On a recent episode of “GoJo,” Mike Golic Jr. spoke about the Manti Te’o documentary and shared his unique perspective, having been Te’o’s teammate at Notre Dame during the catfish situation. Golic Jr. gave his own version of the story while not fully agreeing with the way it was portrayed.
“It didn’t preoccupy the locker room in the way [the documentary] made it seem like it preoccupied everything else.”
Golic Jr. and Te’o played together at Notre Dame from 2009-2012, but while they certainly spent many hours together on the field and in the locker room, they weren’t especially close friends.
“Manti just wasn’t the guy I was that close with in the locker room, so for me when I heard he had some long-distance girlfriend who he would, you know, do the ‘fall asleep on the phone with’ thing at night that people did, I was like, ‘alright, like if you want to do that be my guest man.’ Like, I’ve never met this girl, all we heard was the same thing as everyone else, which was he met her out in one of the west coast trips when we played Stanford or ‘SC and you know, life went on. I was like ‘alright, if that’s what you want to do go ahead. You’re not one of my close friends, I’m not really going to look into this any more than I need to.’”
Golic Jr. went on to talk about the negative impacts of excessive media (and social media) coverage around Te’o, but overall the crew felt like the documentary was a relatively fair portrayal that Te’o clearly had a hand in shaping. In addition to Te’o and the documentary, the episode also covered the upcoming Notre Dame football season.
You can watch the full episode here: