Earlier this week on Twitter, Friday Night Lights author, Buzz Bissinger, added some biting commentary to the story surrounding outed 22-year old Guerdwich Montimere, who posed as a 16-year old basketball superstar at Odessa-Permian High School in West Texas, the setting of Bissinger’s formative FNL novel.
The Associated Press story puts much – if not all – of the blame on Montimere’s shoulders, and casts Permian as being duped on account of their good nature. Buzz’ tweets obviously do not concur.
He clearly believes that something was up with Montimere’s handlers in Texas, and I can’t help but see his point. Consider these details:
Montimere presented himself as Joseph after moving to Odessa in February 2009 and enrolling as a ninth-grader at a junior high. He showed officials a Haitian birth certificate indicating he was 15 and claimed he lived with a half-brother in the dorm of a local university, [Mike] Adkins said.
After admitting the person was a friend, not his half-brother, Montimere moved in with Permian boys basketball coach Danny Wright when the friend left the state last summer, Adkins said.
The story about living with a brother in a University dorm is at least a little suspect. It then becomes a highly suspect situation when he confesses that this person was actually just a friend and he needed to move out. I don’t question Danny Wright’s or anyone else’s compassion – but I bet Buzz does – but I wouldn’t be surprised if their hiding behind it to mask that they did nothing to question the situation that was unfolding, and came to a head this week.
Buzz has since switched gears to ranting about Lebron and bloggers (his favorite topic to run wild on).
