Depending on how you look at it, Syracuse is either a small city or a large town (or a barn in the woods with three cows a goat, and some chickens). It’s not a huge urban area where even the rich and famous can live in relative obscurity, but it’s not a small town like Happy Valley that’s more or less owned by the local university, either. In fact, our proximity to NYC means we have a lot of aspiring media types (which once meant journalists, but now, of course, also includes well-coiffed pretty boys and girls trying to get their faces on the teevee), making it difficult to fart without finding it on the six o’clock news (which, for some reason, runs from five to six-thirty these days). I used to joke that it has to be the only place with traffic reports every twenty minutes, and live video of no actual traffic.

There goes a car…. Oh, and a truck. And another – no two cars. Breaking news just in: the cow got out of the barn. Oh, and there she goes.

So it’s hard to be anonymous (especially for local “celebrities”), and, while everyone doesn’t know everyone, you can bet there isn’t more than two or three degrees of separation between us. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I not only work with people who know the parties involved in our current “scandal,” but that we even have somebody who was actually a ball boy for the basketball team back during the time period of the alleged “incidents.” Who, in fact, is one of the four people in the original investigations (and, yeah, turns out ESPN, the local newspaper, and the police all investigated this stuff and found it to be bullshit), and who had to go back down to the police department and give yet another statement.

From what I’ve heard (and, again, I don’t actually know any of this first hand, so you’ll have to take it all with a grain of salt), the coach involved in all this lived a couple blocks away from the family in question. A family of nine kids from different parents who didn’t have a whole lot of money (I mean, nine kids – the food bills alone would have to kill you). And the kids – in fact, from what I hear, pretty much all the kids in the neighborhood – would hang out around the coach’s house, and he and his wife would try and help them out with food, money, a place to stay at times when they got older, etc. As I understand it, the coach was like a second father to these kids.

The people that know the two individuals who are making these claims described one as a “druggie” (dunno if you saw his interview, but he looks like a tweaker to me) and the other as a drunk. And both of them as pretty strange and not very bright.

Speculation seems to be that the coach in question turned off the money tap, and this was the scheme they cooked up in hopes of getting some money out of the deal. They originally came out with it back around the time that SU was on its way to winning the National Championship in 2003 (when there was a lot of SU in the local and national news). Or, the one guy did. At that point, his older stepbrother hadn’t remembered anything yet (odd that he didn’t have a problem with allowing his younger brother to be exposed to this; BTW, did I mention that there’s a third brother? He must feel left out, because he says this is bullshit, too).

Of course, nobody could corroborate his story, and life went on.

Now comes the Penn State thing. ESPN – which dropped the ball on the Sandusky story – was anxious to get a “scoop,” and apparently remembered this story. Whether they reached out to the person in question and told him to find a witness, or whether his stepbrother had a recovered memory or something, I don’t know. But ESPN had its story of abuse that went on until this “kid” was 27 years old.

Now, perhaps this is all true. Stranger things have happened. You may recall that, with Penn State, nobody exactly jumped out there and defended Sandusky. People had to have known. In this case, everyone – player, coaches, balls boys, you name it – have made a point of saying what a crock of shit this all is. In fact, former players feel so strongly about what a great guy this coach is, they’ve made a point of reaching out to the media to defend him. Our head coach – who has known this guy for close to 50 years and allows his children to be around him – says this is a flat out lie. And the coach in question (wife, son, and two daughters) flat-out denies it (I mean, so would I, but anyway).

So, anyway, I guess we’ll see. There are a lot of other holes in these guys’ stories. Like how the guy says he travelled with the coach and slept in his hotel room and was seen by the head coach (who says that’s a lie; in fact a former assistant coach has said for the three years he was here, he was the only roommate this guy had). And how this guy alleges the abuse continued until he was 27 (which, I suppose, is possible but, hey, seems like a 6’3″ athletic-looking 27 year old guy could hold off a fat 50+ year old guy. Or go to the police then – and not 12 years after the fact when SU happens to be in the news. Or that he claims he had his pee-pee touched several times a day every day for 16 years, which he figured added up to about “a hundred.”

Anything’s possible, I guess, and you hate to “blame the victim.” But you also hate to see somebody’s life destroyed by a bullshit story, too.

Our publicity-loving (Republican) DA is now seizing the spotlight and appealing to anyone who is a “victim” to come forward (we’ll see what crawls out of the woodwork there), and of course, since this all smells pretty rank and they’ve already destroyed the coach, the focus of the witch-hunt is now on the “cover up” that wasn’t a cover up and trying to destroy the the basketball program here at the very least, and maybe the entire university (if they get lucky).

So, as I mentioned yesterday, this sucks.