planomateo
Member
Oh Snap!
| FTBL Deadspin: Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend, the most heartbreaking and inspirational story of the colle
- Thread starter TerryP
- Start date
PhillyGirl
Member
Interesting that it didn't raise any flags to the media, either.
This is all too suspicious. All too coincidental. Especially when he had the big song and dance about meeting her.
planomateo
Member
And he's not at the Senior Bowl right now - how many questions you think he'd be answering right now?
planomateo
Member
"support of my girlfriends family"
[video=youtube;HKDus7QjJ_w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKDus7QjJ_w[/video]
[video=youtube;HKDus7QjJ_w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKDus7QjJ_w[/video]
Crimson&WhiteGecko
Member
Ya'll got some stuff that is funny has hell in here. I haven't laughed this hard in a while!
Am I the only one who finds this really funny? Just look at the coverage by the reporter? On ESPN today, Wojo said "We just all really wanted this story to be true." This was in response to Zarniacks question about following up on the story. Checking death records, photographs, car accident reports. Etc etc. He admitted essentially to not following due diligence because Manti more or less told him not to. We should not expect more from media types. ( No offense Terry. Not including you.) The general media cares more about it's agendas than it does truth.
I hope Wojo, Notre Dame, Manti (whom I believe is part of the hoax) and ESPN are massacred for this.
Sure, I'm a jerk. Still, I like to see liars fall.
I hope Wojo, Notre Dame, Manti (whom I believe is part of the hoax) and ESPN are massacred for this.
Sure, I'm a jerk. Still, I like to see liars fall.
Last edited:
“@finebaum: When you lose to Nick Saban, nothing is ever the same.”
so true :rofl:
so true :rofl:
You just have to chalk that up to good investigating reporting, yep.
planomateo
Member
Just posting another interesting article from October 13, 2012.
http://www.irishsportsreport.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121012/FOOTBALL/121019992
It never felt like a chance meeting, although it probably appeared
that way from the outside looking in.
Their stares got pleasantly tangled, then Manti Te’o extended his hand
to the stranger with a warm smile and soulful eyes.
They could have just as easily brushed past each other and into
separate sunsets. Te’o had plenty to preoccupy himself that November
weekend in Palo Alto, Calif., back in 2009.
His Notre Dame football team hadn’t won since Halloween, and a
three-game losing streak, that included seismic home setbacks to Navy
and Connecticut, was pushing Irish head coach Charlie Weis out the
door after five seasons, albeit with a seven-figure financial
settlement set to kick in.
Weis was the man who, in the recruiting process, promised Te’o’s
parents that he would take care of their son 4,400 miles away, that he
would make sure he graduated and really nothing else, nothing that had
anything to do with football anyway.
And once Te’o’s 11th-hour shift away from USC and to Notre Dame took
hold, Te’o’s still-confusing leap of faith hinged upon every
subsequent word that came from Weis.
The part that stung the most for the Laie, Hawaii, product was that
there was nothing he could do in ND’s upcoming clash with Stanford
that could reverse the process. His only anchor was about to be set
adrift.
There had been delusions by some observers, going into the ’09 season,
that the freshman linebacker would be so advanced, so
transformational, so immune to growing pains and flat spots in the
growth curve that he could help launch the Irish back into a cycle of
national prominence.
Instead, it was a school with an even smaller recruiting pool and a
less-decorated football tradition that pre-vailed, 45-38, in what
turned out to be Weis’ last game. That same school, Stanford, then
proceeded to smack around the old stereotype of needing to compromise
academic standards in order to climb up on college football’s biggest
postseason stages.
Te’o would start the game on the bench and finish it with a new career
high in tackles, with 10.
This Saturday afternoon at Notre Dame Stadium, three years later and
half a continent away, Stanford and the Irish meet again, this time
with Notre Dame ascending and Te’o right in the middle of the
uprising.
The Cardinal (4-1), ranked 17th, have won three straight in the series
and have pushed around the Irish in the process. ND (5-0), which
started the season unranked, has pushed itself into the cusp of the
national title conver-sation.
For the first time this season and seventh time in Te’o’s career, his
parents, Brian and Ottilia, will be in the stands for the game — along
with the youngest of his five siblings, 6-year-old brother Manasseh.
“They’re watching you and they're watching someone who they've given
everything they have to live his dream,” Te’o said earlier this week.
