Hoax me once

Gets you into the BCS Championship game where you can imitate a defense, but a make-believe romance?

A US college football star is in the spotlight for the wrong reasons after his story of a girlfriend who died of cancer turned out to be a bizarre hoax.

Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o, 21, said her death had inspired him to lead his Indiana team on its march to the national championship game.

But he stunned the sporting world on Wednesday night by admitting that his partner, Lennay Kekua, never existed.

Notre Dame said the player had been duped by an online and phone romance.

Then there were those play-action passes...

But Te'o can take solace that the current occupant of the White House had the same problem;

Obama biographer David Mariness discovered that a scene with a white girlfriend portrayed in the Obama book Dreams From My Father never happened. Obama says it was another girlfriend, and that he was combining several girlfriends into a “composite” character.

Funny that that didn't get much attention from the nation's journalists.