High School Confidential: The Sun-Times Sports Sex Scandal
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Even though competent, honorable institutions have been blind before and will be blind again to malign forces functioning silently in their midsts, in retrospect the blindness always seems inexplicable. Certainly the Sun-Times failed to explain away knowing so little about Anding. His work wasn’t one thing and his allegedly criminal life another. Anding covered prep sports for the Sun-Times; his ability to bestow ink not only gave him access to young athletes but great power over them. The alleged victim of assault is a 15-year-old basketball player; the alleged pornography was described by the state’s attorney’s office as up to 150 sexually explicit videotapes of prep athletes and prostitutes. The time Anding already served was for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old boy in a swimming pool locker room and kidnapping and attempting to molest a 15-year-old boy.
Now the Sun-Times has pledged to review its editorial hiring policies. More to the point would be a review of its massive, gossipy coverage of prep sports. We’re not going to call prep sports a disaster waiting to happen or argue that a Peter Anding was inevitable. That’s ridiculous. But the Anding affair has thrown a stark light on a sort of demimonde: kids so hungry for attention they’ll accept the most bizarre terms to get it; adults who traffic in this need; coaches who don’t see, or if they see don’t tell. Simeon football coach Al Scott told the Sun-Times he’d been informed about Anding by someone who knew him in prison. Scott shooed Anding away from practice, and that was that. Another coach said that Anding “was well-known and suspicious to high school coaches.” Why did so few of those suspicions get back to Anding’s paper? According to the Tribune’s Sunday piece on Anding, Al Scott didn’t want to offend the Sun-Times.
At any rate, we talked to the coach at the school where the woman’s son plays. Did Anding win her over? we asked him. No way, said the coach, who asked for anonymity. “She told [Bell] in no uncertain terms she didn’t want the man there. She didn’t validate the relationship at all.”
Not that either of these coaches guessed there was a sexual dimension to Anding’s behavior. “There’s no way on God’s green earth I suspected the magnitude of this,” said the anonymous coach. Anding’s behavior on the job simply rubbed them the wrong way. Now they wonder how the Sun-Times could have been so gulled. “How did this guy get hired?” the coach wondered. “How didn’t they know? He disappears for three and a half years–and no one wonders where he’s been! And this ridiculous posture of the Sun-Times that he’s a stringer and not full-time!”
But despite the Sun-Times’s friendly coverage of her campaign, our guess is that the paper’s editorial board despises Braun. Braun’s early champion Carole Ashkinaze has left the board, and Ray Coffey, who heads it, is notoriously unsympathetic to emblems of feminist values, especially emblems as personally careless as Braun seems to be. Rightly enough, the Sun-Times came down on Braun over her handling of her mother’s $28,750 windfall in 1989 and her recent lame attempts to explain the matter away. But the paper was less indignant when Rich Williamson disgraced himself back on September 14 by absurdly linking Braun to the worst excesses of Gus Savage. CONDUCT twice condemned Williamson for this shameless attack; the Sun-Times editorial page has yet to write a word.
Mayor Daley in the Tribune’s account of the same grilling:
