Lies, damn lies and the feckless sports media

Lies, damn lies and the feckless sports media

Joe Bianca

Lance Armstrong must be pissed. After finally coming down from his high horse, letting go of the last vestiges of his superhero facade and planning to admit to the world that he was the fraud we all suspected, he probably thought he’d at least be the most relevant lying asshole in America this week. Now, with the bizarre events surrounding Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o unfolding Wednesday night and the riveting fallout still to come, it’s hard to get worked up over a known cheating scumbag performing the ritual of confessing his sins to sister Oprah.

In case you haven’t been following the Te’o soap opera the last 24 hours, here’s a quick rundown: the Heisman trophy finalist’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, the one he said died of leukemia shortly after she was in a bad car accident, was not real. His tragic story of losing her, reported and referenced by media outlet after outlet across the country throughout the college football season, was bullshit. She never existed, and though the details are still murky on who knew what and when, it’s becoming obvious that this was a planned and executed hoax. The pictures on her Twitter page were lifted from the Facebook account of a friend of someone Te’o knew.

Te’o is maintaining that he was duped just like the rest of us, but his story is flimsy, to say the least. He says he was in a loving online-only relationship with someone he believed to be Kekua, was heartbroken after her “passing,” only to find out she was never real in the first place sometime late last year. But his behavior when discussing Kekua after her phony death reeks of someone trying to obfuscate a fake girlfriend. He didn’t attend her imaginary funeral, insisting that she told him not to miss any games for her, but divulged the oddly specific detail that her casket was closed at exactly 9 a.m. Pacific time.

In a feature with ESPN’s Gene Wojciechowski, Te’o opened up about Kekua’s death. Yet when doing research for the piece, Wojciechowski says:

Before I wrote the script, I remember trying to find an obituary for his girlfriend and could not. And couldn’t find any record of this car accident. But we asked Manti, could we contact Lennay’s family and he said the family would prefer not to be contacted. Could we have some photos of Lennay? He said the family would prefer not to provide those.

About a week later, the South Bend Tribune ran a story about the fictitious Te’o-Kekua relationship, with a fairytale backstory and new details provided mostly by Te’o’s father, Brian. If you haven’t heard, Brian Te’o is a bit of an overprotective nutcase of a football dad. After Notre Dame got the shit kicked out of it by Alabama in the BCS National Championship Game, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser printed a photo of Manti getting steamrolled by Crimson Tide running back Eddie Lacy on its front page with the headline “Bowled Over” attached. That didn’t sit well with Brian, who took to Facebook and insanely urged fans of his son to unsubscribe to the paper over this egregious act of betrayal.

With a new, invented, romantic history behind the Te’o girlfriend story, other news agencies began picking up and running with it, increasing the groundswell for the senior’s Heisman candidacy in the process. There’s no doubt Te’o was aware these fabricated details about the relationship — a chance meeting between the two in 2009, Kekua coming to visit him in Hawaii several times — were being reported again and again, yet he did nothing to set the record straight. Either Te’o lied to his father, who in turn parroted those lies to everyone who’d listen, his father lied and Te’o went along with it, or they both lied their asses off to rally support for a Heisman bid.

We’ll probably find out in the coming days and weeks just which Te’o was full of more shit, but one thing is for certain: if the mainstream sports media were as interested in practicing real journalism as they are in extracting every last drop of sap from their subjects, Deadspin wouldn’t have showed them all up months later by doing some actual reporting.

Just look at who ESPN’s biggest journalistic acquisition of the past decade was: Rick Reilly, The King of Schmaltz, the guy always trying to find the dead grandmother or the paraplegic uncle behind the player kicking ass on the field, so he can tell us all how it’s bigger than the game for this man. There’s a cottage industry for finding, and sometimes forcing, the human-interest angle in sports journalism.

Last year, this segment of the media reached its collective nadir with the hundreds of thousands of words spilled trying to ascribe Tim Tebow’s late-game heroics to something greater, instead of calling it what it was: a small sample size of clutch drives orchestrated by a quarterback who sucked throughout the other 55 minutes of most games. Yet, they succeeded. Tebow was a star because the media made him one. So one can understand why Manti and/or Brian Te’o thought that injecting some deeper meaning and a made-for-TV story into his Heisman campaign made practical sense.

A successful scam is just as much an indictment of the victim as of the con artist. The fact that the Te’o-Kekua story was reported by dozens and dozens of leading news sources (ESPN, CBS, USA Today, SI, Fox Sports just to name a few) and nobody did enough fact-checking to deduce that one of the central actors didn’t fucking exist should be an enormous red flag for anyone purporting to care about the legitimacy of sports journalism.

The media is supposed to filter rose-colored fantasies about sports heroes also being real-life ones, not sell them. Because most of the time, the game isn’t bigger than the game, and trying to force it to be so only leads to the hagiography of people who turned out to be assholes all along. Just ask Lance Armstrong.