IN a way, any one of us could be Manti Te'o.
No, we're not all super athletic Hawaiian Mormon football stars who go to Notre Dame, get nominated for the Heisman Trophy and play in the NCAA championship game before the heartbreaking and inspirational story of our girlfriend's tragic death is called into question because of the teeny fact that the girlfriend does not exist.
That's a pretty select group.
What's not such a select group is those of us who, particularly in our youth, have professed to be "dating" someone only to discover, in retrospect, that wasn't really the case.
The most intriguing part of the whole Manti Te'o story, first reported by the talented Internet people at deadspin.com, was that Te'o spoke longingly and lovingly about his "girlfriend" to friends, family, teammates and reporters despite the fact that he had never actually met her in person. Never kissed her, never rubbed her feet, never held her hair back while she vomited tequila shots into the kitchen sink at a frat party. He couldn't do those things because she wasn't a real person - she was a hoax created through social media - but that didn't stop him from professing his love for her to the world.
If you're confused, don't worry - everyone is confused. It's weird. I try not to think about it for more than five minutes at a time for fear my brain will climb out of my ear and jump in front of a bus.
What's not so weird, though, is the confusion of young romance. The story I'm about to tell is a secret shame that I've carried with me for more than 15 years.
It's pretty embarrassing so, um, let's try to keep it hush hush, OK?
I do have slightly higher ground in this story than Te'o does now because the girl in my story did, in fact, exist. Boy did she ever. She was a Grade 9 knockout, an athletic young thing who really knew how to fill out a Club Monaco sweater, if you know what I mean. Her name was Honey McJuggerson (note: that wasn't her name).
We were on a soccer trip to the provincial championships when word was passed down to me that Honey, a girl I knew by reputation only, was interested in me. Being the stellar athlete that I was, I ignored this information and focused all of my energy onto the field, leading my team to a famous gold-medal victory.
Just kidding - we finished in the middle of the pack and I spent all of my off-field time dreaming about Honey and her beehives. Our two teams were staying in the same hotel and at night I employed all my charms.
As an extremely shy 15year-old with no game, my charms involved doing things not with her, but near her.
Talking to her, of course, was completely out of the question. I'm pretty sure that if I had suffered a seizure I would have just played it cool rather than ask her to call me an ambulance.
"Look at me everyone, I've got mad cow disease. Moo. Moo. Ha ha ha - ouch, my tongue."
By the time I worked up enough gumption to actually say something to her our tournament was over. I still had a chance, I thought, because the girls had one more game to play and we could go watch it and I would make a magic connection with my witty post-match banter. Strangely, though, the other guys on my team and the two parents who were all riding in my dad's van were somehow more interested in getting started on the five-hour drive home than waiting around so that we could watch the girls play in the game for seventh or eighth place.
"But shouldn't we support the girls?" I said.
My dad replied with his foot. "Vroom," it said.
Here's where my shame kicks in. I made up a clever lie, saying I forgot one of my cleats at the field. We took a detour and, with the "lost" cleat cleverly tucked in my bag, I found Honey warming up for her game, summoned all my courage and asked for her phone number. Seven digits later I had what I wanted and my missing cleat magically reappeared.
At home that night, I hid in the basement so no one could hear me and summoned all my courage once again, dialling the number.
"Do you want to go out with me?" I asked, using the parlance of the time. Yes, came the answer. Boom! Hot new girlfriend.
Then came my biggest mistake. I explained my whole clever ploy from earlier that day to her. Her response should have set off alarm bells for me.
"Why didn't you just talk to me at school tomorrow?" she said. I probably would have been better off going mad cow again.
We met for one "date" at a high school football game where I spent the entire time doing what all Grade 9 boys are supposed to do at a football game: share two warm beers between six guys, stand around looking cool and hope to see some older kids get into a fight.
Shockingly, Honey dumped me the next week. She did it in that beautiful pre-Internet way, the handwritten note passed to me by one of her friends.
My loud-mouthed Grade 10 teammate, a self-proclaimed expert on beehives, consoled me with some good old-fashioned lewdness. "Well, at least you got to play with those cans, didn't you?" he said.
I didn't say no. I didn't say that she and I shared maybe seven face-to-face words together, tops. I didn't say I never actually made any physical contact with her of any kind.
"A gentleman never tells," I said, a stupid grin on my face. If ESPN had been filming me at that moment, I would have been just a couple of steps away from a full Manti Te'o.
I take solace in the fact that I was a clueless 15-year-old boy, not a 21-year-old college senior playing football for one of the most distinguished programs in the United States.
Still, though, it's not that hard to see how a little sweet honey can turn any productive young worker into a brainless drone. [email protected]
