Love Illuminated by Daniel Jones

Author:Daniel Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Case 1: The Foolish Jock

Manti Te’o, a star Notre Dame football player who supposedly fell for a woman he met online in 2011, was widely mocked as a thick-necked cretin for having publicly proclaimed his love for someone who turned out not to exist. To friends, family, and the media, he talked about Lennay Kekua as his girlfriend, the love of his life, and even his future wife. When she abruptly died of leukemia near the start of Notre Dame’s 2012 football season (only two weeks after her surprise diagnosis, and on the same day Te’o’s grandmother died), Manti Te’o’s tragic love story went national, and his spirited play in the first games of Notre Dame’s season was credited to his emotional outpouring in the midst of so much personal tragedy.

When it came to light many months later that Lennay Kekua never existed, and Te’o had never met her, and neither had his family, the public was incredulous. Her picture was of someone else, swiped off the Internet, and her voice—those few times they spoke on the phone—was, oddly enough, that of a male football player who had briefly crossed paths with Te’o years before and who went on to describe himself in media interviews as a “recovering homosexual.”

The reaction in the press was basically: Who could be so stupid? Some argued Te’o had to be complicit in the hoax, perhaps to deflect rumors of his own homosexuality, because no other explanation could be credible. When Te’o embarked on a series of media appearances, though, and didn’t exactly come across as the sharpest tool in the shed, his gullibility seemed easier to believe than his culpability.

In any event, the court of public opinion already had made up its mind.

The verdict? Fool.

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