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The following comes from CampusRush, the college section of Sports Illustrated.
On Feb. 4, 2015, BYU announced its recruiting class for the upcoming season. The list was typical, with a heavy presence of players from Utah and a bent toward Californians and Texans. But as the athletics department tweeted out each recruit’s information, several of the program’s communications staffers hatched a plan. One name, they figured, might go viral. They’d include a photo. That would rile up Twitter. And then, they decided, they’d wait a bit longer to send the next tweet.
That name was Motekiai Taukolo Langi, a 6’7″, 410-pound, zero-star lineman from Tonga. His profile alone would have been enough to garner notice, but in the photo accompanying it, Langi is a human snarl, the left side of his upper lip curled toward his nose, his brow not so much furrowed as it is an awning shading his deep-set eyes. He appears to be staring down the rest of the world, ready to clobber it.
The communications staff was right. For a few hours, Langi was the Bigfoot of football Twitter. ESPN’s sports business reporter and arbiter of Twitter tidbits, Darren Rovell, speculated that the whole thing might have been a hoax. “Is BYU trolling us?” he wrote. “No video or pictures of him playing on the Internet. Four total photos on Facebook.” Soon thereafter, BYU’s football media relations director, Brett Pyne, tweeted a photo of Langi standing next to 6’7″, 265-pound defensive end Bronson Kaufusi, who was a third-round pick in the 2016 NFL draft. The older player looked willowy in comparison. This was no hoax.
To read the full article, click here.
