Blame the Victim 0
In the Detroit Free-Press, Mitch Albom wonders just who, exactly, is the victim and needs apologize in the strange case of Manti Te’o’s online fantasy romance:
It is that machinery that is most angry. Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandel wrote this Saturday:
“If Te’o truly wants to clear the air, he needs to sit down in front of a camera. He needs to show emotion, and he needs to show remorse. … Many of his fans and followers still feel betrayed. He needs to apologize for his part in embellishing and perpetuating the myth of Kekua.”
Really? Why? What does it matter? Did he take money from those fans? What did “the myth of Kekua” do except momentarily interest people? And we in the news media perpetuated it as much as he did.
As jaded as I have become about NCAA anything, I must point out that, if anyone is going to act stupid over the opposite sex, real or imagined, it’s likely to be high school and college kids. I give you, for example, Beiber Fever.
And if anyone is going to act stupid over college ball players, it’s ESPN and their fellows.
In their uproar of Te’o, the sports press is, I suspect, most angry because their part in it brings out the ultimate superficiality of their own tongue-dragging fan-dom and, in doing so, indicts the whole damned ball of hooey that is big-time college sports.
