Sports

Now THIS Is An Offensive Team Name

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The London, Ontario independent baseball team has decided to rename itself “The London Rippers.”

Jack's last victim: a logo, perhaps?

The city’s mayor has expressed concerns about the name, and good for him. This isn’t a manufactured political correctness complaint, based on the dubious logic that it demeans a group to honor it with an athletic team name. This is the opposite: a team name that honors a serial killer who disemboweled poor women in the slums of London in 1888. Misogyny isn’t cute or funny, and anyone who thinks that making Jack the Ripper a team symbol is anything but one more outrage perpetrated against his pathetic victims but gets indignant over the Atlanta Braves has his head on upside-down and backwards.

Now, I suppose it’s possible that an association of serial killers will protest that the name “London Rippers” dehumanizes them and puts them in the same category with lions, tigers and bears. In such an eventuality, I would side with the associations of lions, tigers and bears protesting that the name denigrates them. Sportswriting lawyer Craig Calcaterra, a sharp baseball mind whose NBC column alerted me to this story, somehow misses the point by a mile, writing:

“…Jack the Ripper did his work, like, 130 years ago. Murder is murder and it’s always awful, but at what point has enough time passed to where this kind of thing isn’t a problem?  And yes, I note the mayor’s nod to ending violence against women, but does a reference to a 19th century British serial killer who is more often fictionalized today than dealt with in his brutal reality really undermine those laudable aims?
I’m not saying it’s 100% fabulous. But really, kids were singing about Lizzie Borden taking an axe and giving her mother 40 whacks within a few years of that going down. Is it really too soon to be able to use a  long-dead historical figure as a mascot? There are a bunch teams called “crusaders” and the crusades were brutal. We still have Chief Wahoo around, and you can make an argument that the thinking behind that mascot (i.e. Indians are somehow less-than-human) represented way more death and destruction than anything Jack the Ripper did.”

Ugh. How many rationalizations are in this passage? Playground chants about Lizzie Borden (or the Black Plague, which is what “Ring around the rosey” is about) are not remotely comparable to naming a community’s baseball team after a serial killer. Playground refrains don’t become part of a community’s identity, and they don’t in any way bestow prestige on the dark subjects of their rhymes. Teams named after crusaders, warriors, braves and pirates don’t aspire to honor the deaths caused by these groups, any more than teams are named the Lions or Tigers because they have mauled people, or the Cardinals and Orioles are so named because the birds poop on our heads. There one reason, and only one, Jack the Ripper is famous. He slit the throats of desperate prostitutes and dissected them,: in the case of Mary Kelly, he minced his victim, leaving her internal organs on her night table. The London Ripper sent body parts of one victim to police, and taunted them. He didn’t possess a single admirable quality to justify a connection to a sports team, unless there are professional misogyny, mayhem or maniac leagues somewhere.

And Craig’s argument that is an expiration date on the offensiveness of trivializing tragedy is the worst of all. Seriously, Craig? So Penn State can call its wrestling team “the Molesters” in 100 years or so? What he’s really endorsing is ignorance. Kids who chant about the bubonic plague don’t realize it, and neither do their parents. That a lot of people don’t know the truth behind all the fictional Jack the Ripper tales is an argument for enlightening them, not pretending that killing prostitutes is just fun and games.

The mayor of London is right, Craig  is wrong, and if there ever was an inappropriate and harmful  team name, the London Rippers is it.

For Those Who Want To Discover First-Hand Whether My Oral Opinions Are Even More Infuriating Than My Written Ones…

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

…I will be a guest on NPR’s “Tell Me More” with Michel Martin this Friday morning to talk about ethical issues raised by the Penn State.

Of course, by that time, Jerry Sandusky may have given another creepy interview confessing that he always wanted to be a Catholic priest,  it will be discovered that Joe Paterno not only gave ownership of his house to his wife to avoid paying liability damages, but also has left the country to rule a colony of fanatic Penn State boosters in Guyana, amd Mike McQueary may have sent out an e-mails revealing  that he is really Marie of Rumania.

You never know.

The show will be broadcast live at 11 AM, East Coast time, and my segment will begin around 11:20.

Judging McQueary: Child Rape Bystander Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

You have no excuses, Kal-El. But the rest...

“It was cowardly for a 6′4″ graduate assistant to witness the rape of a child by an older man and not only take no action to stop it but also not even call the police,” writes David French in the National Review.

He is, of course, referring to Mike McQueary, then a 28-year-old graduate student assistant coach for Joe Paterno at Penn State. Others have declared that it was an “absolute moral imperative” that McQueary physically intervene to stop the sexual assault.

