“We’re braining our boys and raping our girls.”
That’ll grab your attention at the beginning of a forty-five-minute conversation. Irv Muchnick was asked what drives his passion to report on training deaths in football and sexual abuse in swimming. When you follow Irv’s work, you get used to hard-hitting stuff. But that was an extra level of truth.
Muchnick: Don’t try to hide from this man (Broadsheet)
Muchnick is used to violence in sport. He grew up in St. Louis watching his uncle Sam Muchnick’s wrestling shows. This inspired 2007’s groundbreaking Wrestling Babylon, “a shocking document of the ruthless way sports entertainment eats its own.”
After his expertise earned cameos with Bill O’Reilly and Nancy Grace, Muchnick followed in 2009 with Chris & Nancy, detailing the story behind the Benoit murder-suicide.
But Muchnick wasn’t done there. While his research led him to the epidemic of concussions in football and other contact sports, his family life led him to the rigors and joys of swim-parenthood. And he stumbled right into the world of a coach named Jesse Stovall.
Through USA Swimming’s underreaction to high-profile cases of abuse, Muchnick kept pushing. He was not satisfied. He kept badgering. He wanted every case of abuse made public, not just shoved under the rug with a “banned” designation from USAS, then forgotten.
When Muchnick partnered with investigative reporter Timothy Joyce, they made a formidable team and they asked questions that angered a lot of people, right up to Chuck Wielgus at the top of USA Swimming. When they got an interview with Outside Magazine, you’d think the sword was drawn and the heads would roll.
But the average reader thought, geez, those dudes are pissed. Glad they’re out there fighting. And the reader flipped the page to another glossy-print Outside adventure. That was in 2014.
Now it’s five years later and Muchnick has honed his focus. A cynic might say he’s jaded, weary as he is of talking about storylines like this in general terms. But he’s still driven. He wants to stick with individual cases where he can make an impact.
Braeden Bradforth: Gentle giant (NJ1015.com)
Muchnick advocates for the family of Braeden Bradforth, a “gentle giant” who died of heat stroke after a brutal Kansas football practice. The story is made more tragic by investigators’ reluctance to seek clear answers about what happened. But Irv is swinging that sword on the family’s behalf, even if all he can do is write about it.
Ted Agu: Bears teammates remember (SF Chronicle)
He continues a years-long legal battle with the University of California, seeking the release of documents under that state’s Public Records Act that will shed new light on an institutional coverup following the death of football player Ted Agu in 2014.
Gibney: still on the run (Irish Times)
And Muchnick has been relentless in his pursuit of justice against George Gibney, former Irish national team coach who ducked pedophilia charges in 1993 and slipped off to the USA – where he still lives as a permanent resident. Muchnick’s constant inquiries helped force Gibney out of coaching, but this perp is still in America, hiding from justice back home.
Muchnick tweets (@irvmuch) and blogs daily on just these three topics. He doesn’t back down. He demands accountability for bad guys and justice for victims. His online presence rarely gets comments or retweets. Is he tilting at windmills? Is it frustrating when people don’t take him seriously? Is it all an impossible dream?
“Sure, but that’s the kind of journalism I love,” he says. “Change is glacial sometimes. In youth football leagues, some parents are finally voting with their feet and finding other things for their kids to do. People don’t like to mix new ideas with their entertainment choices. It’s a sausage factory. I mean, you love the taste, but…”
Muchnick is on a bigger mission, even as he says he wants to narrow his focus, even as he claims he’s done talking about raping and braining in general terms.
“I’ve put in years of sweat equity on these issues. And it seems like, especially post-Nassar, people believe there’s nothing new under the sun. Nobody wants to go where I want to go. I want to tear up the Amateur Sports Act. Change everything. I’d like to get people to talk about this culturally, about the way we do youth sports.”
He sees the vastness of the elephant he’s trying to eat. It’s an unprecendented paradigm shift he’s suggesting.
“I realize that [our sports culture] is part of American exceptionalism. We’re not China – we don’t let the government select our kids and force them to play – but there’s still cruelty out there. We have this gladiatorial entertainment that’s monetized by only a tiny portion of those actually participating.”
I ask him for specifics. What, for instance, about sex abuse in youth sports, needs to change – culturally?
“I challenge the trope of abuse journalism. It’s too victim-centric. We need to be sensitive to survivors, but can we let traumatized people call all the shots in the stories we tell?”
Irv Muchnick is teetering on the brink… this attitude flies in the face of convention. Then he drops the bomb.
“Parents need to take ownership in this crisis.”
Bam!
