As news of Lance Armstrong's admission of guilt and scheduled interview with Oprah broke last week and details began to emerge, I joked to my girlfriend that, if the story is going to be that a professional cyclist took performing enhancing drugs and lied about doing so, she should wake me when something interesting happens.
Along came news of Manti Te'o's fabricated girlfriend, and I finished last week wide awake.
I don't yet know what to think of the Te'o story, and it's possible I never will. It seems that he lied about how he met the fictitious woman, and embellished details of their online relationship. He was and is, as Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick stated, the victim of an elaborate hoax, but Te'o is also complicit in the hoax. Te'o's naivety enabled Roniah Tuiasosopo to string him along so easily, and Te'o embraced the attention he was receiving, continuing to talk about Lennay Kekua even after he became aware she did not exist.
But Manti Te'o and Roniah Tuiasisopo, and his conspirators, are not the only perpetrators of this hoax.
Ultimately, we are all guilty as enablers of a culture in which a young man could be so easily taken advantage of, and a culture that is too quick to glorify a story to bother making sure it's real.
As Malcolm Gladwell and Chuck Klosterman discuss in a riveting series of emails the two exchanged over the Te'o situation, Te'o isn't a real person to us - he's a symbol of what we want our student athletes to be. We allow ourselves to believe that the athletes we see on TV are the physical embodiments of perfection - practicing and playing hard, studying and achieving in the classroom, making good life decisions and forming meaningful romantic relationships. The truth is that college athletes are students, they're fallible young adults living with the added burden of fame.
College athletics, especially NCAA football and basketball, have grown far too popular for their own good. The spotlight shown on athletes such as Manti Te'o corrupts the amateurism in which the NCAA wants them to exist. Star football and basketball players in Division I programs become on-campus and sometimes national celebrities, garnering equal media attention as their professional counterparts. But Division I college and football players aren't professional athletes. They're students. Unfortunately, the NCAA, the national and local medias, and the fans have stopped treating them as such.
Jason Whitlock underscores this point in his own brilliant column. Manti Te'o, garnering support for his outstanding play on the football field and sympathy for his emotional story, became a symbol of what we're supposed to believe and want to believe student athletes are. In truth, Manti Te'o, who suffered enormous real hardship, proved to be a young man desperately seeking the approval of his family who found comfort, and even pleasure, in a national outpouring of support.
Those expressing outrage upon discovery that Te'o is not what they believed are not truly angry with him. Rather, their anger is an outward expression of their displeasure with themselves for believing in the false symbol of Manti Te'o as easily as Te'o believed in Lennay Kekua. In the end, Kekua was as real to Te'o as Te'o was to us.
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