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.

Peterson carries Vikings into playoffs to cap greatest rushing season ever

Peterson carries Vikings into playoffs to cap greatest rushing season ever

Joe Bianca

Adrian Peterson said all the right things in his postgame press conference on Sunday. He talked about the team accomplishing its ultimate goal in clinching a playoff berth and relegated personal considerations to the back burner. Yet the disappointment in his voice was audible. The man who had just willed his team to the positive side of a 37-34 epic over their biggest rival on national television was dejected.

In the end, Peterson fell nine measly yards short of breaking Eric Dickerson’s 28-year-old single-season rushing record of 2,105 yards. His frustration is understandable. Great athletes don’t have much use for being second on lists of awesome feats and Peterson is as great as they come. But it needs to be said and said often: the season the sixth-year back from Oklahoma put together in 2012 was the greatest of any runner in history.

The numbers are staggering: 2,097 yards rushing on 6.0 per carry. 1,598 rushing yards in his final 10 games, more than any other runner had in a full 16. 4.1 yards per carry after contact, the same number 2011 rushing champ Arian Foster averaged overall this season. In his Week 17 masterpiece, 189 of his 199 rushing yards came after contact. 40 runs of 15+ yards (next closest was star rookie Alfred Morris with 24).

Peterson was, by far, the largest contributor to a Minnesota Vikings team that improbably went 10-6 and made the playoffs a year after going 3-13. He plays alongside a second-year quarterback who’s ranked 21^st in the league by Football Outsiders. His offense has been without Percy Harvin, its only receiving weapon, since Week 9. He runs behind an offensive line that is good in space but is hardly ever able to blow people off of the ball and create big holes. He faced stacked boxes, eight and nine-man fronts, on nearly every down because defenses are unconcerned by the Vikings’ passing game. They know exactly what’s coming, they hit him a lot and in the backfield and he still won’t be stopped. He’s a battering ram, pounding away until the door comes down.

And then, there’s the knee. Last Christmas Eve, in a meaningless Week 16 game against the Washington Redskins, Peterson took a low hit from DeJon Gomes and tore both the ACL and MCL in his left knee. The catastrophic injury was particularly devastating to Peterson for several reasons. For one, the plants and cuts necessary to be a successful running back put more strain on the knee ligaments than the skills utilized for other positions. More importantly, the timing of the injury and expected recovery timetable not only ended his 2011 season but put his 2012 campaign in jeopardy as well. Even optimistic forecasts had him making his return around Week 7. There was no guarantee he would ever be the same electrifying running back again.

Yet there he was on September 9, resembling every bit of the usual Purple Jesus, running for a pair of touchdowns on his reconstructed knee as the feature back in a Vikings win over Jacksonville. As the year went on, he just kept getting better and better, running more and more violently and plowing through more and more tacklers.

Dickerson had the misfortune of setting his rushing mark in 1984, the same year Dan Marino threw for 5,084 passing yards and 48 touchdowns, arguably the greatest season a quarterback has ever produced. So a Most Valuable Player award was never in the cards for the exquisite runner from SMU.

But there has been no such season this year from the position annually most prized by NFL writers. Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers have all compiled characteristically great numbers, but in the context of this illegal contact, spread offense, quarterback-friendly era where 5,000-yard passing seasons are no longer incomprehensible, their campaigns don’t approach the transcendence of Marino’s. There should be no debate as to who the MVP was in 2012, and if the voters decide otherwise, the award should just be renamed “Best Quarterback of the Year” for transparency’s sake.

Judging by his visible discouragement with not breaking the rushing record, Peterson will probably be similarly crestfallen if he doesn’t take home the MVP. Awards in sports, however, are ultimately just debate fodder for down the road, invoked at the ends of careers and subsequent beginnings of Hall of Fame discussions. What matters most to the consumer are the ephemeral moments, the feelings engendered and the memories forged by witnessing true, once-in-a-lifetime greatness on the field.

This past Sunday, following an afternoon of forgettable games between teams who had already clinched playoff spots or been eliminated, Peterson and the Vikings took center stage. People who hadn’t seen firsthand the demolition of his running this season tuned in and marveled.

Against the backdrop of a phenomenally exciting game, everyone’s eyes focused on the guy so determinedly chopping away at the deficit between him and immortality. Twitter timelines, a haven for anonymous negativity and unrelenting snark (the latter to which I often contribute), were overwhelmed with those pulling for Peterson to break the record.

With 40 seconds left in a 34-34 tie, 2^nd & 10 from the Green Bay 37-yard line and Peterson needing 35 yards, he got loose. As he’d done so many times this season, he busted through the line, got to the second level, stopped on a dime and cut it back upfield. For a brief moment, it looked as though he would break the record in the most dramatic way possible – with a game-winning, playoff-clinching touchdown.

It didn’t happen. The Packers had safeties deep and were able to stay in front of Peterson enough to gang tackle him at the 11. The Vikings bled the clock down and kicked a field goal to win the game.

He had fallen tantalizingly short of a record he clearly was burning to own, but in the process, he shook the sports world with his performance. In the final week of a grueling season, less than a year removed from major surgery on the joint most integral to his job, he carried the ball a season-high 34 times for 199 yards, dragging an otherwise mediocre Vikings team into the playoffs with his teeth.

Dickerson’s 1984 was legendary. Jim Brown’s 1963 cemented him as the standard-bearer to which all future runners would be measured. O.J. Simpson’s 1973 produced the only 2,000-yard season of the 14-game season era. Walter Payton’s 1977 crowned him the new greatest ever. Barry Sanders’s 1997 was a work of art.

Peterson though, surpassed them all with his 2012. The numbers say it, the circumstances augment it and our eyes confirm it. After what we all witnessed, whether he has a record or wins an award to show for it is beside the point.