He’s on a roll, but I have to stop him for a minute, have to interrupt him. Not many years ago, here in my little town, a swim coach got fired. Six months later a parent stood up in a board meeting, in tears, because her 12-year-old daughter was “still having meltdowns” over the loss of her mentor and friend. She demanded guidance on “what am I supposed to do?”
Really, and this is a true story, what kind of parent could allow herself to be groomed so purely and completely? How did she let her pre-adolescent daughter get that attached to a single man in his 50s? So attached that, six months after he went away, that little girl and her mother were still unable to process the trauma? How?
“Yeah,” Muchnick says, “that’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
He takes a breath and gets back on his roll.
“When an abuser is outed, so much of parents’ rage is just sublimated guilt. They’ve been manipulated by the cult of the coach. Kids are lucky to have someone to look up to, a role model, whether it’s a teacher, coach, or someone else. But parents need to assume some of the blame for where we are culturally with sports: the way we just hand over our kids and trust everything will be OK.”
Muchnick has seen it play out the same way, over and over, when abuse allegations come up.
“Parents will deny everything, deny, deny. Then, when the worst happens to their own child, they become the most vituperative reform advocate without any memory of who they were just ten minutes earlier. We own a lot of pieces of this problem. But we like to talk about the abusers and the victims, not about the culture that led us to this.”
Muchnick scoffs at “Safe Sport” initiatives, specifically in swimming and now across all Olympic sports. “The entire thing is a massive fraud,” he says. He worries that we’re all too weary of hearing about abuse, and we’re banking our complacency on an office where bureaucrats spew platitudes and gloss over the truth that we’ve really solved nothing yet.
In a more recent column for Outside Magazine, he warns about the aftermath of Larry Nassar, that “anyone tempted to conclude that jailing Nassar, lopping off some heads, and tweaking a few rules solves the problem needs a history lesson. Comparable abuses have been perpetrated in swimming for decades, but for whatever reason they haven’t captured the public’s attention or led to sufficient reforms. We must seize this moment of heightened awareness to demand a thorough makeover of sporting organizations.”
Again, he derides “abuse journalism.”
“They’ll tell us about how many fingers were inserted in which orifice, how many times. But what they don’t talk about is the fact that sexual abuse isn’t about gratification, it’s really about power. It’s about control.”
The Netflix series House of Cards knew this when Frank Underwood said, “Everything is about sex. Except sex. Sex is about power.”
Some abusers have power to shake off accusations and walk away, while their victims find a path forward in life. And some victims just can’t manage that. I contacted Muchnick last week when he wrote about Sarah Burt, a 16-year-old victim whose abuser faced no consequences. She still pretended all was sunny in her life, until the day she stepped in front of a truck and killed herself. Muchnick’s piece discussed the vast web of lives – victims, their friends and loved ones, their future relationships –profoundly altered by just one abuser. That same web is woven throughout my five-plus-years-in-the-works novel Diamonds and Dirt.
Author Steven Blackmoore is credited with saying that “nonfiction is very good at facts. Fiction is oftentimes better at truth.”
Irv Muchnick and I have different methods but we have the same mission: wake people up, change culture, maybe even save lives.
One day we’ll be thrilled to see something juicier than busted-up windmill blades on the ends of our lances. For now we keep on jousting.
I like this: “Author Steven Blackmoore is credited with saying that “nonfiction is very good at facts. Fiction is oftentimes better at truth.”
Parents’ complicity in the physically/emotionally/sexually abuse and manipulation can perhaps be traced to the desire to achieve recognition or glory through their kids’ accomplishments. As parents, I think none of us can say that we’re entirely innocent of this urge. The antidote is perhaps to reduce the parent/child/sports (or music or academics as well) experience into the elemental question after each game, each practice: how did today benefit my child, and what price is the child paying.
Thanks Phil, you’ve tapped directly into what Irv was telling me on the phone a couple weeks ago. When he spoke of the parents who back up a coach’s grooming and manipulation no matter what, until it’s proven that he molested someone at which time they jump on the dog pile like they weren’t part of the problem in the first place for allowing him access to their kids… Of course the perp is the only criminal, but a parent who looks real deep in the mirror has to feel a ton of guilt in a situation like that. I’ve been listening to a series of podcasts from a swim coach named Chris DeSantis who discusses grooming behaviors that are egregious and hurtful and abusive even when they don’t involve sexual abuse. It’s heartbreaking, but also fascinating, as I (like many adults) have certainly seen it happen, and done nothing to stop it. My next post will be about this. Thanks again as always for reading my rants.