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The site outside Beaver Stadium where a statute of the former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was removed in the wake of a sexual abuse scandal.
Among college football's many rituals, the annual Heisman Trophy presentation remains one of the highlights. Fans and coaches and former stars gather in Manhattan each December to honor the season's outstanding player. This season, about two dozen former winners stood on the stage as another member was added to their exclusive club.
Pool photo by Julie Jacobson
Reggie Bush won the 2005 Heisman Trophy, but U.S.C. later had to vacate a national title and disassociate itself from him.
But in avoiding any mention of two controversial winners, the Heisman ceremony was notable for another recent trend: colleges and sports teams that love to celebrate their history have become masters at editing it. Often this is done quietly, with computer keystrokes altering a record book, and not with an angry mob throwing a rope around a statue's neck on the stadium steps.
But sports, perhaps better than any endeavor except politics, has become adept at a type of cleansing more commonly associated with authoritarian governments. With surprising regularity and ease, once-popular figures who have run afoul of the rules or the law have been erased like disgraced leaders from an old Soviet photo album, whitewashed from history to preserve an institution's image or to abide by a governing body's sanctions.
Awards are returned. Banners are pulled down. Names are stripped from buildings. Wins, individual feats, even entire seasons can be eradicated as if they never happened.
Didn't Reggie Bush win the Heisman Trophy? Didn't Lance Armstrong win the Tour de France seven times? Didn't that stadium used to have a statue out front?
"No one says Nixon didn't go to China or sign Title IX into law because he was forced to resign because of Watergate," said Bob Costas, an NBC commentator. "It seems to me you can't strike from the historical record what occurred. The Fab Five played in the N.C.A.A. tournament, and Reggie Bush was a great and impactful player who won the Heisman Trophy."
Last month's Heisman ceremony, which received heightened scrutiny because the eventual winner, Florida State's freshman quarterback Jameis Winston, was until recently the subject of a rape investigation, was a good primer on how to present a selected history. Bush, whose 2005 trophy was later revoked when he was found to have accepted improper benefits while in college, was never mentioned during ESPN's broadcast.
When comparisons were made between the finalists who are running backs and previous backs who won the Heisman, Bush, who now plays for the Detroit Lions, was never cited. He had become the tailback who must not be named. (The name of another former winner, O. J. Simpson, rarely comes up at the Heisman ceremony anymore, either, though for entirely different reasons.)
Chris Fowler, the host of ESPN's Heisman broadcast, said by telephone that the Heisman Trust had never given him editorial direction. "They've never said one thing to me about the content of the show other than deciding how many finalists there will be," he said.
And William Dockery, the president of the Heisman Trust, said there was no ban on discussing Bush. "Obviously, this situation is not your preference," he said. "It's an unfortunate position that you'd rather not be involved in."
Perhaps it is no surprise then that the official history of the Heisman Trophy omits 2005 as if it did not happen. The honor roll on the trophy's official website moves directly and without explanation from the 2004 winner, U.S.C. quarterback Matt Leinart, to Ohio State's Troy Smith in 2006.
But Bush won the '05 award, piling up 2,541 points, the most since Simpson in 1968. By 2010, though, he had been written out of Trojans history, ruled ineligible after the N.C.A.A. determined that he and his family had received improper benefits from agents.
Years after Bush left campus for the National Football League, the National Collegiate Athletic Association ordered U.S.C. to vacate the 2004 national championship he had helped win and to disassociate itself from him. University officials removed his jersey and his Heisman Trophy, which now sit in a storage unit in New York, from a display of the Trojans' Heisman winners at the campus's Heritage Hall.
"Yes, in some cases it is cumbersome and awkward," Tim Tessalone, the university's sports information director, said by email of the revisionist history. "But it is part of our N.C.A.A. penalty."
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