“My dream is to help them in their dream, too. So, it's always
exciting. It's going to be a special occasion to see them in the
stands.”
And Manti Te’o is convinced the beautiful stranger will be watching
too Saturday, somehow.
Lennay Kekua was a Stanford student and Cardinal football fan when the
two exchanged glances, handshakes and phone numbers that fateful
weekend three seasons ago.
She was gifted in music, multi-lingual, had dreams grounded in reality
and the talent to catch up to them.
The plan was for Kekua to spend extensive time with the whole Te’o
family when upwards of 40 of them came to South Bend in mid-November
for ND’s Senior Day date with Wake Forest.
“They started out as just friends,” Brian Te’o said. “Every once in a
while, she would travel to Hawaii, and that happened to be the time
Manti was home, so he would meet with her there. But within the last
year, they became a couple.
“And we came to the realization that she could be our daughter-in-law.
Sadly, it won’t happen now.”
About the time Kekua and Manti became a couple, she was injured in an
auto accident. There were complica-tions during her recovery. And it
was also during her recovery that it was discovered Kekua had
leukemia.
“That was just in June,” Brian Te’o said. “I remember Manti telling me
later she was going to have a bone marrow transplant and, sure enough,
that’s exactly what happened. From all I knew, she was doing really,
really well.”
Kekua, who eventually graduated from Stanford, was, in fact, doing so
well that she was released from the hospital on Sept. 10. And Brian
Te’o was among those congratulating her via telephone.
Less than 48 hours later, at 4 a.m. Hawaii time, Kekua sent a text to
Brian and Ottilia, expressing her condo-lences over the passing of
Ottilia’s mom, Annette Santiago, just hours before.
Brian awakened three hours later, saw the text, and sent one back.
There was no response. A couple of hours later, Manti called his
parents, his heart in pieces.
Lennay Kekua had died.
In a Newport Beach, Calif., hotel room last December, Brian Te’o
pulled out the papers with the numbers Manti had asked him to compile,
figuring it was only a formality in what seemed like an obvious
decision to go pro a year early.
Manti and his parents had all flown to California for a banquet
honoring the Lott Impact Award finalists, but at the top of the agenda
was putting the finer points on how to break the news to ND head coach
Brian Kelly and the rest of the college football world that Te’o’s
junior year at the school would indeed be his last.
Instead, it was Manti who had to break the news. In the days leading
up to this moment, BrieAnne Te’o was among the voices whose words
pervaded in Manti’s thoughts.
The oldest of Manti’s four sisters asked him point blank over the
phone, “Wasn’t it your dream to go to the NFL? Then go.”
But as the words fermented and mixed with Manti’s prayers, he came to
what sounded like a chance decision, at least from the outside looking
in.
“The NFL is my goal, not my dream,” he told his parents. “My dream is
to have an impact on people. I think I'm doing that, and I'm not
finished yet.”
Brian’s and Ottilia’s pride overran their tear ducts as the surprising
decision sunk in.
“I never said it to Manti, but I did wonder, ‘Man, what more can you
do?’ ” Brian said. “And then on Sept. 22, I knew. We all knew.”
That was the night of ND’s clash with Michigan, the first home game
after Santiago and Kekua had passed. In fact, Kekua’s funeral was held
in California earlier that morning.
Brian and Ottilia were back in Laie, watching the game on TV, and
overwhelmed with emotion before the opening kickoff.
“They kind of panned out and took a wide view of the stadium,” Brian
said, “and all you could see from cor-ner to corner on my television
were these leis. They were twirling on people’s fingers and I turned
to my wife and I said, ‘That’s for your son.’ ”
Seemingly, the entire student section was adorned in them, band
members, cheerleaders — even the people who typically implore the
ushers to ask people to sit down and shut up. The Lou Holtz statue,
just outside the stadium, was smothered with leis in support of Manti.
On the couple’s Facebook page, people took pictures of their kids in
Manti’s No. 5 jersey, wearing leis.
“From Texas, from California, from Utah, from London,” Ottilia said.
“One guy had his children making a No. 5 with their bodies, laying
down on the lawn with their leis on,” Brian said. “I even got a
picture from a Michigan fan. He was wearing his Michigan jersey, but
he had a lei on. He said, ‘I love Michigan, but I support your son.’
“And I go back to that night at the Lott Awards. I should have known.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, that his intention was to
just unite as many people under a single idea of family. I didn’t
think it would get to this level.”
