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Graham Spanier’s ABC Interview Will Make You Never Want To Hear The Word “Horseplay” Again

Ever since last November, we’ve obviously heard a lot – way, way more than we’d ever want to hear, in fact – about the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State. Amid though, all the horrors of what Sandusky was tried and convicted of doing, the debate surrounding the fate of Joe Paterno, the perjury charges against former Penn State vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley, and the Freeh report, there was one person we didn’t hear a whole lot from – former Penn State president Graham Spanier.

Spanier was forced out (well, he says he left by choice) just like Paterno, Curley and Schultz were, but it happend relatively quietly. There were no criminal charges against Spanier, and he wasn’t seen as the face of the entire university like Paterno was, but that doesn’t mean his reputation is any less in tatters – and recently, Spanier’s started trying to restore his name. Yesterday, his lawyers began attacking the Freeh report – which, of course, judged his actions, as well as those of other people in power at Penn State, harshly – as “blundering.” And Spanier himself talked, too: to the New Yorker and ABC’s Josh Elliott.

ABC gradually rolled out that interview over the course of the last two days, and aired a segment on today’s edition of Good Morning America in which Spanier defended his honor by noting he was a victim of child abuse himself, so had he truly known the gravity of what Sandusky was accused of doing, he’d have put a stop to it. Spanier’s contention, though, is that he wasn’t informed of the severity of the allegations against Sandusky. Rather, he was only told it was “horseplay”:

And if you’re like me, the word “horseplay” is probably going to make your skin crawl from now on – because of what was really happening, and because Spanier isn’t the only one who says he heard the term used to describe what Sandusky was allegedly doing. Paterno also used “horsing around” to describe what he’d heard, and even Sandusky himself copped to some “horsing around” without admitting anything more.

The prevalence of this term, and the corresponding amount of time it took to bring Sandusky to justice, brings to mind a column Tommy Christopher wrote for our sister site Mediaite last year, in which he urged people to call the Sandusky scandal a “rape scandal” rather than “sex scandal,” and lamented that “[t]he nomenclature surrounding ‘sex crimes’ is… hopelessly sterile.” What’s “horsing around” but another sterile bit of nomenclature that allowed Penn State’s power structure to think everything was going to be fine?

This isn’t to say Spanier is blameless and surely would have fixed everything himself had he just been given the proper information by everyone else. Far from it – what happened at Penn State was systematic failure, and the higher-ups, Spanier included, had to go. But part of that systematic failure was, it seems, a failure to grasp what Jerry Sandusky was truly accused of doing, and at least to hear Spanier tell it, a part of that failure was everyone using that damn “horseplay/horsing around” word/phrase. There are tons of lessons to be learned from the Penn State rape scandal. “Don’t sugarcoat,” it’s safe to say, is one of them.

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