Penn State concluded its weeklong goodbye to the former football coach Joe Paterno with a memorial Thursday at a packed arena that featured remembrances from a player from each of the six decades in which he coached, videos of him with the team and an emotional closing eulogy from his son Jay.
The service mirrored the reverential tenor of the other ceremonies that have honored the contribution that Paterno, who died from lung cancer on Sunday at 85, made in transforming Penn State and its football program. The speakers mostly avoided the child sexual-abuse scandal that led to Paterno’s firing Nov. 9.
The exception was the speech given by Phil Knight, the chairman of Nike, who was a close friend of Paterno’s. In the memorial’s most riveting moment, Knight lambasted Penn State’s board of trustees for firing Paterno, the coach from 1966 until 2011, because he did not report to the police what he knew about a suspected 2002 sexual assault by the former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. Paterno, who wore black Nikes on the sideline, reported the allegations to two university officials, but apparently did not follow up.
“It turns out he gave full disclosure to his superiors, information that went up the chain to the head of the campus police and the president of the school,” Knight said. “The matter was in the hands of a world-class university and a president with an outstanding national reputation. Whatever the details of the investigation are, this much is clear to me: if there is a villain in this tragedy, it lies in that investigation, not in Joe Paterno.”
Do I have to remind everyone? The man harbored a child molester.
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