With the close of Sunday night, perhaps the strangest and saddest sports week in recent memory came to a dramatic end.
This week saw one of the most decorated and dominant athletes of all time finally plummet back down to Earth and admit to cheating. A superstar college football player who inspired fans across the nation with his story of determination was found out to be in the middle of suspicious scheming, and Ray Lewis will now take his farewell tour to the Super Bowl in New Orleans.
While many probably saw Lance Armstrong’s admission to Oprah that he used performance enhancing drugs in all of his Tour de France wins as no surprise, it did bring a level of sad closure not only to the world of sports, but to those that have been helped by the Livestrong Foundation, a foundation that likely would not exist if not for those performance enhancers.
By far the strangest story of the week, however, was the news that Manti Te’o, Notre Dame linebacker and Heisman Trophy finalist, was involved in a hoax regarding his deceased girlfriend, who he claimed had passed away within 24 hours of his grandmother and had given him motivation for a huge game against Michigan State.
The thing is, his girlfriend never existed. Whether Te’o was the victim in the situation or whether he perpetuated the hoax the entire time is still up for debate, despite his claim that he was not aware his girlfriend of three years did not actually exist.
The story was odd enough for Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy, to confirm it had entered the “Tyson Zone”, marking it as a story so bizarre any new revelations are immediately believed, if for no reason other than the rest of the story being so ridiculous the new wrinkle seems par for the course.
Simmons (and others, including the Huffington Post) introduced a theory with perhaps the most possibility for redemption, wondering if T’eo was in fact duping the nation by creating a girlfriend that never existed not because he wanted to give his team extra motivation, but because he is gay and felt having a girlfriend would help him navigate the uber-masculine society of a football locker room.
This could explain why his father had said he had met his girlfriend, why the hoax came about in the first place and why the situation still seems so murky.
To be clear, I don’t want to speculate about the man’s sexuality, that’s his own business, but this theory does not seem as far-fetched as others. Also, it has the possibility of redemption, with Te’o possibly having the opportunity to become the first openly gay, active superstar in football.
To me, however, the most disturbing part of this last week in sports was not Te’o’s fake girlfriend or Armstrong’s PED use, but the attention Ray Lewis received as he danced his way through the NFL playoffs on a team that limped into the playoffs worse than Kirk Gibson did for the Dodgers.
While Lewis has been a great linebacker for the entirety of his career and deserves recognition for that, to honor him without taking into account his personal transgressions is a sham. In early 2000, Lewis was involved in a brawl outside of a nightclub that left two men dead. Lewis was charged but faced reduced counts for his testimony against two of his friends that were with him that night.
Lewis also reached a settlement in a civil suit with one of the victim’s daughters, a desperate attempt to achieve justice years after the fact. It is at this point, when grieving families are involved, that the aura of sport must be cast aside.
While I do support forgiveness, some things are simply unforgivable, and to celebrate a man like Ray Lewis is to admit that our culture values his contributions to football more than the lives of the two men he may well have taken. So, as much of the media continues its infatuation with Lewis, count me out.
