As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I cringed.
Standing in the tunnel that leads from the visitor’s locker room to the Los Angeles Coliseum field after Notre Dame completed a perfect regular season with a 22-13 win over USC on Nov. 24, I asked a tear- and sweat-stained Manti Te’o if he could have written a better script.
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“If my grandmother and Lennay were here,” he said.
Man, did I feel like a fool. The guy loses his grandmother and girlfriend and I ask if there could be a better script?
VOTE: WAS TE’O IN ON THE ELABORATE HOAX?
But that was small change compared to yesterday. That’s when the mind-numbing news broke on Deadpsin.com that Te’o never had a girlfriend named Lennay Kekua, that she didn’t die of leukemia, that she was a figment of someone’s devious imagination.
Te’o, in a statement released through Notre Dame, said he was the victim of someone’s sick joke.
It’s been a long time since I’ve grown as fond of a college football player and his family as I have of the Te’os but, sadly, I hope it’s true. I hope some sicko conned them. Because if that’s not the truth, then I was hoodwinked, duped, suckered.
“The thing I am most sad about,’’ ND athletic director Jack Swarbrick said last night in an emotional news conference, “is that the single most trusting human being I’ve ever met will never be able to trust in the same way again in his life. That’s an incredible tragedy.’’
On Dec. 3, I sat next to Te’o in the restaurant of a Charlotte hotel the afternoon before I presented him with the Bronko Nagurski Trophy. We joked about him having to order a salad instead of fries. We talked about the upcoming BCS National Championship game against Alabama. And we talked about the death of his grandmother, Annette Santiago, who died on Sept. 11, 2012, of natural causes, and of Kekua.
Then I sat with his parents, Brian and Ottilia, for about an hour. They told me how fond their son was of Lennay. They told me that they wondered why their son had endured so much loss in his young life. They told me it was the death of his maternal grandfather, Louis Santiago, on Jan. 27, 2012, the day after Te’o turned 21, that really devastated their son.
They were the portrait of loving, supportive parents. They trusted me with their story, with their loss, with their heartache.
That was authentic, right?
Te’o was authentic, right? He gave a human face to college football this season.
When he stood on the field in Spartan Stadium on Sept. 15, after a 20-3 win at Michigan State, he was not afraid to let his sorrow show. He made grown men wonder if they could have shown the same strength on the field and vulnerability off it that Te’o did. At 6-foot-3, 255 pounds, he was powerful. But he was not too powerful to hurt.
We all make mistakes and hope they are not big ones, hope no one gets hurt. This was one of those mistakes. But here’s the really painful part:
The next time a college athlete tells a story of love and loss, I’ll have to ask another cringe-worthy question: Do you have a death certificate? That’s an incredible tragedy.
lenn.robbins@nypost.com