But Brian never doubted that Manti would choose to play through the
tragedy in both the Michigan game and the road game at Michigan State
game that preceded it.
“He said something that night in Newport Beach that kind of scared me,
actually,” Brian said. “He said ‘Dad, whether I’m on crutches or in
pads, I’m going to run out of the tunnel my last game, and it’s then
I’m going to be able to say to Notre Dame, I gave you everything.
Wherever we land, that’s where we’ll be.’ ”
qqq
In the moments after the Michigan game, Ottilia sent Manti a text with
a familiar message, “Thanks for choosing me as your mom.”
“Our belief, as members of the church, is that before we came here to
this Earth, that we got to choose our cir-cumstance in life,” Ottilia
said. “And I’m just so grateful, as a parent, that when Manti was up
there he chose Brian and I — he chose us to be his parents. Definitely
we had a lot of work to do. He was literally with us every step of the
way.”
Brian and Ottilia were 19 when they got married, and Manti came along
shortly thereafter.
“We were young parents,” Brian said, “and there was something about
that kid that brought a sense of peace and order to what ordinarily
would be a very chaotic young relationship.
“We went from teenagers to parents almost overnight. I told my wife
that this kid is special. ‘There’s some-thing about him that makes the
world better.’
“When he was 2 or 3 we tried to explain to him, ‘There’s something
special that you’re supposed to do. We don’t know what it is, but
we’re going to do everything we can do to help you find it.’ ”
Even if that sometimes meant letting him make his most profound
decisions on his own — to attend Notre Dame, not to take a two-year
Mormon Mission weeks after Kelly succeeded Weis, to return for his
senior year and to play through the grief and the pain.
All seemed rather disconnected at the time, but almost seem steeped in
destiny now.
“We listen to his interviews on the Internet pretty regularly, and we
kept hearing him talk recently about him making our dreams come
true,” Ottilia said. “I think, in his mind, he’s thinking huge house,
I can tell. But that’s not what our dreams look like.”
What they do look like is when Manti’s sisters got together to raise
more than $3,000 so that their brother could go to USC’s football camp
in eighth grade.
What they look like is the conversation between Kelly and Manti that
Brian Te’o overheard on Skype just af-ter the double tragedies hit
him. “I was so worried about him,” Brian said, “but what coach Kelly
said made me know he was with family.”
What they look like is Manti Te’o doing what he promised in that
Newport Beach hotel room, making a dif-ference every day.
“As my wife suggested, our dream is to watch our children live
theirs,” Brian said. “And right now I’d say we’re right in the middle
of that.”
http://www.irishsportsreport.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121012/FOOTBALL/121019992
It never felt like a chance meeting, although it probably appeared
that way from the outside looking in.
Their stares got pleasantly tangled, then Manti Te’o extended his hand
to the stranger with a warm smile and soulful eyes.
They could have just as easily brushed past each other and into
separate sunsets. Te’o had plenty to preoccupy himself that November
weekend in Palo Alto, Calif., back in 2009.
His Notre Dame football team hadn’t won since Halloween, and a
three-game losing streak, that included seismic home setbacks to Navy
and Connecticut, was pushing Irish head coach Charlie Weis out the
door after five seasons, albeit with a seven-figure financial
settlement set to kick in.
Weis was the man who, in the recruiting process, promised Te’o’s
parents that he would take care of their son 4,400 miles away, that he
would make sure he graduated and really nothing else, nothing that had
anything to do with football anyway.
And once Te’o’s 11th-hour shift away from USC and to Notre Dame took
hold, Te’o’s still-confusing leap of faith hinged upon every
subsequent word that came from Weis.
The part that stung the most for the Laie, Hawaii, product was that
there was nothing he could do in ND’s upcoming clash with Stanford
that could reverse the process. His only anchor was about to be set
adrift.
There had been delusions by some observers, going into the ’09 season,
that the freshman linebacker would be so advanced, so
transformational, so immune to growing pains and flat spots in the
growth curve that he could help launch the Irish back into a cycle of
national prominence.
Instead, it was a school with an even smaller recruiting pool and a
less-decorated football tradition that pre-vailed, 45-38, in what
turned out to be Weis’ last game. That same school, Stanford, then
proceeded to smack around the old stereotype of needing to compromise
academic standards in order to climb up on college football’s biggest
postseason stages.
Te’o would start the game on the bench and finish it with a new career
high in tackles, with 10.
This Saturday afternoon at Notre Dame Stadium, three years later and
half a continent away, Stanford and the Irish meet again, this time
with Notre Dame ascending and Te’o right in the middle of the
uprising.
The Cardinal (4-1), ranked 17th, have won three straight in the series
and have pushed around the Irish in the process. ND (5-0), which
started the season unranked, has pushed itself into the cusp of the
national title conver-sation.
For the first time this season and seventh time in Te’o’s career, his
parents, Brian and Ottilia, will be in the stands for the game — along
with the youngest of his five siblings, 6-year-old brother Manasseh.
“They’re watching you and they're watching someone who they've given
everything they have to live his dream,” Te’o said earlier this week.
“My dream is to help them in their dream, too. So, it's always
exciting. It's going to be a special occasion to see them in the
stands.”
And Manti Te’o is convinced the beautiful stranger will be watching
too Saturday, somehow.
Lennay Kekua was a Stanford student and Cardinal football fan when the
two exchanged glances, handshakes and phone numbers that fateful
weekend three seasons ago.
She was gifted in music, multi-lingual, had dreams grounded in reality
and the talent to catch up to them.
The plan was for Kekua to spend extensive time with the whole Te’o
family when upwards of 40 of them came to South Bend in mid-November
for ND’s Senior Day date with Wake Forest.
“They started out as just friends,” Brian Te’o said. “Every once in a
while, she would travel to Hawaii, and that happened to be the time
Manti was home, so he would meet with her there. But within the last
year, they became a couple.
“And we came to the realization that she could be our daughter-in-law.
Sadly, it won’t happen now.”
About the time Kekua and Manti became a couple, she was injured in an
auto accident. There were complica-tions during her recovery. And it
was also during her recovery that it was discovered Kekua had
leukemia.
“That was just in June,” Brian Te’o said. “I remember Manti telling me
later she was going to have a bone marrow transplant and, sure enough,
that’s exactly what happened. From all I knew, she was doing really,
really well.”
Kekua, who eventually graduated from Stanford, was, in fact, doing so
well that she was released from the hospital on Sept. 10. And Brian
Te’o was among those congratulating her via telephone.
Less than 48 hours later, at 4 a.m. Hawaii time, Kekua sent a text to
Brian and Ottilia, expressing her condo-lences over the passing of
Ottilia’s mom, Annette Santiago, just hours before.
Brian awakened three hours later, saw the text, and sent one back.
There was no response. A couple of hours later, Manti called his
parents, his heart in pieces.
Lennay Kekua had died.
In a Newport Beach, Calif., hotel room last December, Brian Te’o
pulled out the papers with the numbers Manti had asked him to compile,
figuring it was only a formality in what seemed like an obvious
decision to go pro a year early.
Manti and his parents had all flown to California for a banquet
honoring the Lott Impact Award finalists, but at the top of the agenda
was putting the finer points on how to break the news to ND head coach
Brian Kelly and the rest of the college football world that Te’o’s
junior year at the school would indeed be his last.
Instead, it was Manti who had to break the news. In the days leading
up to this moment, BrieAnne Te’o was among the voices whose words
pervaded in Manti’s thoughts.
The oldest of Manti’s four sisters asked him point blank over the
phone, “Wasn’t it your dream to go to the NFL? Then go.”
But as the words fermented and mixed with Manti’s prayers, he came to
what sounded like a chance decision, at least from the outside looking
in.
“The NFL is my goal, not my dream,” he told his parents. “My dream is
to have an impact on people. I think I'm doing that, and I'm not
finished yet.”
Brian’s and Ottilia’s pride overran their tear ducts as the surprising
decision sunk in.
“I never said it to Manti, but I did wonder, ‘Man, what more can you
do?’ ” Brian said. “And then on Sept. 22, I knew. We all knew.”
That was the night of ND’s clash with Michigan, the first home game
after Santiago and Kekua had passed. In fact, Kekua’s funeral was held
in California earlier that morning.
Brian and Ottilia were back in Laie, watching the game on TV, and
overwhelmed with emotion before the opening kickoff.
“They kind of panned out and took a wide view of the stadium,” Brian
said, “and all you could see from cor-ner to corner on my television
were these leis. They were twirling on people’s fingers and I turned
to my wife and I said, ‘That’s for your son.’ ”
Seemingly, the entire student section was adorned in them, band
members, cheerleaders — even the people who typically implore the
ushers to ask people to sit down and shut up. The Lou Holtz statue,
just outside the stadium, was smothered with leis in support of Manti.
