Placing Manti Te'o's fake girlfriend in the pantheon of sporting WTF-ness.
Yankees Pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson Swap Families
This one is the king of all WTF: Two New York Yankees pitchers in the '70s decided to take swinging to the next level when they TRADED FAMILIES. The four were close and would often spend time together, until one day one of them must have joked, in that way that everyone knows isn't a joke, "We should just trade lives!" and three other adult human beings all decided that that was a great idea. My favorite part of this story is that Peterson fleeced Kekich in the trade. Peterson is still with Kekich's ex-wife Susanne, while Kekich and Marilyn Peterson's relationship fell apart shortly thereafter. The moral? The '70s were weird and scary.
O.J. Simpson Runs from the Cops After His Ex-Wife Is Murdered
You know the story at this point. One of the most famous and beloved athletes in the world, O.J. Simpson, is accused of killing his wife and her boyfriend. Four days after the killing, the LAPD allows Simpson to turn himself in. Instead he gets in The White Ford Bronco and tries to run, leading to the most surreal low-speed car chase in television history. And then despite the fact that he tried to run, and an overwhelming amount of evidence, he is acquitted of the crime — before being found "responsible" for the deaths in civil court. And he later writes a book called If I Did It describing the "hypothetical" murder in detail. And then goes to jail in the end anyway because he robbed a sports-memorabilia dealer at gunpoint in Las Vegas. All this actually happened.
Manti Te'o Has a Fake Dead Girlfriend
It's too early to tell exactly how high on this list Te'o will end up, but he and "Lennay Kekua" (there have never been more telling quotation marks than those around her name) have already moved up this far. We still don't know what happened, and depending on what part of the story you look at, you can be totally convinced of different theories. The tweets about the hoax that were sent months before it was revealed seem to point to an innocent Te'o who was duped. But Te'o's strange, fishy interview with Sports Illustrated seems to imply that he's hiding something and may have been in on the whole thing. It's a rare story where every single possible explanation still sounds like an insane conspiracy theory. This one still has a shot at the title before all is said and done.
Image by ESPN Images, Ryan Jones / AP
Tonya Harding Hires Goons to Attack Her Biggest Rival
Tonya Harding's ex-husband and her bodyguard hired a guy to break Nancy Kerrigan's leg in the days leading up to the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in 1994. The man hired to perpetrate the act, Shane Stant, hit Kerrigan with a tire iron IN THE ARENA WHERE THE EVENT WAS TO TAKE PLACE! Harding denied involvement in the attacks, something her ex and bodyguard disputed, but she did plead guilty to the cover-up. The "W" in this WTF is for "white trash."
Image by Pascal Rondeau / Getty Images
