Appreciate the Beauty of Gray

I’m going to start this piece off right now by doing something I normally don’t like to do. I’m going to make a blanket statement about people.

When it comes to sports, people prefer things to be black and white.

(I’m not talking about race, because based on the vitriol that Bomani Jones and Michael Silver were dealing with in re: NFL coaching hires, people can’t stand talking about black and white. But that’s another column.)

Dualities are simple: there is a right and a wrong. A hero and a villain. A winner and a loser. It’s clean and easy.

The Manti Te'o Hoax Story Is Not Cut-and-Dried

(From Dictionary.com)

hoax

ʊks/ Show S[hohks] Show IPA

noun

1.

something intended to deceive or defraud: The Piltdown man was a scientific hoax.

verb (used with object)

2.

to deceive by a hoax; hoodwink.

---

Origin:
1790–1800; perhaps contraction of hocus

Synonyms
1. deception, fraud, fake, imposture, humbug.

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

~Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia

 

 

I am not Manti Te'o.

 

I mean that in every sense of the word, as far as having his heritage, his youth, his skill, his physique or his faith. In most (if not, all) instances, I am the antithesis of Manti Te'o.

 

Which means that the perspective I am writing from is going to be from an outsider's place. So keep that in mind as we wander through the minefield that his life must surely feel like right now.

 

I cannot imagine the emotions that have to be running through him right now, and I think it depends on what role he played in the farce that his life has been over the course of the last day (and month, if you want to go back that far).

 

Deadspin reported on Wednesday that Te'o's girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, who supposedly died on (or about) September 12 was not, actually, dead.

 

In fact, to be fair, there is a chance that she never existed.

 

She was a figment. A fake. A fraud. A humbug. She was apparently never real, although there are sources that state otherwise. Actually, I'll let Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey's words speak here:

 [T]here is no SSA record there of the death of Lennay Marie Kekua, that day or any other. Her passing, recounted so many times in the national media, produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper.  

Nor is there any report of a severe auto accident involving a Lennay Kekua. Background checks turn up nothing. The Stanford registrar's office has no record that a Lennay Kekua ever enrolled. There is no record of her birth in the news. Outside of a few Twitter and Instagram accounts, there's no online evidence that Lennay Kekua ever existed.

The photographs identified as Kekua—in online tributes and on TV news reports—are pictures from the social-media accounts of a 22-year-old California woman who is not named Lennay Kekua. She is not a Stanford graduate; she has not been in a severe car accident; and she does not have leukemia. And she has never met Manti Te'o.

 

Whatever the case, we are facing one of the weirdest stories we've seen in sports in quite some time.