On the couple’s Facebook page, people took pictures of their kids in
Manti’s No. 5 jersey, wearing leis.
“From Texas, from California, from Utah, from London,” Ottilia said.
“One guy had his children making a No. 5 with their bodies, laying
down on the lawn with their leis on,” Brian said. “I even got a
picture from a Michigan fan. He was wearing his Michigan jersey, but
he had a lei on. He said, ‘I love Michigan, but I support your son.’
“And I go back to that night at the Lott Awards. I should have known.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, that his intention was to
just unite as many people under a single idea of family. I didn’t
think it would get to this level.”
But Brian never doubted that Manti would choose to play through the
tragedy in both the Michigan game and the road game at Michigan State
game that preceded it.
“He said something that night in Newport Beach that kind of scared me,
actually,” Brian said. “He said ‘Dad, whether I’m on crutches or in
pads, I’m going to run out of the tunnel my last game, and it’s then
I’m going to be able to say to Notre Dame, I gave you everything.
Wherever we land, that’s where we’ll be.’ ”
qqq
In the moments after the Michigan game, Ottilia sent Manti a text with
a familiar message, “Thanks for choosing me as your mom.”
“Our belief, as members of the church, is that before we came here to
this Earth, that we got to choose our cir-cumstance in life,” Ottilia
said. “And I’m just so grateful, as a parent, that when Manti was up
there he chose Brian and I — he chose us to be his parents. Definitely
we had a lot of work to do. He was literally with us every step of the
way.”
Brian and Ottilia were 19 when they got married, and Manti came along
shortly thereafter.
“We were young parents,” Brian said, “and there was something about
that kid that brought a sense of peace and order to what ordinarily
would be a very chaotic young relationship.
“We went from teenagers to parents almost overnight. I told my wife
that this kid is special. ‘There’s some-thing about him that makes the
world better.’
“When he was 2 or 3 we tried to explain to him, ‘There’s something
special that you’re supposed to do. We don’t know what it is, but
we’re going to do everything we can do to help you find it.’ ”
Even if that sometimes meant letting him make his most profound
decisions on his own — to attend Notre Dame, not to take a two-year
Mormon Mission weeks after Kelly succeeded Weis, to return for his
senior year and to play through the grief and the pain.
All seemed rather disconnected at the time, but almost seem steeped in
destiny now.
“We listen to his interviews on the Internet pretty regularly, and we
kept hearing him talk recently about him making our dreams come
true,” Ottilia said. “I think, in his mind, he’s thinking huge house,
I can tell. But that’s not what our dreams look like.”
What they do look like is when Manti’s sisters got together to raise
more than $3,000 so that their brother could go to USC’s football camp
in eighth grade.
What they look like is the conversation between Kelly and Manti that
Brian Te’o overheard on Skype just af-ter the double tragedies hit
him. “I was so worried about him,” Brian said, “but what coach Kelly
said made me know he was with family.”
What they look like is Manti Te’o doing what he promised in that
Newport Beach hotel room, making a dif-ference every day.
“As my wife suggested, our dream is to watch our children live
theirs,” Brian said. “And right now I’d say we’re right in the middle
of that.”
PhillyGirl
Member
These pictures are KILLING me. My abs hurt from laughing. I better have a six pack tomorrow.
The newspaper blacklisting was the first thing I thought of as I read the story... His family (his father at least) is all about media control and positive publicity... the imaginary dead girlfriend stuff is obviously taking it to the extreme, but had they pulled it off, wow, it would have been epic... Had A&M not beat Bama, it might have gotten him the Heisman, and as it was he still got a truckload of prestigious awards... and if the folks who voted for him for such awards were honest, they would tell you it had as much or more to do with his character than his play.
The thing that stands out to me though, is how ND went to great lengths to defend him... They couldn't have handled that any worse if they tried too.
There is a part of me too that wants someone to find out that Sarah Phillips was/is behind all this just to see Twitter break.
In all seriousness, he'd be hiding in his room, protected from the media. Ignoring the NFL scouts (interviews) all week wouldn't do him any favors though... he needs to get his story straight before he sits down with them.
PhillyGirl
Member
https://plus.google.com/+SaturdayDownSouth/posts/3mxA4UfHsya
Hahahahahahahaaaa!
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