Truth about athletes makes it hard to believe Teo isn’t lying

Posted by Justin Goldsborough | 2 comments

I had a professor my senior year of college named Andy Bagnato. Andrew Bagnato, Jr., was his full name and he covered the college football beat, amongst others, for the Chicago Tribune. For a kid who grew up wanting to be a sports journalist all his life, this was the class to take. And Andy was the perfect person from whom to learn. I was actually going to get college credit for talking about sports, discussing my favorite athletes and debating what play should have been called during the 2-minute-drill. Did it get any better than this?

Little did I know what I was getting into. It wasn’t bad, but it was life-changing. In retrospect, it was the most valuable class I took at Northwestern. Because I left with a new clarity around the athletes I’d grown up idolizing and the direction I wanted to take in my life. Here’s what I learned:

Andy Bagnato (paraphrasing), after what must have been a rough day at the office: “You all need to decide if you love sports or sports journalism. There is a very big difference. The athletes I cover are not the same people I built them up to be in my head as a kid. They are human beings. And many of them, not very nice ones. Sports is my job. When I get home from work, the last thing I want to talk about or watch is sports. And part of that is because I know what these athletes are really like.”

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Looking back, O.J. Simpson should have done it for me. And I guess in a way he did. Because while I sat glued to the TV that day watching police chase Juice’s white Ford Bronco, I realized for the first time that we don’t really know these professional athletes we see on the pregame shows and in O.J.’s case, in the movies. Still, I wanted to believe he was the exception to the rule.

Unfortunately, he’s not. Not even close. While most athletes don’t commit double homicide — which no one will ever convince me O.J. was not guilty of — most will do anything necessary to protect and improve their image. And usually, that involves some form of cheating followed by pathological lying that continues no matter how much evidence to the contrary pops up.

This is why I have trouble believing Manti Teo’s story. Because of all the lies that have come from professional athletes before it. Because Pete Rose swore he never gambled. Because Barry Bonds still won’t admit he took steroids — c’mon Barry, you don’t go from having a normal-size head to one in the 150th percentile without a little juice.

Because Rafael Palmeiro told Congress he never took steroids and then failed a drug test two weeks later. Because Mark McGwire took the 5th in front of Congress but still won’t admit he cheated. Because Joe Paterno looked us in the face and said he did enough. Because Lance Armstrong juiced, lied, sued people who accused him of lying, publicly berated competitors who called him out, continued lying when the evidence was overwhelming and then finally sat down with Oprah and told the world, yep, I’m a liar.

I’m not saying it’s 100 percent impossible Teo was duped. I just read the excerpts from his interview with ESPN and the story he tells is very convincing. But I have the aforementioned athletes to compare it to. And I have heard their convincing stories before. Their lying was absolutely pathological by definition — telling any sort of lie to make their lives more interesting.

Better yet, I have seen pathological liars up close and personal. And the one fact I am always amazed by is how they will continue on with a lie when any rationale person would know what they are saying is not believable. When they’ve been “caught,” they keep lying. And they look you straight in the eye while doing so. Which is why I still think it’s very possible Teo lied to Jeremy Schapp and is lying to us all.

Have you seen the movie Catfish, the film to which Teo’s story has been compared? One of the most fascinating parts of the movie to me is how after the three friends go to see the “girl” they’ve been talking to online and only find an older women who looks nothing like that girl, the perpetrator doesn’t just confess. Instead, she keeps the lie going for several more days until she finally gets painted so far into a corner that there’s nowhere else to turn.

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To answer Andy Bagnato’s question, I decided that day that I love sports. I still do today, and I always will. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sports play a big part in our lives. The athletes that play them teach us to live our lives with passion. And some of our best memories center around a certain game or season — Game 6 of the 1985 World Series for me.

But we can love sports without lying to ourselves about who many of these athletes really are and what they’re capable of. And we shouldn’t idolize the stars of our games so much that we allow them to get away with whatever they want without questioning it. That’s the lesson I’m taking away from this whole Teo story and the ones before it. That’s the lesson I’ll attempt to teach my son — hopefully a lesson that will have an impact on his direction in life.