The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (18 page)

Should your child play football? The choice, Margolis says, isn't just for parents. It's for all of us. Society needs to seriously weigh the risks and rewards, the games won and the damage done, the same as it has with lead paint and cigarettes.

He shows me an article. It's from the
Wall Street Journal.
The title? “In Defense of Football.” Written by a military historian, it acknowledges that brain damage is a problem, but lauds the sport as a civic religion and argues that society should not “overreact to a handful of tragic injuries and legislate or litigate away a game that means so much to so many Americans.” The author concludes by citing Teddy Roosevelt, who warned that abolishing the game would be “simple nonsense, a mere confession of weakness,” and result in society producing “mollycoddles instead of vigorous men.”

“It's the old thing about the Battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton,” Margolis says. “I don't disagree with that. My son played sports. My daughter played sports. Sports can produce laudable outcomes.”

But?

“But whether you need to have people scrambling their brains in the process is doubtful,” he says.

 

Monet's mother is showing me pictures. Photo albums. Framed shots. A family's football life. Mel Jr. in his UCLA uniform, featured in an advertisement on the side of a Los Angeles city bus. Mae and Mel Sr. with singer Smokey Robinson. Mike and Mel Jr. with their beaming father, all three wearing Lions uniforms. A collage of Mel Jr. and Mike's undefeated youth squad. Mike's 12-year-old son, Mikey, in his youth league uniform. Mae on a football field, holding a camera.

“I didn't want my boys to play football at first,” Mae says. “But look at me. I would run up the sidelines when they would score a touchdown.”

“It's almost like a bipolar love of the sport,” Monet says.

“It gets your adrenaline going,” Mae says.

“Then you go home and think about it,” Monet says. “My gosh, it's a rough sport. I think about my family. When it hits home it's completely different.”

“I used to sit in the [team] medical room with my mother-in-law when Mel [Sr.] would play,” Mae says. “I never understood why she was so concerned. Not until my boys started to play did I understand what that was like for her.”

“But even though I have that feeling, I'm still right down there on the field,” Monet says. “If it's fourth-and-goal at my nephew's games, I can't watch.”

“My mother watches football and she is 95,” Mae says. “I'm missing Mikey's scrimmage right now. Football gave our lives such dimension.”

Remember that Marist College survey? The one in which a third of Americans said concussion concerns would make them less likely to allow their children to play football? Seventy percent of the respondents thought the benefits of the sport outweighed the risks. The choice is hard. Football is a new car and a full tank of gas. Brain damage is climate change.

It's a Saturday morning. Monet is making breakfast. Mike couldn't join us. He's coaching his son's scrimmage. I ask Monet's 14-year-old daughter, Paige, if football is a big deal at her high school. She nods. Her eyes go wide.

“When they have games, you can't find a place to park,” Monet says.

“People who live across the street from school charge to park,” Paige says.

Young Parker Bartell isn't playing football this year, though even if his parents let him, he doesn't really want to. “There are thousands of people there,” Monet says. “Everything at the school is scheduled around football season. My daughter is in a play. The dates of the play coincide with the playoffs. If the team makes the playoffs, they've already planned on moving the play.”

Parker wants to show us something. His football trophy. It's nearly as tall as he is. He received it at the end of his first season, and it was pretty much his favorite thing about the sport. Well, that and the team banquet. Turns out Tank didn't really
like
football—he would knock opposing boys down, sure, but only so he could more quickly get back to the sideline and continue playing his Nintendo DS.

“Whenever I talk to him about football, he is not interested,” Melvin says. “Like, period. He won't even watch it with me for more than three minutes.”

Parker is now seven. He's playing chess. Taking karate lessons. Asking about soccer and basketball. He's a whip-smart student but also a handful, the kind of boy who finishes an assignment and then celebrates by doing cartwheels in the middle of the classroom. He says he wants to be an engineer when he grows up—that is, after he learns how to cook at Le Cordon Bleu.

“He's into being a Ninja Turtle,” Monet says.

Parker isn't playing football. Not this season. But if he asks to play again in the future, Monet and Melvin have made their choice. They'll definitely say no. Unless they say yes.

“Deep down, there's a side of me that would love him to go to the NFL and keep up the tradition,” Monet says. “Do I
want
him on a football field? Absolutely. Do I know the repercussions? Absolutely. Do I think he
should
play? As a mom, absolutely not.”

The phone rings. It's Mel Sr. We talk about football. About the choice. He thinks children should be allowed to participate. Thinks the sport builds character. Provides opportunity. He tells me a story: Back in Beaumont, his mother didn't want him and his brother, Miller, to play. But Mom also worked. So the boys joined their school team in secret. Didn't tell their parents. They got away with it for about two weeks, until Miller came home with a busted lip.

“When I retired from football, I told my mom, ‘My knees have given up,'” Mel Sr. says. “And she said to me, ‘What do you think about my knees? I don't have to go on the floor anymore to pray.'”

Football is like the lottery. Thrilling to play. You probably won't win. But if you do, it can change your life. Forever. Only the prize isn't money.

Monet hugs her son.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” she says.

“An engineer,” Parker says.

“Where do you want to go to school?”

“Georgia Tech.”

Tank grins. He's missing two of his baby teeth. Monet smiles too. She looks relieved. For now, at least, the choice has been made for her.

FROM
DEADSPIN.COM

 

N
OTRE DAME'S MANTI TE'O
, the stories said, played this season under a terrible burden. A Mormon linebacker who led his Catholic school's football program back to glory, Te'o was whipsawed between personal tragedies along the way. In the span of six hours in September, as
Sports Illustrated
told it, Te'o learned first of the death of his grandmother, Annette Santiago, and then of the death of his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua.

