This was the week of Lance Armstrong, 41, the guy who now admits to Oprah that he was juiced to the gills while he was winning seven Tour de France titles, even as Armstrong spent so much time in those years convincing an adoring public that he was the cleanest and most noble cancer survivor sports has ever produced. In so doing, he played the world for suckers.
But it was also the week of Manti Te'o, 21, near Heisman Trophy-winning football player, one who says he got suckered into believing the online girlfriend he says became his soulmate — even though he never actually saw her before her imaginary death from leukemia.
Armstrong was the first show — or soap opera — on Thursday night. The two of them became a double feature the next night, even though he was the only one on camera; after all the Te'o myth-making of the fall in South Bend he finally decided he was camera shy.
Obviously, Armstrong's fame and legend were so much bigger and different than Te'o, the soap-opera narrative built around Te'o and how he played through the pain of losing his girlfriend — and his quite real grandmother — as he helped Notre Dame all the way to the national championship game.
But they are the same in so many ways, starting here, starting with something Armstrong said about himself to Oprah:
"The story was so perfect for so long."
The story of Te'o wasn't nearly as perfect, but it was close enough. Only the legend of the dead girlfriend turns out to be about as real as the legend of Lance Armstrong.
Here is somewhere else where Te'o and Armstrong are the same: They both offered themselves up as a big get this past week — Armstrong very much on-camera with Oprah, Te'o off-camera with Jeremy Schaap of ESPN — as a way of beginning to repair their own brands.
And finally there is this similarity between the guy who was once one of the most honored athletes in the world and a Notre Dame football player now desperate not to drop in the first round of the NFL draft and lose a ton of endorsement money:
We are supposed to believe this past week's version of the truth, from both of them, believe them both absolutely.
At the start of the week, as Armstrong was sitting down with Oprah Winfrey in Austin, you would have believed it was impossible that anybody or anything could hijack the headlines or the spotlight from Lance Armstrong's confessional.
But then came Deadspin's reporting on Manti Te'o and the fact that the dead girlfriend never existed, that Te'o never met her even though he said he had. All that. He first issued a statement about being the victim of a sick joke and then late Friday night he sat down with Schaap in Florida and one of his handlers, after being holed up at the International Management Group Training Academy in Bradenton (I think the academy is joining the Big East next season), and told his latest version of his own story, just not with the cameras rolling.
Start right there, by the way. There was a great old line from Graig Nettles about Reggie Jackson, when both of them were with the Yankees in the '70s, Nettles always saying that if a reporter tried to pass Reggie's locker without talking to him "Reggie would trip the guy." That was Manti Te'o as the publicity machine was cranking up around him in the fall, as the legend of the dead girlfriend was first being told.
But now he wants the cameras turned off. Now he waits until late on a Friday night after the second part of the Armstrong interview has been aired and tells his latest version of how he was victimized by scammers, and does this with a handler at the table. How come he didn't need handlers when he was tearfully talking about his soulmate on ESPN back in the fall?
And, boy oh boy, Te'o sure gets it in there that one of the reasons why Alabama football players ran around him and over him in the BCS championship was because he was so upset about the whole scam perpetrated against him by a scammer named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.
In that way, you have to say that Te'o is trying hard to make the imaginary dead online girlfriend work for him the way she was working for him in the fall, with an amazingly trusting media, when she was only "dying." A media, by the way, that is still trusting with Te'o, consistently calling him a "devout Mormon." Really? How do they know that? Because he told them? Because they're at church with him on Sunday?
The problem for Te'o, with his own Lance-like confessional with Schaap on Friday night, is that once again he tries to explain everything to you and you come away with more questions, and a version of things from him that still seems to have enough holes to strain spaghetti.
He told his parents he met her, now he says he didn't. He says that he wanted to see her face online, but there was always just a black box on the other screen. This from a woman he says changed his life, made him a better person, and made him "sleep on the phone" with her night after night.
