Love may trump all, but facts are facts

Now we know why Notre Dame's football hero Manti Te'o played so poorly against Alabama in the national championship game Jan. 7.

His heart was broken, kind of, by a woman who didn't exist.

It was all in Deadspin, an Internet sports blog, on Wednesday, about an amazing sports hoax, a hoax that was spread witlessly by sports writers peddling the heart-wrenching tale of the heroic linebacker, his dying girlfriend and the true love they shared.

They probably forgot the ancient credo of the City News Bureau of Chicago:

When your girlfriend dying of leukemia after suffering a car crash tells you she loves you -- even if it might help you win the Heisman Trophy -- you check it out.

Actually, the City News Bureau credo goes like this: If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out. My wife hates that credo. All mothers do. But reporters should love it.

Te'o's "girlfriend," Lennay Kekua, didn't exist. He never met her. And even though the saga was the centerpiece of the Notre Dame football storyline, almost like that cool speech the Gipper gave Rockne before he died, there was a problem.

He called it "a sophisticated hoax" and said that Notre Dame didn't come forward because "this was Manti's story to tell."

Really?

Swarbrick is the same mealy-mouthed bureaucrat who defended the football program after student videographer Declan Sullivan was sent into that scissor lift in the high wind and died when it collapsed in October 2010.

Swarbrick said then that the weather conditions before the tragedy were "unremarkable," even though Sullivan told friends on social media that there were "gusts of wind up to 60 mph" and he was afraid he would die.

Notre Dame's company line isn't any more convincing now than it was then.

"She said, 'Babe, if anything happens to me, promise that you'll still stay over there and that you'll play and that you'll honor me through the way you play,'" Te'o said. "All she wanted was some white roses. That's all she asked for. So I sent her roses, and sent her two picks along with that."

White roses and two interceptions. Babe, how cool is that?

It almost makes you want to scan the Midwestern horizon during a thunderstorm, to see the lightning strike the great oak tree on the family farm.

And then the young Roy Hobbs, who'd grow up to be the greatest baseball player who ever lived, and looked exactly like Robert Redford, would take a chunk of that magic wood and carve the amazing bat known as Wonderboy. He'd burn a crude lightning bolt into the wood, a symbol of its Arthurian power.

Americans love such myths. Even though we know they're fiction, we yearn for them. The Roy Hobbs of the Redford movie "The Natural" is not the self-loathing Roy Hobbs of the Bernard Malamud novel -- but which one made more money?

"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," Te'o's father, Brian, told the South Bend Tribune in October. "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."

No, I guess not.

"This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about," Manti Te'o said in a statement probably approved by lawyers and his sports agent, "To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating."

Still, Manti said he's really looking forward to the NFL draft.

When reporters get persnickety about checking those stubborn things called facts, and peeling back the layers, we're often accused of being negative and agenda-driven. We become inhuman monsters devouring the flesh of the virtuous.

But it might be better to devour flesh than to peddle it.