and 80s, and they are highly respected for their experience and achievements.
Moreover, American professors of all ages generally repay this respect by showing a personal care and concern for their students which, to an Australian, can appear borderline improper.
Still not yet as bureaucratised as Australia or Europe (though it’s getting there) personalities count in America, and not only covertly, as they do everywhere, but overtly, and again in a way that can strike an Australia as improper.
It sounds like a wild generalisation, but I think it is nevertheless true to say that Americans are much less cynical than Australians.
They expect more from universities, from people in authority, from life, than Australians do. And this means that Americans are hit all the harder when one of their idols fails them.
Only last year, a Republican Congressman proposed that Paterno be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour.
Before that, it was he suggested he should become the Governor of Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s largest states.
Now, with his reputation in tatters, Americans are grieving over what is their loss as well as his.
Of course, Australians would also react with shock and expressions of horror to the fall of a major public figure. But I cannot help thinking they would not be as shocked, and would not express so much horror.
Indeed, I cannot think of an Australian who commands in Australia the kind of universal respect Paterno has commanded in America, unless it be someone like Wayne Bennett, and even then in an infinitely lesser degree.
Which brings us to a point of similarity between our otherwise so different countries: the extraordinary way in which we invest in sport, and the people who participate in it, with moral significance, when, at least in the Australian case, we expect so little from anyone else.
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