Maybe one way to get people to believe him as much as he wants them to believe him is to show us his phone records, that would probably dial down an awful lot of the skepticism about what Manti Te'o knew and when he knew it about the fictitious "Kekua."
This is something Te'o said to Jeremy Schaap on Friday night: "I wasn't a part of this. When they hear the facts, they'll know. They'll know I could never be a part of this."
What facts is he talking about? There was one set of facts in a brief statement issued in the middle of the week and then there were all the facts that came out Friday night when Te'o decided he could no longer stay silent on this, it was starting to cost him money.
Same with Armstrong, whose revenue streams have been drying up in record numbers. He basically got kicked to the curb by his own foundation, he can't compete in sanctioned sports events. He isn't looking for redemption and forgiveness here as much as relevance. And viability. And money.
Same as Manti Te'o.
Two products of the myth-making machine in sports. Maybe the biggest difference between them is that Lance created his legend. Te'o just fell in love with his own.
A NOD TO THE EARL OF BASEBALL & YANKS' ONCE AND FUTURE BAD CONTRACTS...
-- Earl Weaver, one of the great baseball managers and one of the most wonderful characters the game has ever produced, died on Saturday at the age of 82.
He died on one of those baseball cruises, died being a Baltimore Oriole to the end, died and took so much fun and a lifetime of stories with him.
I spent a lot of time with him over the years, in baseball dugouts and small manager's offices, and at his home in Florida.
Once I was with him in Florida, sitting next to him in his golf cart, and asked him a question about managing.
I said, "How many games do you really win for the Orioles during the course of a season?"
Without hesitation, he put up his hand, showing me his fingers forming a great big goose egg.
"None," he said.
Then he gave he a huge smile and said, "But I'll lose you five or six."
Oh man, is baseball going to miss him.
So am I.
Before all the computer printouts in baseball, there were Earl's index cards.
-- If it turns out that Lance Armstrong was still doping when he made his Tour de France comeback a couple of years ago — then how much of what he said to Oprah this week are you still going to believe?
This is from Mike O'Keeffe's story in Saturday's Daily News, referencing the United States Anti-Doping Agency report on Armstrong that got him banned for about the next 9000 years:
From the USADA report: "When Prof. Gore compared the suppressed reticulocyte (immature red blood cells) percentage in Armstrong's 2009 and 2010 Tour de France samples to the reticulocyte percentage in his other samples, Prof. Gore concluded that the approximate likelihood of Armstrong's seven suppressed reticulocyte values during the 2009 and 2010 Tours de France occurring naturally was less than one in a million."
-- Behind the scenes, the people who run the Yankees have spent an awful lot of time complaining about Alex Rodriguez's contract, one that seems to run forever, an insane 10-year contract, the dumbest in world history, given to him before they found out he was once the Lance Armstrong of the Texas Rangers.
So it is going to be interesting to see if they are willing to give Robinson Cano, past 30 now, his own 10-year contract when the time comes, one that will take him to the age of 40 and beyond.
Because if they do, this does become the old line about people not learning from history being doomed to repeat it.
If Cano and his agent Boras want eight years or 10 years and $200 million or more, I would tell both of them to hit the road.
Unless the Yankees just plan to be paying big money to baseball AARP members from now until the end of time.
-- Amy Poehler and Tina Fey were so great at the Golden Globes that I would be remiss in not mentioning that Ms. Poehler is a Boston College woman.
Maybe Oprah could have re-thought closing Friday night's show by reminding Lance that the truth will set him free.
We have been telling Betsy Andreu's story at this newspaper for years and years, but somehow this week everybody else treated Frankie Andreu's wife as if they'd discovered her on a drugstore seat.
-- I'm starting to wonder if The Gipper actually kicked the bucket at Notre Dame.
Considering how much his divorce cost him, Tiger Woods probably wishes he'd had imaginary girlfriends.
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The Mike Lupica Show is heard Monday through Friday at noon on ESPN 98.7.
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