Catfished

I remembered the story. Vaguely. A prominent college athlete - Samoan kid at Notre Dame having a banner senior year. Grandmother and girlfriend die on the same day. Playing on makes Manti Te'o an inspiration. Turns out the girlfriend didn't exist. Manti Te'o enters a shitstorm...

And that was all that I remembered. Actually, more than I remembered. 

When Tua Taovailoa - another ethnic-Samoan football star from Hawaii - suffered his second concussion in less than a week, I heard the name "Tua" and thought it was the catfished guy.

Then I watched Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist, a two-part Netflix documentary that revisited the now nearly decade old scandal from the perspective of both the the victim (Manti Te'o) and the perpetrator (Naya Tuiasosopo), which turned out to be fascinating and nuanced, and touched on issues on so many planes and vectors of our culture.

First, there's Manti Te'o. A star athlete from Hawaii (he graduated from the same high school Obama did), who's one of the most highly recruited high school football players, Class of 2009.

Manti is smart, gifted, handsome, driven. His family has no money for college, so a scholarship is mandatory. A lot of schools are interested, and he's leaning towards Southern Cal. Then he has a revelation that God wants him to go to Notre Dame. 

From a football perspective, why not? Although its team hadn't been doing all that great, ND is always up there in terms of the prestige of its program - including that, unlike the situation at so many sports-factory schools, most of its athletes graduate. But South Bend is cold. And Notre Dame is Catholic. Very Catholic. Which makes Manti Te'o, a very religious young fellow, a Mormon, something of an odd man out.

There are great expectations that Manti will help turn around the ND football program, and, over the years he's there, that he does.

But Notre Dame was a culture shock for him. If he'd gone to Southern Cal, even though he wouldn't have found a ton of fellow Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders, there'd have been an order of magnitude more than he found at ND. And he'd have been in an area with a large AAPI population. 

Then there was the Mormon thing...

There aren't a lot of them at Notre Dame, which is overwhelming Catholic. 80% of its students are Catholic (vs. roughly 70% at Holy Cross and Boston College, and roughly 40% at Georgetown).

In some sense, the conservative Catholic atmosphere at ND would make a conservative Mormon kid fell right at home. Still...

Being a fish out of water pretty much set Manti Te'o up for what happened to him.

Which was that he met Lennay Kekua on Facebook. Like Manti, Lennay was of Samoan descent. And smart. Stanford smart. She was very religious (not clear whether she was a Mormon), and the two grew FB close, exchanging messages and phone calls. Manti was able to vet Lennay through a cousin, who was also a friend of Lennay. Turns out, he was a FB friend who'd never met her in person.

Meeting her in person would have been impossible, because she didn't exist.

Lennay was the invention of (then) Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, who was using Facebook to help herself come to terms with her own identity as a transwoman. 

Over time, Manti pressed to meet Lennay in person, but he was a busy young man, what with school and football. And he was in Indiana, while Lennay was in California.

And, in the modern era of social media, having a virtual relationship was becoming fairly commonplace.

The relationship was growing in intensity, and Tuiasosopo (also a Samoan from a conservative religious background) decided to kill Lennay off.

And so, as football season kicked off at Notre Dame in the fall of 2012, Lennay's "sister" informed Manti that Lennay - who'd previously suffered an equally imagined accident - had died of leukemia, just hours after Manti's grandmother had died in real life.

Manti, in good athletic spirit, soldiered on, leading Notre Dame to an undefeated 12-0 season. And the story of his suffering through these two deaths captured a lot of attention, raising Manti's profile and helping him get a nomination for the Heisman Trophy. (He didn't win, but got the most votes ever for one-way players who played defense only.)

Ah, human interest. Aren't we all suckers for it?

Then, on the eve of Notre Dame's playing for the national championship, the story began to unravel.

A couple of Deadspin reporters, trying to prove that mainstream sports news sites like ESPN were willing to go with stories that they didn't bother to vet, researched Lennay and found that she didn't exist.

The pictures on her Facebook page? Stolen from the social media accounts of one of Tuiasosopo's high school classmates The persona? Entirely cooked up by Ronaiah (as she was then known) Tuiasosopo. 

The questions - and the piling on - began.

Was Manti Te'o in on the hoax? How could he have been so naive? Was he stone stupid? Was he secretly gay and in love with Ronaiah Tuiasosopo? Etc.

Manti went from cover boy and boy hero, to laughing stock and meme.

The story became a skit on SNL. Katie Couric asked him if he were gay. Everyone, it seems, was piling on.

Not surprisingly, Notre Dame lost the national championship game. Manti Te'o's play was definitely off.

Then the NFL draft came along, and Manti - who had expected to be taken in the first round - wasn't picked up until the second round. It's estimated that this tumble cost him several million dollars. 

Manti did make it to the NFL, and had a reasonably good career: 9 seasons, 3 teams. 

But football life was hard. The confidence he had felt in high school and college had taken a big hit. How had he allowed himself to be catfished? He went from there's Manti Te'o being shouted to there's Manti Te'o being whispered, or jeered.

Manti Te'o comes across as someone who, helmet off, has his head on plenty straight. He's forgiven Tuiasosopo. He's forgiven himself. He's married and a father. Whatever he does after football, he will no doubt succeed. 

Then there's his catfisher, Naya (now) Tuiasosopo.

While she does express remorse for the harm she caused Manti Te'o, she's more interested in her interviews in exploring how and why she invented Lennay, and how it was central to her coming to terms with her gender identity and sexuality. 

While I'll reserve most of my sympathy for Manti Te'o and his family, I have plenty left over for Naya Tuiasososopo and her struggles.

How easy it is to get sucked into meshugas when you're making things up on the Internet. How difficult it is to extricate yourself from it, once you get in deep.

Fascinating stuff, for sure.

If you're a Netflix subscriber, I highly recommend Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist.