A Quick And Dirty Mystery

This Manti Te'o story that has gotten into the news in the last day or so is awfully interesting to me. Te'o, a star linebacker for Notre Dame, had been one of the more inspiring stories in sports, mourning the deaths of his grandmother and his girlfriend in short order as his team marched on towards the championship game. It turned out, however, that his girlfriend was fictional, and the party line at the university is that he has been duped.

It doesn't feel right, to me or others. Some are glad to accept it, but I have a hard time believing that he could have maintained a relationship so long without ever suspecting. He was presented with a picture of a girl who wasn't the one he spoke to on the phone or supposedly met. Did he meet a woman who looked like the picture and sounded like the voice? As I say, it's hard to believe. Now, it seems evident that an acquaintance of Te'o's named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo is directly behind this fraud, but was it without the involvement of Te'o and others close to him?

Any explanation that doesn't have Te'o in connivance feels wrong. He would certainly have to be too naive and credulous to live, which is not impossible, but certainly seems unlikely in a story of a man looking for love who is a famous, deeply popular football star. That same detail also makes it feel wrong that he would fake a thing like that. It's hard to see the incentive in faking a girlfriend and her death. Somebody could fake a girlfriend to impress people, but he'd have no need of that. He could fake a girlfriend and her death for sympathy in some sort of PR move, but he was already touched by tragedy.

Things feel wrong in both conceivable possibilities. They feel wrong enough that I don't know and won't assert what the truth is. What I'm sure of is that we will know. There are mysteries which go unsolved, but this won't be one of those. There is, in a manner of speaking, a bleeding animal in the water, and there's no chance of predators leaving it alone when it's so tempting. Journalists and would-be journalists will toss and turn this story until we know it all, and I don't imagine it will take long at all.