Why Mike McQueary Shooting 91 in a US Open Qualifier is Very Significant

It has been often said that you can tell more about a man in one round of golf than in years of knowing him. As a life-long competitive golfer I agree with this adage. I also believe that we now know enough about Mike McQueary as a golfer to conclude that he is an inherently dishonest person.

Last week Mike McQueary tried to qualify for the U.S. Open golf tournament. It did not go well. In fact, he shot a embarrassing 91 and and only beat two other qualifiers (some immediately joked that if only he had continued to play in Second Mile golf tournaments even longer than he did after the "incident" that he would have been better by now).

To a non-golfer this may seem irrelevant to the Sandusky case or to McQueary's truthfulness as a person. After all, everyone has a bad day, right? So what if he isn't a very good golfer?

This issue here is not that McQueary, who apparently is now trying to become a PGA club pro (not a PGA touring pro), isn't very good at golf. it is that he clearly lied to get into the tournament.

Here is why it is obvious McQueary lied...

To be eligible to qualify for the U.S. Open you have to have attest, in writing, to having under a 1.4 handicap. This means (basically) that the best 10 scores of your last 20 have to average less than 1.4 strokes from the course rating (which is usually around par). Someone with that handicap would usually shoot in the mid 70s on a decently difficult golf course and would rarely shoot much over 80, even on a bad day.

McQueary's dreadful 91 was so outside the realm of what a 1 handicapper should shoot (especially when the player is a former college football quarterback who played in front of national television audiences and 100,000 seat stadiums) that, by rule, the USGA is now allow to ban him from playing in any further USGA events until he can prove that he can play at a national level. As a point of reference, my own handicap is, ironically, almost exactly what McQueary's allegedly is, though in about 25 years of trying to qualify for USGA events, I believe that my highest score ever was an 85 (and that was in a brutal rain storm).

This alone would be enough to bring McQueary's already dubious personal credibility into further disrepute. However, there is more to the story.

If you research how McQueary got his handicap below 1.4 (which you can do yourself at this website by plugging in his full name and state) you will see just what a brazen a liar he clearly is.

In the month before the last handicap revision before the deadline to enter the U.S. Open, McQueary posted a remarkable 14 scores. The highest entry was an 84 (which was in a tournament round which he had no control over whether to report the score or not) and the last two were by far the lowest he had ever shot. This was obviously done in a way which was, at best, contrived, and at worst, flat out made up, in an effort to make sure his handicap was low enough so he could try to qualify for the U.S. Open.

While his efforts at handicap manipulation were successful, McQueary was exposed as a fraud when he shot that 91, which would have been almost statistically impossible for a true 1 handicapper to shoot. But again, the relevance here is not just about his golf, or even his honesty.

Contrary to public perception, I have actually been rather kind to Mike McQueary. I have been extremely hesitant to claim that he has "lied" about anything in this case. In fact, when I went on the Today Show the first time to discuss this case and Matt Lauer asked me about this issue I said that its possible that McQueary simply misremembers what he thought he "saw" happen, or that he was manipulated into "remembering" what he testified to. In my book, "The Betrayal of Joe Pateno," I actually go out of my way to conclude that McQueary was NOT a blatant liar.

Now, after this revelation, combined with what ESPN confirmed (but didn't report) about him, I am now forced to believe that it is quite possible that McQueary has knowingly lied at many stages of this story.

I find it particularly interesting that it now appears that McQueary has a remarkable amount in common with Bill Clinton. Both have lied under oath (even if he really did "see" an assault, we already know that McQueary has testified to things which are not true), both have cheated on their wives and are very sexual people, and both cheat/lie on the golf course.

I also think that the reason McQueary lies is very similar to why Clinton does. Both rationalize that either there is no harm done (I am convinced McQueary exaggerated what he "saw" in the shower because it was in his own interest and because he was convinced by investigators that he was helping put a pedophile behind bars) and because they are personally entitled to their own truth because of who they are and what they have been through.

The bottom line here is that nothing Mike McQueary has said can now be fully trusted, and the ENTIRE case against Penn State is based on the word of a man who: got the date/month/year of the incident wrong, cheated on his wife, bet on college football games he played in, and lies about his golf handicap.

You really can't make this stuff up.