Manti Te’o - more than just a football star
A true scholar-athlete, the Notre Dame-bound Punahou star is grounded, well-balanced, devoted to his family and faith, and would be a success in life with or without football. A Devout Mormon, Manti Te’o Chose Notre Dame Over Brigham Young Manti Te’o is special. Sure, he’s a great football player, but it goes much deeper.
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A Devout Mormon, Manti Te’o Chose Notre Dame Over Brigham Young Manti Te’o is special. Sure, he’s a great football player, but it goes much deeper. He’s a rare combination of youthful exuberance and mature intellect. He’s an Eagle Scout, carries a 3.1 GPA, is active in his church and would rather spend time working out or being a good role model to grade-schoolers in his Laie community than hanging out at the mall or pushing the limits of parental authority. Had he never taken up football as a youth, he’d still be well-set for success. But he is, in fact, a football player. It’s his refuge, a source of joy and the key to his future. The lessons he learned in preparation for muscular contest serve him well.
Manti’s father, Brian, trained his son for the physical demands of the sport. And life. He had to be tough against the competition, could not complain and needed to outwork everyone. On some days it was an easy lesson, on others more trying. Success, he was taught, is not a birthright or something that comes without sacrifice, but a long and sometimes lonely road filled with tests, challenges and disappointment. While he admits he didn’t always understand the lessons or recognize the growth, those years of lifting, running and studying eventually paid off with a state championship at Punahou and the Butkus Award given to the country’s best high school linebacker.
Those lessons also helped him handle the most amazing, fun and frustrating period of his young life: college recruiting.
The inquiries began simply enough: a few coaches from a few schools offering introductions and words of encouragement in basic form letters sent to his family home and to the Punahou Athletic Department. With each backfield tackle or interception returned, the stacks of mail grew, reaching ridiculous proportions. What once fit into the mailbox ballooned into a trash bag full of letters, notes and pamphlets from universities promising the talented linebacker anything an ego could desire. He became a target and the man capable of either resurrecting a program or continuing another’s dominance.
From every position on the coaching roster came still more letters, phone calls and e-mail. Some came in the form of personal messages while others, perhaps most, various pieces of athletic propaganda to keep the Punahou senior, and every other recruit, in the know. So many came that he got to a point where a simple glance or a feel could relay the contents. Anything see-through or thin was a meaningless update that could be immediately tossed into the trash. Something thicker meant a personal correspondence.
For someone who had once dreamed of a single college offer to trade his athletic skills for an education, the constant stream of letters, calls and interview requests began to take a toll.
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“We had to start narrowing the choices down because of the heat from the media and from colleges,” says Manti. “You’ve got to understand, there is the college and the college coaches, and they are calling me - the head coach, the defensive coordinator, your position coach and everybody else wants to talk to you. Then there is the media. There is Rivals.com and then there’s Scout.com, and they have reporters for each college that is calling you. Then there is the local media. They call you, and the radio stations call you. On a regular day I’d go through three or four interviews. It was just hard on our family. It was just difficult.”
His voice lowers as he continues, providing further evidence of the emotional burden that chasing a dream can cause.
“It’s hard,” he says. “It’s hard to keep a smile on your face and put your best foot forward all the time. You just want to be a kid and you just want to be a family.”
To protect his son and to provide him with some peace, Brian took on the burden of handling all interview requests and phone calls. Any coach who wanted to talk to Manti had to go through his father first. Still, as the process labored, some coaches tried to skirt the rules, and the results showed on his son.
“I did start to see signs of stress as the time got closer because they started calling him constantly and they weren’t going through me, they were going through the school or they were going through friends, just trying to find a way to get to him,” Brian says.
As the process continued, the pressure increased and some of the more unscrupulous coaches looked for ways to bypass the rules his family put in place.
Fortunately, he had an escape. “When I’m on the field, there is no recruiting, there are no cameras. There could be cameras watching me, but you’re just so in love with the sport that you tune everything out and it’s just football, and you become a kid again. I find true joy in playing football.”
Pressure came from everywhere.
“Everybody wanted me to go somewhere,” Manti says. “I was being pulled in all directions and I just relied on my parents, the Lord and the Heavenly Father to direct me.”
Some opinions were well-meaning and others far more personal and direct.
Darnell Dickson, the sports editor for the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah, in a rambling piece that goes from amusing hype to the ridiculous said, “When a recruit spurns his hometown team, there can be bitterness among the faithful ... With Brigham Young University, religion just amplifies those kinds of emotions. But Te’o didn’t turn his back on his religion, just the school that was founded by it.” Six paragraphs later he says, “It really is a slap in the face that BYU wasn’t even in Te’o's top three.”
Manti didn’t read the column. By that time he had long learned to stay away from such commentary, but he felt it and dealt with it.
The pressure actually increased when he narrowed his choices down to three schools: University of Southern California, University of California at Los Angeles and Notre Dame.
“I got a lot of heat for that,” he says. “Strictly because it is a Latter-day Saints school. All LDS athletes should go to a LDS school, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m not the first LDS member not to go to BYU, and why am I getting heat for it?’ I just lost a lot of respect, not necessarily for the school, but with the people in the area,” says Manti, his voice trailing off.
Such open criticism may be part of the reason why Manti chose to go east. As too often happens, it is when times are tough that friends can be hardest to find: “People always say you should be grateful and thankful to be going through the process, and I’ve always been grateful for that. But it took a lot of time and energy and effort. The love for things quickly became dull because you’re like a machine.”
Reports had surfaced that Manti was either drinking or in the vicinity of alcohol during his recruiting visit to BYU. It’s a charge that
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Thanks for the article featuring what we Notre Dame fans know is an outstanding young man.
For the author’s edification, Coach’s name is spelled Weis (only one “s” please. But don’t worry, it happens all the time). And the assistant coach who so diligently, yet enthusiastically, flew weekly to Hawaii was Brian Polian, who happens to be the son of the Indianapolis Colts President Bill Polian and our special teams coach.
We look forward to welcoming Manti into the Notre Dame family as well as the good people of Hawai’i who care to follow him onto the next stage of his life. Go Irish!
Posted by GoIrish on 03/19 at 10:38 PM