By Tim Healey/DFP Staff
Given the events unfolding this week conerning the Penn State football team, Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno, the Boston Hockey Blog thought it would be relevant to ask another long-time college coach what he thought.
Today, BU men’s hockey coach Jack Parker, currently in his 39th year at the helm of the Terriers, commented on the controversy.
If you’ve been following what’s been going on at Penn State, what are your thoughts on that?
I have [been following the situation]. I think it’s so … horrible. It’s easy to coach someone else’s team, it’s easy to judge other people and it’s easy to point fingers at people, but this isn’t about a sport, and this isn’t about a coach and this isn’t about a president, this is about the kids. And that’s just a sad, sad situation.
The other thing that just jumps out at me – and I’d just love to know about the timing of this – it’s my understanding that it’s been investigated for a while, it’s been in front of a grand jury for a while, and is it a coincidence that it doesn’t come out until Joe Paterno wins his 409th game? They’ve been investigating this thing for three years, it’s been in and around a grand jury for over a year and a half, so I wonder who else is culpable here. I wonder if, I should say, I wonder if somebody else is culpable here as far as the timing of it all too. The governors and the presidents and the ADs, they go around this, that and the other things. ‘Hey, any way we can hold this off until we go another week?’
I don’t know if that has anything to do with it. It could just be a coincidence, but that coincidence jumped at my mind the moment I saw it.
There’s a lot of good people whose lives are ruined. There’s a few bad people whose lives are ruined. But there’s some innocent kids that aren’t kids anymore that never should have had to put up with that in their lives, should have had to deal with that. Who knows how horrible that can be for everybody. It’s an amazing thing.
As a coach that’s been at a school for a long time like Paterno, have you looked up to Paterno in the past as a coach?
Yeah, I always thought he was a real class act. I always thought he was a guy that prided himself in doing things the right way, and I still believe that. I think his teams have been terrific teams over a long period of time without reverting to questionable recruiting, NCAA violations, questionable academic standings. They’ve done an awful lot of things in that football program for a long period of time the right way, and all of that will be forgotten over this. And that’s another sad thing. That’s quite a legacy that you push aside and say, ‘This is the legacy now.’
It’s not right for anybody. It’s not … How could it have happened? If it did happen – and it looks like it did – if this is a situation that is true, about all these kids, how bad is that situation in and of itself? And then to come around backwards and of course we’ve been … Cardinal Bernard Law gets to take a boat ride across the Atlantic to go settle into like a prince in the church with all the stuff that he oversaw that happened here. There is such a thing as ‘the buck stops here,’ and at least the buck has stopped at the right people. Everybody who is in touch is going to pay the price, and that didn’t happen in the Archdiocese of Boston, I’ll tell you that. To this day that sickens me. He’s living like a prince in Italy.
Cardinal Bernard Law should be in a jail cell.
Maybe sharing a jail cell with Jerry Sandusky.
Not only the Catholic Church but all other denominations have had problems that have been covered up. The National Council of Churches estimates that ten percent of their ministers have had sex with teens. One never heard about these cases because they, too, have been covered up. Also, because we are talking about hockey, remember the situation with the Canadian Junior coaches a few years ago. I can not believe that people do not report these crimes. Most of us do not want to get involved. Speak up people!