R.A. hopes Sandusky trial opens people’s eyes
CHICAGO — In recent weeks, while enjoying a professional breakthrough, R.A. Dickey’s attention would drift to the Pennsylvania courtroom where former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky was tried and convicted for sexually abusing 10 boys. Such is life as a victim, working simultaneously to process the past and forge forward.
When Dickey revealed his history of abuse in a memoir published in March, he joined the year’s most significant sports conversation, one that began last autumn with the Sandusky scandal.
“It’s kind of a common thread of a common time,” Dickey told the Daily News regarding sexual abuse in sports, an ever-unspooling narrative that has ensnared Syracuse University assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine and Hall of Fame baseball writer Bill Conlin, among others.
Dickey believes that the revelations at Penn State helped to make victims more comfortable discussing, and healing from, their experiences. “I definitely think that we are stepping into a culture where there is going to be more of a forum to talk about things that have traditionally been very hard to talk about, and thank God for that,” he said.
“I have thought often about what it might do, the whole attention around the trial, and around what has happened. That’s one of the things I hold hope for — and that’s what I was hoping to do with the book — is to create a forum where it is OK to discuss things that are hard.”
Since publishing his memoir, Dickey has received “hundreds and hundreds” of letters from victims of sexual abuse, and has answered many of them. He was glad to serve in that role, but the process conjured traumas that derailed his life for years; news of Sandusky’s trial and conviction did the same.
“My perspective is that of the victims, and obviously empathizing with them,” he said. “It will never go away. That’s just not how it works. People think it works that way, but you deal with that for the rest of your life, in some capacity.”
If there is any small positive to take away from the trial — which ended Friday with Sandusky’s conviction on 45 counts — Dickey said, it was that “it may help the victims sleep at night, knowing that this guy is not going to be able to do this to anyone else. You feel like it’s one less perpetrator.
“He was falsely projecting himself as someone he wasn’t, in order to take advantage of boys. It’s just really sad.”
BAY CLEARED
Jason Bay (concussion) was cleared to begin exercising, Terry Collins said. Collins hopes that Bay will be able to begin baseball activities this weekend. Bay said on Saturday that he felt symptom-free, after crashing into the left-field wall June 15.