It is interesting that the absolute moral imperative is nonetheless linked to qualifiers. French references McQueary’s size and the fact that the alleged assailant, Jerry Sandusky, is older. Some critics have focused on his gender. Still others, making the argument that McQueary failed to intervene because he didn’t take a child rape seriously enough, have suggested that he would have acted differently had Sandusky been beating, rather than raping the child. Of all the ethical debates surrounding the Penn State scandal, the question of how much scorn should be heaped on McQueary for not acting immediately to stop the rape in progress has been the most fascinating, and to my mind, the most disingenuous. It appears that every commentator, male or female, young or old, fat or fit, is convinced that would have charged in and battled the 57-year-old former wide-receiver, pummeling him into wet submission while the child escaped. Maybe. Studies and anecdotal evidence indicate that in fact, most people wouldn’t physically intervene. Perhaps sportswriters and op-ed writers are made of sterner stuff that the rest of the public.

Yes, that must be it.

None of this is to suggest that physically stopping a child rape in progress isn’t the right thing to do; it is. For his part, McQueary reputedly didn’t take any action to stop the assault,* which in order of effectiveness would be… Continue reading →

A Commercial Break

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The new Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2012 is out today. As usual, publisher Dave Studenmund and his staff have done a terrific job gathering provocative commentary on the baseball season just ended, and have stuffed the book with the fascinating and useful statistics and analysis that makes the Hardball Times website such an enjoyable hang-out for baseball fans.

Dave consented to allowing this year’s Annual to include an essay on some of the important ethics issues that surfaced during the season, and it bears my name as author. I’m proud to be part of such an excellent publication.

If you are a baseball fan, I recommend The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2012 heartily. You can order it, and many other nifty baseball books,  here.

Now back to our regularly scheduled ethics alarms…

My 15 Hollywood Cures For A Paterno-Penn State-Sandusky Hangover, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Part 1 listed the first seven of my 15 cinematic remedies for Penn State-inspired ethics ennui. Part 2 includes the final eight. Please don’t take the order too seriously; I could have shuffled the whole batch. I also tried to include as many genres as possible. When it comes to ethics, good lists can be compiled using all Westerns, all sports movies, all war movies, courtroom drama or science fiction. Here we go…

8. Spartacus (196o)

The raw history is inspiring enough: an escaped gladiator led an army of slaves to multiple victories over the Roman legions in one of the greatest underdog triumphs ever recorded. Stanley Kubrick’s sword-and-sandal classic has many inspiring sequences, none more so than the moment when Spartacus’s defeated army chooses death rather than to allow him to identify himself to their Roman captors (“I am Spartacus!”)

Ethical issues highlighted: Liberty, slavery, sacrifice, trust, politics, courage, determination, the duty to resist abusive power, revolution, love, loyalty.

Favorite quote: “When a free man dies, he loses the pleasure of life. A slave loses his pain. Death is the only freedom a slave knows. That’s why he’s not afraid of it. That’s why we’ll win.” [Spartacus (Kirk Douglas)] Continue reading →

Paterno, Hoover, and Jones’s First Law

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Would Uncle Walt have resisted the curse of Jones's First Law?

Jones’ First Law, one of many useful corollaries to Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong, will.”) is usually stated:

“Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an obstruction to its progress – in direct proportion to the importance of his original contribution.”

This week was a good one for Jones (whoever he was; I can’t seem to find out) if not for the rest of us, because two classic examples of his principle were on display:  Penn State coach Joe Paterno, who managed to stay coach long enough to unravel his legacy and help lay the groundwork for an ethical, moral, legal, public relations, and financial catastrophe for the institution he had dedicated his life to, and J. Edgar Hoover, the subject of a newly-released Clint Eastwood directed film that shows how he too stayed long enough as the key figure of an institution he built—the FBI—to become an embarrassment to it. Continue reading →

Ethics Mystery: How Can Penn State Let McQueary Coach the Team For Saturday’s Game?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

WHAT???

It is almost too weird to contemplate. Penn State has fired both its president and football coach Joe Paterno over their failure to take necessary measures to protect young boys who they knew were targets of what appears, and appeared to be, a serial child molester, Jerry Sandusky. Paterno was fired yesterday specifically to eliminate the pall that would be cast over all Penn State activities, including this Saturday’s game, if he were to continue as coach, and to make sure that the university didn’t project a “business as usual” attitude by allowing its community to blithely cheer Paterno’s team as if a child molesting scandal could be brushed aside for a weekend of fun and games.

