One response to the memorial service for Joe Paterno:
 People were attracted to Penn State because of its successful, charismatic and apparently idealistic football coach?  Sorry, but that makes me just a bit uneasy.

I can see going to a school for its academic rating or a specific major, or well-known teachers who can be accessed by signing up for a course, or reasonable in-state tuition, or a scholarship, or a workship program that prepares you for real life, or proximity to home, or distance from home, or a beautiful setting. Or even the reputation of a party school.

But choose a university because you might score an occasional ticket to a football game or once in four years find yourself in the presence of a JoePa? Yikes. How did a football program become a beacon for a university?

I was able to watch the memorial live, streaming on PCN.com. I loved the stories about how Paterno recruited players’ mothers in their kitchens, raving over their pasta, and I believed every word about his fierce loyalty to players. And I respect the dean who praised Paterno's support for the classics.

Paterno was way above most big-time coaches in his relationship to education, and the media reported it.

However, I could not help but react to the defensive note being spun around the many wonderful traits of Paterno, almost as if they had been coordinated by a public-relations firm. Or defense counsel.

The most outspoken comments were from Nike’s Phil Knight, who said the flaw in the Sandusky investigation “lies in the institution, not in Joe Paterno’s response.”

Paterno wore Knight’s footwear. So there’s that.

The people from the university seemed to be addressing some other audience – history? A grand jury? The politicians of the state?

It is hard for an outsider to believe that insiders in the extremely inbred society of the university and the football program did not know about Jerry Sandusky’s at-least very creepy tendencies.

Whatever Mike McQueary told him, there is no evidence that Paterno understood the implications, or did enough to follow up. For a man that powerful to turn the rumors over to authorities (whom he apparently stonewalled) was just not enough. Football players are trained to follow Coach. However, I would expect a university and the surrounding community to be a bit more skeptical.

The tributes to Paterno were very touching; he had a better grip in a long and honorable life than most big-time football coaches – which is saying what?

But people’s choosing a university in order to be in the reflected glow of a hallowed football coach should be enough to make us question the link between football and higher education, so-called higher education. Even if Coach loved the classics.

As the mourners pay respect to Joe Paterno, it becomes increasingly clear just how badly he was served in his final years.

Paterno had enough left in his final weeks to understand that he was going to be judged as a public figure who did not do enough when warned about the possibility of male rape on his watch.

“I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was,” he said. “So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”

That’s what Paterno told Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post. The most important person in the state of Pennsylvania lived inside a castle, behind barricades and moats formed in the name of winning a national football championship.

This is what college football is all about – win at all costs, including isolation and ignorance. Take a look at an excellent article, “How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life,” by Laura Pappano, in the New York Times education supplement of Jan. 20.  It asks the question, how did it get to be like this?

But Joe Paterno’s legacy should endure. The entire Penn State community accepted Paterno’s public reputation and his millions in donations to the educational and spiritual side of Penn State. But the mob let him down by not allowing even a court jester to speak some truths to him.

How alone he was. This was more than the King Lear paranoia of a coach who will not be shoved into retirement.

In 2004, the president and the athletic director of Penn State shuffled up to Paterno’s house and suggested it was time for him to retire. Paterno gave them the bum’s rush. Of course he did. By that time, it was already too late to create a dialogue between an aging coach and anybody he respected.

He was on his own, living by his wits, against anybody who would challenge him – because in his street-smart Brooklyn way, he knew they had only one thing on their minds, and that was winning more football games than the powerhouses in Ohio and Alabama and Florida. That’s all they cared about. He was there to be No. 1. So he told them to get lost.

In his press conferences in later years, he sounded like any cranky old man shouting at the kids to keep off his lawn. On that November night after his job was taken away from him, he sounded disjointed, telling the students to go home and study but he still did not seem to understand how serious, how ugly, this all was.

His players are now suggesting he died of a broken heart. This is classic football – us against them. We don’t have access to Paterno’s medical history in recent years (when he seemed to be a magnet for players running out of bounds), but he was diagnosed for lung cancer days after being publicly caught up in the Jerry Sandusky scandal.

Was he well served by his family, or did they all try to preserve his position against the hordes who resented every rare loss? Was he well served by his university, which allowed him to retreat deeper into the castle?

Above all, they wanted Penn State to be No. 1. And in the end, he became the Wizard of Oz, behind the trappings.

I’d rather remember the vital, earthy, skeptical, educated guy with the Brooklyn rasp, who built a good thing in the Nittany Valley – until the masses did him no favors by making him king.