From the first day I passed through the Dean Dome’s doors, my support of UNC athletics has been a blasphemy.
It was during my freshman year, of course, the year of all years to drown oneself in Carolina blue. But on that Saturday morning, as the top-ranked Tar Heels prepared for their Nov. 15 season opener, I found myself wearing a navy blue shirt with a light blue logo.
There was only one problem: that logo wasn’t an interlocking “NC” but a “V,” for Villanova (or as some suggested, a certain private part rather than private university). It might as well have been a scarlet “A” on the day UNC played Penn, another Philadelphia team.
Before anyone would “remember, remember, the 15th of November” as the day this Yankee wore out his welcome, I admitted that my loyalties lay in Pennsylvania, with Penn State football. But a lot has changed in the past week.
As another group of Tar Heels opens another season as the top-ranked team today, I look 450 miles north to the quaint, aptly-named college town of State College and wonder what went wrong. Perhaps like the man himself, I wonder why Joe Paterno turns a blind eye after a graduate assistant coach hears rhythmic slapping noises coming from the locker room shower, only to find former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky engaging in a sexual act with a young boy.
I wonder how, at age 84, a supposedly moral compass like Paterno picks up the phone late one night and learns that he’s fired. I wonder why I can’t say I dislike the Penn State Board of Trustees’ unanimous decision. And, considering the NCAA violations of the past year, I wonder whether the culture that made a monster of Paterno is on its way to UNC.
Granted, UNC’s firing of Butch Davis was a grenade compared to the atomic bomb Penn State’s board dropped on State College Wednesday. After all, UNC only had to weigh NCAA violations when it fired Davis — not violations to our conscience, our morals, our laws.
But just by hiring Davis and trying to turn the Tar Heels into a football powerhouse, UNC was treading down a path to State College, where future linebackers are given jersey numbers before names, where football is king.
It was this very culture that crowned Paterno, that put wins and losses before right and wrong. It was the same culture that allowed Paterno to say “no thanks” and get away with it when the athletic director and select board members twice visited his home in 2004, asking him to retire.
