When to print the myth...

There are so many aspects to the Manti Te’o story that are interesting that this may soon become one of my favorite news events ever. I know that many people are sick of the story already and the fact that it really doesn’t matter but to me that is one of the fascinating parts of this whole thing.


Now I will admit that as a Notre Dame alumni I fall into a slightly different category here but there is a question as to why anybody cared in the first place. We spent months focused on the story of a football player (who we had never met) and his girlfriend (who we, as well as he, had never met) and how she tragically died of leukemia during the season. Sure there is the tragedy of someone dying young but sadly that happens every day. We don’t focus on it for months and then act appalled because the nature of the story changes. But tying it into a sports story completely changes the narrative.

We don’t typically grasp just how much of a story that we add over sports in order to create a better event. In reality all sports is a group of people in one color shirt challenge a group of people in another color shirt and eventually one side wins (or, in the case of soccer, end in a 0 - 0 tie and thus make the entire enterprise completely pointless.) As has often been said, on some level all you are doing is cheering laundry. So we create storylines and plotlines and create heroes and villains and describe long standing rivalries that typically have nothing to do with the competitors. We talk about the long standing rivalries between the Red Sox and the Yankees but do the players from Japan and the Dominican Republic really care about some games played and lopsided trades between these two teams nearly a hundred years ago?

The reason pro wrestling exists is because it allows for the creation of the drama of sports without having to worry about the fact of having random results. Instead of trying to find the plot line or resorting to the dreaded Olympic human interest story you write the story, determine the ending and then just perform it for the crowd, altering it based on the whims of the individuals who actually pay to watch pro wrestling. We scoff at wrestling while Bob Costas did the exact same thing every night in London.

So we have some right to be upset about being lied to in a story by Te’o. I still am in the camp that he was duped into thinking that she was real, decided to embellish the relationship because why let the truth get in the way of a good story and by the time he figured out that she wasn’t real the story had taken off and could not be retrieved. But we are lied to in every story about sports. We use sports to illustrate the human experience. For the allegories to work we have to tweak the game to serve the message. Manti did the exact same thing. It’s not entirely the same as being upset about the last scene of the Soprano’s but it is close.

My Life in Music Part 1 (1973): I’ve decided to start a new feature on the blog in honor of my turning forty this year. I figure that I can trace my entire life, interests and beliefs through the music that was created throughout my lifetime. So I will go year by year picking one song and artist that I feel represents at least some aspect of myself. I promise not to repeat artists and will do everything that I can to insure that I have seen each artist live in concert. That second one may be tougher, especially until I get to the mid-80s or so but I will certainly try my best.

For the start I will go back to an album that was released a month after my birth by a guy who literally lived in the next town over: John Prine with his song “Dear Abby”. This is a nice place to start given that Dear Abby just died even though I must admit I thought that she had died years ago. As a Chicagoan growing up I knew the story of Dear Abby and Ann Landers, twin sisters who wrote dueling advice columns for dueling newspapers and thus taught you that the people who provide advice are the same people who would publicly feud with each other. More importantly this song has the legendary refrain “You are who you are and you ain’t who you ain’t.” It has taken me nearly forty years to figure out who I am and who I am not. Once you get that lesson down life becomes easier. Not necessarily better but easier.

I swear I really did have a Canadian girlfriend

Well I don’t have to look too far for a topic tonight. Here are my thoughts on the Manti Te’o story and what I can make out of it.


The first big question is what Te’o the victim of a hoax or was he behind it? Obviously the first thought that many people would have is that this was a big plan that he developed in order to gain more press. Invent imaginary girlfriend, have imaginary girlfriend die early in the season, gain great press from playing in her memory and use that to improve your draft position. To me that doesn’t make any sense at all. Obviously people could check up on the story and there was no guarantee that Notre Dame was going to have this amazing season and turn Manti into a Heisman candidate. Plus, why include a fake death when his grandmother, who he was incredibly close to, died on the same day? Yes it adds to the story but it wasn’t really necessary. He was already the top prospect and a prospective first rounder on a team that is on television every week.

If Manti was involved in the creation of the imaginary girlfriend and he did it for publicity he would have to be a stone cold person. From every interview and comment that I have seen about him for four years I’ve seen no indication that there would be anything like this in his personality. I’ve never heard anyone say a negative thing about the kid. If he was involved in the setup of the hoax I would be stunned and disappointed beyond belief.

So if he was a victim of the hoax what the hell happened? After thinking about it for a few hours this is my best guess.

Manti gets a message from someone on Twitter and starts a conversation. They tweet and text regularly over time. Maybe they even talk on the phone a few times. Her backstory becomes more convoluted (car accident, cancer, bone marrow transplant) until, on the same day that the news breaks that his grandmother died the person behind the hoax also tells him that the girl has died. In talking to the team and press about it Manti describes her as “his girlfriend”, which leads to the story getting confused in the press.

See, the term girlfriend is what has always bugged me about this from the start. You notice that they never showed pictures of her with him throughout the season, or mentioned him by her bedside, or any other behaviors you would expect out of someone whose girlfriend (in the standard definition of the term) is dying. But I can easily see a guy, even a top football player, refer to someone he only talks to online as his girlfriend because, hell, I’ve been guilty of that one.

Obviously my geekiness and dating challenges are well documented on this blog, which makes the fact that Kim and I are married still the best proof that I have that miracles are still possible. But in college I referred to a girl I met every week for coffee as my girlfriend. We never dated, never even really came close to in fact, but we regularly spent time together and there is no good word for a relationship like that especially when trying to explain that to your buddies who don’t know her. She can’t be your friend because then they would know her so it is just easier to describe her as a girlfriend. I’ve written about relationships where I went on a few dates or one date or never technically been on a date but more like we happened to repeatedly find ourselves in the same bar and described them all in this blog as relationships or girlfriends. It’s a huge lie and I think everyone realizes it but it makes you feel better because as a guy you never want to admit that you can’t get a girlfriend. There is just a part of the evolutionary, lizard like portion of your brain that constantly goes “I would make an especially good mate. My sperm are healthy and plentiful” and you will invent Canadian girlfriends galore to keep that image up.

So Manti talks to a girl online and describes her to a bunch of buddies as a girlfriend. He is duped into thinking she was real and when told that she has died he calls her a girlfriend. When the press calls him out on it he doesn’t want to admit that they had never actually met and they weren’t really dating so he makes up a story about how they met and how they hung out together a few times. The story takes on its own life and once someone looks into it and finds out that she isn’t real the entire thing explodes. That version makes sense to me.

I do also want to add this, though. I want to give huge kudos to my friends at Deadspin for breaking this story and doing the leg work behind it. For those who don’t know, Deadspin was founded by Will Leitch who was a few years behind me at Illinois and if I remember correctly was on the team of Daily Illini writers who beat me in the intramural sports trivia competition my senior year (yes, sports trivia was a legitimate intramural sport at Illinois.) The fact that no one else: ESPN, Sports Illustrated, CNN, every news outlet that you can think of, did the research into this story to find out the truth just shows how great of a job Deadspin does on covering sports and just how bad the mainstream media is. I mean, how can ESPN not send someone to find the girl’s parents to talk about the relationship? How could no one else do the work to find this out? That might be as big of a story as anything else here. The story should be less on the hoax itself but how in the world could the main story of the football season, involving the Heisman runner up, be false and no one notice?

Wednesday Night Music Club: Actually these are really the New Pornographers, right? I mean, I’ve met the band…