Football player Manti Te’o, whose dead girlfriend turned out to be a hoax, tells Katie Couric that he is not gay

This story has been in the headlines for nearly two weeks now and it just keeps getting more and more strange.

It involves Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o whose well-publicized dead girlfriend turned out to be a hoax. It turns out that not only had he never met her, but she is a guy who apparently had successfully convinced Te’o that he was a woman.

Of course there are those who wonder if Te’o is really gay.

The runner up for college football’s Heisman Trophy, appeared on Katie Couric’s talk show in an episode that aired Thursday.

‘Are you gay?’ she asked Te’o.

He replied: ‘No. (Laughs) Far from from it. Faaaaar from that.’

Te’o has said he believed Lennay Kekua to be his girlfriend despite the fact that he had never met her face to face. He said he also believed she had died of leukemia on September 12 after a car accident left her hospitalized.

The story became part of Te’o’s story as he led Notre Dame through an undefeated regular season and through the team’s loss in the national championship game.

He admits he stuck to the lie even after he said he found out Kekua had not died and did not seem to exist.

It has since been learned that a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was involved in the scam and created a fake Twitter account for Kekua. He used the photo of an old high school classmate named Diane O’Meara who was unaware of what was going on.

There are phone records of dozens of calls between Te’o and who he said he thought was Kekua. Couric played audio of one of the calls and asked Couric, ‘That sounds like a woman, doesn’t it?’

The voice reportedly belongs to Tuiasosopo.

CNN reports that Te’o made or received more than 1,000 calls totaling more than 500 hours from the same number in the 661 area code, an area code that covers the Southern California area where Tuiasosopo lives.

Somehow, I have a feeling we are going to be hearing more about this.