The sports-related news has been terrible these past few days. Really, I can find a joke in a 20-car pileup, but this stuff has been awful and horrific and sad and I just want to crawl under the covers until it all goes away.
But the thing about the Penn State story is that you can’t forget it, even if you want to, because to forget risks it repeating. And as Jeff Passan reminds us, it is, sadly, nothing new:
Before Jerry Sandusky -- before he allegedly used the Penn State football complex to commit sex crimes with young boys and before the university spent more than a decade covering up his sins and before the grand-jury report revealed the appalling details of his abuse and before the campus rioted over legendary coach Joe Paterno losing his job amid it all -- there was Donald Fitzpatrick, the longtime Red Sox clubhouse manager who lured [Leeronnie] Ogletree and at least a dozen other young, African-American boys into two decades of systemic sexual abuse.
It’s heartbreaking and terrible. Yet we must remember that there is evil like this in the world if we are to have any chance at stopping it.