We talked to Richeal, who was born with a condition called hip dysplasia and has been disabled his entire life, after noticing this anecdote in the introduction he'd written for the book (former NFL coach Dick Vermeil wrote the foreword):
My first real contact with Jerry Sandusky came from a rather odd question he posed to me: "How much do you weigh, young man?" I was puzzled, because I knew he wasn't interested in me as a linebacker, but I told him I weighed about 95 pounds. "Get up on that scale," he ordered. I did and the locker room scale topped out at 96.
"Not bad," Jerry said, trying to sound as mean as possible, "but you still have some work to do." Sensing my confusion, Jerry stared at me and continued. "We gotta get you up to 100 pounds before you're ready to fight me."
Fight him? I barely knew him. "When you get to 100 pounds, it's gonna be you and me in the center of the locker room in a boxing match. Then I'll show you who the real boss is. It'll be you and me eyeball-to-belly button."
When Richeal was a senior at Penn State, he finally hit 101 on the scale. He writes that once the weight had been read out to a crowded locker room, the players cheered and he and Sandusky met at the center of the room. They staged a bout—"eyeball-to-belly button"—and Richeal leveled him with "a swift (and well-rehearsed) right hook."
Richeal, now 51, said repeatedly that he had never witnessed Sandusky act inappropriately with players or with young men from Second Mile. He said the "boxing" incident wasn't anything out of the ordinary because "you don't think like that.
"Now, you know, I'd be kind of uncomfortable," he allowed, "but I had no reason to be then. It was just a running gag because I weighed under 100 pounds. He'd say, you know, 'We gotta put some meat on those bones.'"
"I want to believe it's not true," Richeal said of the allegations against his friend and co-author. "I'm not an accuser or a judge, so I'll have to sit back and let it all play out. The person I knew, I never ever saw anything like that. I saw him with Second Mile kids many times—at his home, at the stadium for game days, at practices. And it was never anything like that. He never did that around me."
He added: "But I wasn't a little kid."