Manti Te’o is six months older than I am. We both attend upper-echelon colleges. We are both in the midst of job searches. Manti majored in graphic design, while I’m majoring in government. He is a standout college football player—the kind of player that exists at schools other than Bowdoin. Manti turns 22 on Saturday.
Over the course of the last week, the story of Te’o’s fabricated girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, has taken America by storm. Commentators have called it “the story that broke the Internet.” The unfolding mystery quickly upstaged Lance Armstrong’s admission of Performance Enhancing Drug use and his (bullshit) apology.
That’s right, the story of a fake online romance has transcended the fall from grace of a cancer-surviving, world-champion American hero.
Of course, those aren’t all the details of the hoax perpetrated against the Notre Dame star. Te’o’s relationship had received publicity throughout the football season because of the fake girlfriend’s alleged death after a battle with Leukemia and, more importantly, the tragedy’s role as motivation for him as an athlete.
Te’o, we have found out, was given undue sympathy and praise for performing well on the football field while battling through gigabyte-generated heartache. He even spoke about his love for Kekua on ESPN, concealing the fact that he had only communicated with his girlfriend by phone and on Facebook.
To be fair, though, was the relationship really fiction? Most Bowdoin couples never make the leap from texting to vocal telephonic communication.
We have now learned—at least for the time being—that Te’o found out that Kekua was an invention around the same time we did. For the better part of a year, he was cruelly led to believe that he had found intimacy with a young woman who died of Leukemia six hours after the passing of his grandmother.
However, prior to learning definitively of his victimization, America disgustedly shook its collective head and bemoaned its own duped-ness.
The public had been suckered into a fantastical story and now thirsted for the details that would make them triumphant in the face of another’s misery. We Americans hate to play the fool and we’ll shame you until we forget that we were ever thrown for a loop.
Boy, weren’t we taken advantage of? We, under false pretenses, added fuel to the fake narrative of a college linebacker bearing his burden bravely and playing inspired football.
By golly, we should only sit, eat and watch football with that much passion when someone has truly earned our intrigue. Te’o, we suspected only days ago, was a babe-inventing fraud who manipulated us into praising and pitying him. How could he do this to us?
Here is where I pause and ask: is America freakin’ serious?
At the height of our uncertainty, the possibilities were threefold.
1. Te’o was cruelly duped by an online impersonator.
2. Te’o was duped initially and, after finding out, perpetuated the lie out of embarrassment or for the attention.
3. Te’o is desperately insecure about his popularity and/or sexuality so he invented a tragic story around a girlfriend that resided only in his cerebral cortex.
In which of these situations are the spectators of college football— and news watchers generally—owed something by this troubled college student? I’ll tell you: at no point ever.
We took umbrage with our own voyeuristic vulnerability when a glossy narrative of pain and personal struggle was substituted for a grainier narrative of pain and personal struggle. That’s why the story became a sensation. Because America lost its collective shit when the support structure of an overly idealized 21-year-old began to crack.
It should go without saying that Te’o’s privacy has been violated. If you think he’s getting what he deserves for talking about the story in the first place, you’re probably a terrible person.
Successful college athletes are commoditized and glamorized by a system that certainly does not ask for consent. Secondly, this was a college kid who messed up on the Internet. He didn’t break the law. He didn’t cheat his way to athletic success. I ask again, what does he owe us?
Finally, I should say that I don’t believe that any members of the millions-large audience that watched this saga unfold can or should be held individually responsible for the way we treated Te’o. Like most issues in a world with seven (that’s right, seven) billion people, the problem is systemic.
As disgusting as this sounds, the media was only showing what we wanted to watch, and we only watched what the media was showing us. Somewhere in that circular doom spiral, culpability disappears. However, I think we all need to examine whether we can take America and its blighted culture seriously when the titanic story of this winter break was that a mostly meaningless college sports story was as fantastical as we wanted it to be. And so we were outraged.