It has been a little more than four months since that insane Deadspin article blew open one of the most absurd hoaxes in sports, at least in this Internet era, as it revealed that Lennay Kekua, the reported dead girlfriend of Notre Dame star Manti Te’o, was the fabrication of a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. Sure, we all had a ton of additional questions and would have loved to have a little more insight into how a grown man fell for such a trick, but Te’o and Tuiasosopo sort of told their stories and were content to leave us believing that Te’o is just a big, dumb schmuck.
Of course, between that January article and today, plenty of other things happened in sports and we’ve turned our attention elsewhere, because we thought that we’d beaten this joke into oblivion. That suggests, however, that sports fans are all on the same wavelength, and obviously Te’o jokes were going to be made during and after the NFL Draft. But today? Talk about timely.
It’s not really fair to say that a Minor League Baseball team with a performing, five-member mascot band and a hot dog vendor who is half ostrich has “lost” their mind, but it’s safe to say the Reading Phillies have been consistently out of it for years and the Baseballtown All-Star Home Run Derby is the next harrowing step of their descent into madness. Picture of me at a school desk in R-Phils Mascot Band bassist Bucky the Beaver’s home unrelated.
