(Editor's note: Pat Murray is a longtime Western New York sports reporter and editor who relocated his family to Texas in order to exploit that state's more lenient gun laws take a job in Lamar University's athletic media relations department. We Want Marangi asked him to share his thoughts on the furor surrounding the non-death of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o's imaginary girlfriend. No need to thank us, Notre Dame. You need all the help you can get.)
By Pat Murray
It’s the worst nightmare for anyone working in media
relations: You turn on ESPN and see your school’s biggest name prominently
featured, and not for scoring the game-winning bucket or making the game-saving
tackle.
Instead, your star player, the face of the program is on the
news for the wrong reasons. Suspended from the team for “violating team rules.”
Arrested for any number of reasons. Or, God forbid, severely injured or killed.
Almost all of us in the profession have dealt with that situation at one time
or another.
It’s never any fun.
Then there’s the unique case of Notre Dame’s Manti Te’o, the
Heisman Trophy finalist, who finds himself in a situation that no athlete of
his stature, or media-relations director, has ever been in.
As I write this, Te’o is not known to have done anything
illegal. Yet, the sports media relations people at Notre Dame, who are usually
concerned with such mundane things as tackles for loss and yards per carry, are
suddenly spin doctors, those people who routinely try to salvage the image of
the likes of Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan and Nick Nolte.
So what do you do in a situation like this, if it’s your job
to deal with it?
First, it’s just not a sports issue, it’s a university
issue. So we get together with the school’s public relations department to
devise a strategy. You can see that was done in the way Notre Dame’s Athletic
Director Jack Swarbrick addressed the media on Wednesday.
But there’s more to do. The story sounds so unbelievable, and
gets stranger by the moment. Was Te’o the victim of a hoax? Or was he part of a
hoax? In these days of social media, everything moves so fast. It’s hard to
hide anything anymore.
The next step is to find the truth from Te’o. If he was the
victim of a con, a claim many people find difficult, if not impossible to
believe, get the facts out there. Phone records, emails, texts will show that
he was communicating with someone.
If he was in on the hoax, get him to come clean now. The
sooner he comes clean, the sooner you can start damage control, not only for
him, but for the football program and the school. We already know Te’o has lied
about meeting the girl who never lived. He has already recanted the imaginary
meetings he previously described to reporters and said all of the supposed interaction
was online.
It’s not hard to believe a relationship can develop online.
That’s how my wife and I met, and we’ve been married for 13 ½ years. But
somehow, all of Te’o’s comments just don’t ring true. That’s why he needs to tell everything, good
AND bad, about the whole incident.
That way he can get on with his life, his family and friends
can get on with theirs, and the media relations department can get back to
worrying about the school record for 3-pointers in a game.
(Editor's note: Oh, and here's a rundown of everything everybody covering the made-up sob story that helped make Te'o a Heisman finalist got wrong.)
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