And yet Penn State plans to have Mike McQueary coach the team on Saturday, rendering all of this incoherent. McQueary was the one who witnessed the act of sexual assault that triggered the whole scandal. He reported it to Paterno, but 1) didn”t stop it when he had the chance, and 2) did nothing to make certain that Sandusky’s criminal conduct was being properly handled afterwards. His presence as coach on Saturday all but eliminates whatever message Penn State intended to send by firing Paterno. The bottom line will be that the team will still be coached by an individual who didn’t do everything he could  and should have done to protect young boys from a predator. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Dunces: Penn State Students”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“Different Angle,” a college student and victim of child abuse, has, appropriately enough, a different angle on the Paterno/Penn State/ Sandusky scandal, and it provides useful and provocative perspective. I’ll let him have his say, as it is extraordinarily well argued, and save my comments for the end. I think he is compassionate, generous, thorough, thoughtful, and wrong. But first, here is his Comment of the Day on  “Ethics Dunces: Penn State Students.”

“As a current college student, prior victim of child molestation, and generally reasonable person, I feel inclined to give my two cents. Having read the grand jury report personally, I am shaken. Unless you are familiar with the shame and humiliation of a situation like this–even if you are familiar–the sheer quantity of these attacks… beyond words. Had any Penn State staff understood the thoughts running through this man’s mind, this comment would’ve started “As a current toddler…” Anyone who knows that the sexual abuse of children is occurring and acts so callously as to downplay it and sweep it under the rug has no place in modern society. That’s as nicely as I can put that.

“With as much emotion and sympathy as I harbor for the young men who’ve endured through this, it pains me to read the bickering and finger-pointing I’ve encountered in comment threads like this. And while it is normally in my nature to grab my trident for a healthy round of devil’s advocate with the popular and most often intelligent opinion, I cannot help but side with Joe Paterno in this matter. I’m about as far removed from sports as a sociable college male can get; I will not rally for a few chants of WE ARE… at the end of this post. If you’re going to scrutinize the choices he made in reference to the 2002 incident, be thorough enough to consider this: He wasn’t thinking about slandering Sandusky, he wasn’t concerned about his career or standing in the community. The decision of if/when/to whom this should be reported wasn’t calculated with pro’s and con’s. Continue reading →

Mike McQueary and Me

/ Jack Marshall / 93 Comments

 

Do you know what you would do, in Mike McQueary's place? Are you sure?

I have defended Mike McQueary, the graduate student assistant coach who, according to the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s report, witnessed Jerry Sandusky raping a young boy in the Penn State showers in 2002 and told Joe Paterno, to this extent: he took the crucial step of reporting the incident to the coach, his boss as a graduate student assistant coach, and that took courage. Because of Paterno’s reputation as a moral and ethical exemplar, the young man had no reason to believe that Paterno would not do all the right things, from confronting Sandusky to finding the boy to alerting the police. (As we now know, Paterno did none of these.)

Even so, he had to believe he was in a career jeopardizing situation. Sandusky was a Penn State football legend, though retired, and presumably had Paterno’s loyalty. Would being the messenger that created liability and public relations problems for his boss’s beloved football program make McQueary a pariah even if it resulted in Sandusky’s arrest? That scenario is not uncommon, unfortunately.

That is why, when a commenter wrote that McQueary was more culpable for Penn State’s inaction than Paterno, I disagreed strenuously, and I still do. Paterno had power, given his iconic status, perhaps the ultimate power. If he had insisted that Sandusky be confronted, removed, and reported to police, it would have happened, and would have happened completely within his natural sphere of influence. For McQueary, however, to track the university’s response and independently take action to stop Sandusky would require exemplary valor. I wish he had done it. But he had placed his faith in Joe Paterno, and at Penn State, that should be a sure bet.

I think it is easy for any of us to conclude that in Joe Paterno’s place, we would not have allowed Sandusky to continue preying on young boys. What would we do in Mike McQueary’s position, however…putting aside the action of physically intervening in the rape itself? There is a reason why the first thing he did was to go home and call his dad for advice. He never, never considered what he would do in such a situation, because never, in his wildest dreams, did he imaging such a crisis occurring.

Never underestimate the difficulty of making the right ethical decision in an unexpected crisis.

I also sympathize with McQueary, because I had my own Mike McQueary moment years ago. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Disloyalty…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Good ol' whatshisname. We'll never forget him.

…also ingratitude, venality, and crassness.

Baseball’s  Kansas City Royals are putting the name of their ball park, now Kauffman Staudium, up for corporate bidding. Soon the stadium that stood as a monument to the late Kansas City community leader Ewing Kauffmann, who owned the Royals in their very first season (1969), built the state-of-the-art home for them that is still a source of civic pride, and turned the team into a model franchise and perennial pennant contender in record time, will be named “Kansas City Masterpiece Stadium” or something else that makes it a giant billboard. Meanwhile, little will be left to remind future baseball fans and Kansas City residents of the life and dedication of the man who was responsible for the city having a major league team at all. Continue reading →