Interesting strategery
, knowing that SecondMile has/had approximately Zero Assets?
Wouldn't ya' say?
And that's just the ONE "funny" issue.... of many. Including:
Timing
Inclusion
Indemnification
Verification
etc
etc
etc
All in all - it is remarkable how non-accountable everyone has held the PSU BOT Scoundrels.... to this day.
Funding was always the issue.
Criminality always in the background.
Second Mile fundraisers almost always included a visit from several players and coaches. Its annual fundraising golf tournament brought together nearly everyone who's anyone in Penn State football, past and present. According to one report, Mike McQueary attended the 2003 Second Mile fundraising golf tournament, one year after he'd told authorities he witnessed Sandusky assaulting a 10-year-old boy.
Frequently football players were sent to The Second Mile after getting kicked off the team. The Second Mile would provide older mentors to keep an eye on them. The players would be pupils for the older volunteers, but heroes to the kids, who didn't know or care if they'd been recently involved in a bar fight. If the players did what they were supposed to, they would get their way back on the team, with The Second Mile's imprimatur.
One player who received this treatment was E.Z. Smith, the starting center on the 2005 Orange Bowl team. Smith was welcomed into The Second Mile, at the request of the Penn State coaches, after he was cited for underage drinking. If Penn State fans truly took pride in Joe Paterno's focus on character development off the field, then they would recognize E.Z . as an ideal Penn Stater.
E.Z. left a different legacy among most other Penn State fans, however. One night before his senior year, during a night of drinking, E.Z. and his buddies (a few on the football team) shot arrows from a compound bow at a Steelers t-shirt, mounted on a wall of their apartment—a dangerous but, frankly, hilarious drinking activity. E.Z. spent a good amount of his Penn State career in Joe Paterno's famed doghouse; after that incident, Paterno's doghouse became his permanent address.
E.Z. was no problem child. He was the kind of guy I'd want my younger sister dating. His father was his high school football coach and his mother was the principal. He couldn't have possibly come from a better family. E.Z. was guilty of getting drunk and stupid—a crime committed by nearly every man or woman who has ever attended Penn State University. It's a crime committed by literally thousands of people each weekend in State College. I too acted equally drunk and stupid in college. My buddies and I just never had the creativity to have a close-range, indoor archery contest.
When one arrow broke through the wall, E.Z. was in trouble. So were the other players. All of the players involved in the incident were suspended indefinitely. Paterno said he received "six different stories" about what transpired.
I believe E.Z.'s end of the story. Bruce Heim, a State College businessman and then a board member of Jerry Sandusky's Second Mile foundation, had taken E.Z. under his wing months earlier. Bruce told E.Z. he was welcome to work out with him and participate in The Second Mile, provided he meet his rigid expectations, including one non-negotiable one: Don't lie to me.
"E.Z., did you shoot those arrows?" he asked.
"Yes, Bruce, I did," Smith told him flatly.
E.Z. owned up to his end, and E.Z. paid for it. Playing in the home opener against South Florida was out of the question. The road back to the field was going to be a long one.
From that point forward, Bruce worked with E.Z. on how he could rebuild his name and get back onto the team. It was a frustrating process for E.Z., one in which he was forced to watch linemen with far less ability play in front of him.
If he was going to be around the Second Mile kids, E.Z. needed to act like a man. Bruce set standards for him—like showing up to workouts not a second late—and E.Z. met them all.
When he started doing so, Bruce let him mentor his own kids, and Joe Paterno let him back on the field.
By anyone's standard, E.Z. emerged from Penn State a responsible adult. Yes, E.Z. did some things in college that others might shake their heads at, but so did you and I. Sometimes you have to learn life's lessons the hard way. The people who've emerged from The Second Mile go through life drawing on lessons learned from their mentors in the foundation.
E.Z. has since gotten married, earned a master's degree in adult education, and coached for his high school football team. "I wouldn't have even graduated from Penn State if it weren't for The Second Mile," he told me in a phone conversation this month." That's the Second Mile I'll remember.