Kekua, 22 years old, had been in a serious car accident in California, and then had been diagnosed with leukemia.
SI
's Pete Thamel described how Te'o would phone her in her hospital room and stay on the line with her as he slept through the night. “Her relatives told him that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice,” Thamel wrote.

Upon receiving the news of the two deaths, Te'o went out and led the Fighting Irish to a 20–3 upset of Michigan State, racking up 12 tackles. It was heartbreaking and inspirational. Te'o would appear on ESPN's
College GameDay
to talk about the letters Kekua had written him during her illness. He would send a heartfelt letter to the parents of a sick child, discussing his experience with disease and grief. The
South Bend Tribune
wrote an article describing the young couple's fairy-tale meeting—she, a Stanford student; he, a Notre Dame star—after a football game outside Palo Alto.

Did you enjoy the uplifiting story, the tale of a man who responded to adversity by becoming one of the top players of the game? If so, stop reading.

Manti Te'o did lose his grandmother this past fall. Annette Santiago died on September 11, 2012, at the age of 72, according to Social Security Administration records in Nexis. But there is no SSA record there of the death of Lennay Marie Kekua, that day or any other. Her passing, recounted so many times in the national media, produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper.

Nor is there any report of a severe auto accident involving a Lennay Kekua. Background checks turn up nothing. The Stanford registrar's office has no record that a Lennay Kekua ever enrolled. There is no record of her birth in the news. Outside of a few Twitter and Instagram accounts, there's no online evidence that Lennay Kekua ever existed.

The photographs identified as Kekua—in online tributes and on TV news reports—are pictures from the social-media accounts of a 22-year-old California woman who is not named Lennay Kekua. She is not a Stanford graduate; she has not been in a severe car accident; and she does not have leukemia. And she has never met Manti Te'o.

 

Here is what we know about Manti Te'o: He is an exceptional football player. He's a projected first-round NFL pick. He finished second in the Heisman voting, and he won a haul of other trophies: the Walter Camp, the Chuck Bednarik, the Butkus, the Bronko Nagurski. In each of his three seasons as a full-time starter, he racked up at least 100 tackles.

We also know that Te'o is a devout Mormon. When asked why he picked Notre Dame over Southern California, the school he had supported while growing up in Hawaii, he said he prayed on it. “Faith,” he told ESPN, “is believing in something that you most likely can't see, but you believe to be true. You feel in your heart, and in your soul, that it's true, but you still take that leap.”

We know, further, that Te'o adores his family. Te'o's father said that Manti had revered his grandfather, who died in January 2012, since the day he was born. He ran his sister's postgraduation luau. And he loved his late maternal grandmother, Annette Santiago.

But that's where the definite ends. From here, the rest of Te'o's public story begins to grade into fantasy, in the tradition of so much of Notre Dame's mythmaking and with the help of a compliant press.

Assembling a timeline of the Kekua-Te'o relationship is difficult. As Te'o's celebrity swelled, so did the pile of inspirational stories about his triumph over loss. Each ensuing story seemed to add yet another wrinkle to the narrative, and details ran athwart one another. Here is the general shape of things, based on occasionally contradictory media accounts:

November 28, 2009:
Te'o and Kekua meet after Stanford's 45–38 victory over Notre Dame in Palo Alto, according to the
South Bend Tribune:
“Their stares got pleasantly tangled, then Manti Te'o extended his hand to the stranger with a warm smile and soulful eyes.” Kekua, a Stanford student, swaps phone numbers with Te'o.

2010–2011:
Te'o and Kekua are friends. “She was gifted in music, multi-lingual, had dreams grounded in reality and the talent to catch up to them” (
South Bend Tribune
). “They started out as just friends,” Te'o's father, Brian, told the
Tribune
in October 2012. “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.”

Early 2012:
Te'o and Kekua become a couple. They talk on the phone nightly, according to ESPN.

Sometime in 2012:
Kekua has a car accident somewhere in California that leaves her “on the brink of death” (
Sports Illustrated
). But when? Eight months before she died of cancer, in September, reports ESPN. “About the time Kekua and Manti became a couple,” reports the
South Bend Tribune.
April 28, reports
SI.

June 2012:
As Kekua recovers from her injuries, doctors discover she has leukemia. She has a bone marrow transplant. (“That was just in June,” Brian Te'o told the
South Bend Tribune
in October of 2012. “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.”)

Summer 2012:
Her condition improves. Kekua “eventually” graduates from Stanford, according to the
South Bend Tribune.
(A
New York Times
story, published October 13, identifies her as a “Stanford alumnus.”) She soon takes a turn for the worse. At some point, she enters treatment, apparently at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, California. (In a letter obtained by Fox Sports published October 25, Te'o writes to the parents of a girl dying of cancer: “My girlfriend, when she was at St. Jude's in LA, she had a little friend.”)

Te'o talks to Lennay nightly, “going to sleep while on the phone with her,” according to
Sports Illustrated.
“When he woke up in the morning his phone would show an eight-hour call, and he would hear Lennay breathing on the other end of the line.”

September 10, 2012:
Kekua is released from the hospital; Manti's father, Brian, congratulates her “via telephone” (
South Bend Tribune
).

September 11–12, 2012:
Te'o's grandmother dies in Hawaii. Later, Kekua dies in California. Or is it the other way around? “Te'o's girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, died Sept. 11 of complications from leukemia. His grandma, Annette Santiago, died after a long illness less than 24 hours later,” according to the September 22
South Bend Tribune.
No, Annette dies first, according to the October 12
South Bend Tribune.
In fact, Lennay lives long enough to express condolences over the death of Annette: