House of Lies

I like to think of myself as a logical person. Most likely because of this, I also tend to like procedural shows, or at least shows with some kind of crime solving element (Castle, Veronica Mars, Murder She Wrote, etc). My favorite part is always inevitably the end, where the heroes figure out or stumble upon a key fact or piece of evidence, maybe something they overlooked before, that leads them to the truth and ties everything together. Once they have all the right information, everything is put in its proper perspective and the crime is solved.

Nothing about this Manti Te'o thing makes a lick of sense. Sports scandals, even the most bizarre ones, usually have an explanation. Sometimes they're crazy, but you can at least go, "Okay, I see how that makes sense." For example when Tiger Woods somehow had a massive accident backing out of his driveway, it seemed weird at the time. Then it came out that he had a mistress (then multiple mistresses) and his wife chased him with a golf club, which makes a lot more sense that he somehow backed into a fire hydrant or whatever.

But now two days out from the big reveal that not did Te'o's girlfriend not die, she never even existed, I'm just as confused as I was the first day, if not more. With every fact, interview, or statement, things seem to make less and less sense. Everything we think we know seems to bring up more questions. Let's have at it.

News breaks from Deadspin: Te'o's girlfriend Lennay Kekua doesn't exist. Her death was a hoax. The girl in the picture was a friend (or acquaintance) of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.

This is the only point in time I thought I understood what was going on. Tuiasosopo and Te'o perpetuated this hoax in order to generate publicity. People have done strange things and told lies to boost their fame in the past.

Then the denials and the statements.

Manti has repeatedly said he wasn't faking it and was "never" in on the hoax.

Notre Dame came out in support of Te'o, including a teary statement from AD Jack Swarbrick who claimed Te'o was deceived and had told the school, who launched an investigation.

Reagan Maui'a of the Arizona Cardinals came out and said that not only did Kekua exist, but he's met her and were "good friends." As far as I could tell, he was the only person who claimed to have met her.

Today, a friend of Tuiasosopo came out and said that he admitted to the hoax and that Te'o had no involvement. It appears that two people from California had a cousin who was also fooled by Tuiasosopo in a similar ruse.

Other than Maui'a, these statements seem pretty straightforward. Te'o was the victim of a strange prank by Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. But if we assume these things are true, there are still things that don't add up and questions that need to be answered. Namely:

How is it possible Te'o and Kekua never met?
Te'o's father Brian told the story of how Manti and Lennay met and locked eyes after a football game. That doesn't take place online. He also talked about how Lennay has visited them in Hawaii. Why wouldn't Manti correct him or deny that fact? There's nothing to be gained from that lie (unless it's to keep the hoax alive). Manti's a popular college athlete. His family doesn't seem to be poor. Both he and Kekua have ties to Hawaii. In the 3 years that they knew each other, how is it possible that they weren't interested enough to actually meet up if in fact they were so in love?

Why didn't he visit her after her car crash or when she was on the brink of death with leukemia? Why didn't he attend her funeral?
This seems particularly heartless and confusing. I know if someone I care about was in such a dire situation, I wouldn't hesitate to fly across the country. But Te'o couldn't/wouldn't do that for the love of his life? The time frame between the accident and her death is shaky, but it was at least several months, more than enough time for him to go visit. And not showing up to her funeral? After carrying out a relationship where you unfortunately never met? You're not going to take that one last opportunity to finally see her in real life before she goes into the ground? According to Te'o, Kekua told him that it was more important to play in the game. But as Chuck Klosterman rightly points out, that's the stuff that belongs in movies.

"In real life, the dying sometimes say things like that. But in real life, we ignore that kind of advance directive once the dying person is actually dead. The reason we go to the funeral of someone who said "I don't want you to miss a game for my funeral" is that we are so moved by that kind of selflessness that going to the funeral becomes even more important. It's only in the fake world of sports that the heroic move is to take that kind of statement at face value."

How atrocious of a human being do you have to be to ignore someone you claim to love and care about who's gone through not one, but two life threatening situations?

Why was Notre Dame so quick to come out in such strong support of Te'o (but so slow to reveal their knowledge of the situation)?
I see three reasons why they would so adamantly back Te'o.
1. They believe his side of the story and trust his character.
2. They know the truth based on what their investigators uncovered.
3. They are trying to protect the program for a reason that remains unknown.

I say unknown because if it was as simple as just keeping the Notre Dame name clean, they could have distanced themselves until more facts came out. Te'o is NFL-bound and not part of their program. Staying as far away as possible would be the surest way to keep themselves out of it. By coming to his defense like they have, it indicates that they either believe his story or are trying to protect themselves.

Why did Te'o keep the hoax going (and then lie about it to Jeremy Schaap)?
In an interview with Schaap tonight, he claims to "never" have been part of the hoax or faking it. The problem is, Swarbrick had claimed that Te'o found out about the hoax on Dec. 6th via a phone call. During interviews in the coming days and weeks leading up to college football awards and bowl season, Te'o didn't reveal what he knew, but continued to talk about his girlfriend and her death. I'm not sure how anyone can spin that as not participating in the hoax. He knew he'd been duped and went on about his interviews like nothing had changed.

If Te'o is not involved, what is Tuiasosopo's end game?
People don't do things for no reason. If Te'o was in on it, it seems reasonable that the goal was to pump up his popularity and get his name and story out there. But if it was just Tuiasosopo on his own (or possibly with a few cronies), what's the point? There didn't seem to be any attempts at extortion. If the goal was humiliation, wouldn't it have been better to keep Kekua alive and have a big reveal on your own terms? What does killing her off do other than turn the person you're trying to embarrass into a sympathetic figure? Was it just for fun? After that long, when does it stop being fun and start being boring or borderline sadistic? It just doesn't make sense.

Other questions we don't know:
Who was Manti talking to on the phone?
How come no one caught that the dates of Kekua's car accident and death were inconsistent?
Why did Manti and Notre Dame sit on this for over a month?
Manti said he said things to suggest he met Kekua because he thought it would sound crazy that he hadn't (oh the irony). In the age of Facebook and Twitter, did he really feel like that was a stigma?
What's up with people who say they knew Kekua or knew Te'o and Kekua as a couple?

We're getting to the point where the most logical explanation that I've seen so far is a newspaper report claiming that Kekua told Te'o she faked her death to avoid drug dealers. That's the kind of territory we're in with this thing now.

I don't know what that one piece will be that's going to bring this all together, but I'm as anxious as anyone who's not involved to find out because this crap is making my head hurt.

Hall of Shame

A few weeks ago, my brother had to travel to Cooperstown for a work trip. I made the three hour drive up to visit and we went to go see the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I had never been to a hall of fame before, and to be honest, my interest in baseball dropped off pretty rapidly as soon as I stopped playing Little League. Still, I was struck by the sense of history in that building. I guess I was expecting a celebration of the individual, but in fact we didn't even get to the actual hall where all the players' plaques are hung until the very end of our visit. Instead, the majority of the hall is devoted to the sport of baseball as a whole which, thinking back, makes a whole lot more sense that the single-player focused museum I had in mind. There were floors and large areas dedicated to things like the origins of the sport, stadium history, or race in baseball, and the sections specifically about records and individual players (again, what I thought would be the bulk of the hall's focus) were just stops along the way.

It was incredible seeing pictures of true pioneers of the game, whether it was the first few baseball clubs or the first women in professional baseball. Some of the displays hardly resembled modern day baseball, but seeing pictures and items from a hundred years ago just added to the mystique. I felt a much greater appreciation for the national pastime.

Today, the results of the Hall of Fame ballots of the voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America's were revealed and, perhaps not so surprisingly, no one was voted in. There are several great pieces (written by people much smarter and knowledgeable about the game than I am) about why this is a slippery slope and quite frankly, idiotic, but I wanted to take this opportunity to hate on one of my favorite targets of all time, Barry Bonds.

In his playing days, I hated Barry. As a Dodger fan, it burned to see a player on a rival team ripping up the league. His (at the time) suspected 'roid use made him an easy target, and the fact that he was by many accounts arrogant and not at all pleasant to deal with conveniently took away any guilt in drinking the haterade. I loved watching him and the rest of the Giants fail in the World Series against the Angels. Despite the fact that he was a perennial MVP contender, I wondered aloud during a game whether or not a hypothetical situation where he signed with the Dodgers would make me renounce my fandom (the decision: yes it would, and this Mexican fan who overheard turned around with a big grin on his face and high fived me). Of my entire college experience, one of my least favorite aspects was the fact that I'm an alum of the same school that he's from.

And yet. Barry was the best player I've seen play the game in my lifetime. I'm not old enough to have seen legends like Babe, Mays, Mantle, or Ty Cobb although you could reasonably argue that Bonds, with his total package, was better than many of those players. Barry was the ultimate five-tool player, and you'd have to look pretty hard to find a weakness in his game.

There's no question that Barry should be an easy first ballot entrant on the basis of his statistics. The power numbers are obvious, and to some, the most dubious, but before the 1999 season (which is when his steroid use is suspected to have started) Bonds already had 411 home runs and 445 stolen bases. To this day, he is still the ONLY member of the 400/400 club, and he achieved it in his first 12 (essentially undisputed untainted) years in the league. He was an eight time All-Star and Gold Glover, as well as a seven time Silver Slugger and three time MVP. And perhaps the most strange to me, during his unreal 2004 season, he led the league in on-base percentage by .140, which is the same gap between Todd Helton who finished 2nd and Jermaine Dye, who was 128th. Not only that, he could have finished the season with 0 hits in his 373 at bats, and still would have had a .376 OBP, good for 35th and ahead of players such as Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira.

The only thing keeping him out is the steroid thing, the undeniable mammoth in the room. It seems unfair and overly self-righteous to apply a double standard to these players, whether they are admitted or suspected users. It's impossible to fairly or accurately assess the impact of steroid use on their performance and statistics (look at this list. Not exactly packed with sluggers and flamethrowers right?) Many baseball writers made a name (and a nice living) for themselves writing about the exploits of these players in that era. Now they want to apply what Buster Olney calls "retroactive morality" and try to pretend like those times never happened. They, and really, the game of baseball itself, had no problem turning a blind eye to what these players as it was happening (as I mentioned before, it was obvious enough to make these players prime targets for jokes even at the time) and reap the benefits of the excitement these guys were bringing to the game.

There are plenty of players already in the hall who used substances to enhance their performance, players who were morally questionable (or even bankrupt) off the field. And yet NOW we decide that it's not just okay, but even reasonable to deny access to both the greatest hitter and pitcher (Roger Clemens) the league has had in decades.

The steroid era happened. Baseball has moved on. Voting for these players would not be a celebration of whatever abuses they had, just an acknowledgement that in their time, they set themselves apart from their peers. With these players, baseball has the chance to take steroids head on, recognizing its ugly past. By trying to scrub it from its history, it looks like baseball is just trying to ignore the problem, just like it did in the 90s and early 2000s.

To me, the Hall of Fame is a celebration of baseball's greatest talent and its best memorial to its history. Denying Bonds, Clemens, and other deserving players entry is a disservice to both aspects of the Hall.