Game Over: Penn State, Jerry Sandusky, and the Culture of Silence
Written by Bill Moushey and Robert Dvorchak
Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
The shocking details chronicling how a beloved coach and esteemed university became enmeshed in one of the worst scandals in U.S. sports history
It's a scandal that began in a place called Happy Valley. But it's not as happy as it once was, as the child-sex-abuse charges against a longtime coach and the conspiracy of silence surrounding the allegations have rocked America and Division 1 college sports.
The shocking stories started to pour out after the November 6, 2011, arrest of Jerry Sandusky, a former coach under the Penn State football legend Joe Paterno. Sandusky had been Paterno's top lieutenant for thirty-two years. He was also the founder of a charity, The Second Mile, that devoted itself to helping disadvantaged youth. It turns out Paterno was told about an incident involving an underage boy showering with Sandusky in the football locker room, but reported the incident to school officials rather than the police.
The numerous boys in Sandusky's program who have come forward told a grand jury lurid stories of a sexual predator who stalked and abused them, sometimes even in the showers of Penn State's football complex. In Game Over, journalists Bill Moushey and Bob Dvorchak investigate claims of a startling cover-up within the Penn State hierarchy that attempted to protect its football legacy, quite possibly at the expense of disenfranchised children.
Game Over is filled with the shocking details of how a culture built around one deified coach with a glorious vision to have "success with honor" fails to act in the best interests of the most vulnerable. University president Graham Spanier has been consumed in this firestorm along with Joe Paterno himself in what spiraled downward into the worst scandal in the history of college sports.
Bill Moushey
Bill Moushey is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated investigative journalist who specializes in documenting abuses of the criminal justice system. He worked with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette for twenty-three years before becoming a professor in the School of Communication at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. In 1997 he won the National Press Club's Freedom of Information Award for his groundbreaking exposé of an out-of-control witness protection program.
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Reviews for Game Over
46 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Errors. Wasn’t as well written as was expected. Do better research before tackling such a controversial issue.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Awfully biased book. You can tell the author had an angle he wanted to take and ignored facts.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This was clearly written in haste and is extremely repetitive, as if no single person ever read it from beginning to end. It serves as a good review of the sequence of events that have been made known publicly.One thing I learned: When the police were finally contacted in 2008 (which one would think would have happened a lot earlier, for example by McQueary) there were Three Years of investigation before charges were brought and an arrest was made. Not exactly confidence-inspiring for any victims currently in such a situation. Shocking.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bill Moushey and Bob Dvorchak, authors of Game Over: Jerry Sandusky, Penn State, and the Culture of Silence, have definitely struck a nerve with thousands of Penn State alumni and Happy Valley residents. It appears, based entirely on the “reviews” of the book I see posted on Amazon, that the pair faces a vicious backlash based more on emotion than on reason – and that almost all of the negative “reviews” posted there have been written by people who did not bother reading the book before damning it. It seems that it will be left to those without ties to Penn State, and a minority of Penn-Staters themselves, to gauge the objectivity and effectiveness of the book. On one level, Game Over is an excellent recap of the news that starting leaking out of Happy Valley, PA, in early November 2011. Those that may have come to the story a little late will find the chronology presented to be especially helpful. Others are likely to focus more on the additional details attached to the original revelations, disgusting as some of those details are. Readers should, in fact, be forewarned that several descriptions of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged assaults of the young boys under his sponsorship and care are disgustingly graphic in nature and leave little to the imagination.On a second level, what Game Over reveals about the culture espoused by Penn State administrators, its athletic coaches, its students, and the community that supports and benefits from the school’s presence, is almost as disturbing and horrifying as the crimes Sandusky is alleged to have committed against his young victims. That there was, and to a lesser degree still is, a “culture of silence” surrounding Penn State that allowed this kind of criminal behavior to continue for decades, cannot be disputed. Moushey and Dvorchak present their case in detail, naming names and shaming those who deserve it, in the process. Only the court system can determine the guilt or innocence of the various parties involved in all of this, but Jerry Sandusky should not be the only one facing a judge and jury of his peers before this is over.From what the Game Over authors have to say, it appears that the second worst “crime” committed during this whole period, may lay at the feet of Coach Joe Paterno, the man who really ran Penn State while all of this was happening. If true, Paterno helped bring shame to the university and forever sullied his own reputation and famous catchphrase: “Success with Honor.” Paterno’s silence seems to have been the signal to Penn State’s coaches, administrators, and others that the entire Sandusky matter should be kept within the confines of the Penn State “family,” and that outsiders were not to be trusted with this information. Joe Paterno had just that much clout in Happy Valley – he had, in fact, almost been granted sainthood by the locals, making a cover-up of this magnitude a relatively easy thing for the school to pull off.Much remains for the courts to determine, including: the culpability of two principal university administrators in the cover-up; the part in the cover-up of some inside The Second Mile (Sandusky’s charity for poverty stricken boys); how much Sandusky’s wife knew of crimes said to have taken place in her home; and whether Sandusky remained at Penn State (even after resigning from its coaching staff in 1999 while at the top of his game) simply because his charity provided him with a ready supply of victims of just the right age. As James Murtha, a 1977 Penn State graduate, put it, “…in retrospect, you could almost predict how this would turn out because of the way Penn State does business. Isolation is one of its charms, but it’s also part of the problem. They all drink the Kool-Aid up there. They lost all focus. The only way to solve a problem is to admit that you have one. It’s crisis management 101. When I saw the way they handled it, I wanted to projectile vomit.”So did I.Rated at: 5.0
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Fortunately I was able to pick this book up at the library and did not spend any money on it. I followed the development of this scandel closely as it broke over weeks late in 2011. The book itself adds very little to what came out in depth primarily through the reporting of the Harrisbug newspaper.Devisive as the incident became on a national stage for those condeming the seeming closed society of the Happy Valley faithful who clung to the images all the cherished, one cannot elude the tradgedy especially endured by the real victims. Alleged of course as it still needs to work its way through the glacial legal system. The only accurate conclusion we can draw is that there will be no real winners as is oft the case in these matters, but some semblance of justice if charges are proven and punishment handed down.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Interesting info about everything but very repetitive of facts that could have been only stated once to shorten the book. Not sure if it's the recording or my device but it seemed to loop a few of the chapters so I had to manually progress the recording to the next chapter.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I had no preconceived ideas regarding what this book was about and was pleasantly surprised with not only the topic, but the writing style. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about this journey to find truth. Definitely worth the read even if you are not involved in problematic relationships or have no negative life-altering events lurking in your past. I knew nothing about Neil Strauss and have not read his other more racy (???) books. The humor of the book cover and gold gilt pages was not lost on me; I found it very clever indeed.