October 15, 2014 04:46 PM UTC

"Fantasy" Football; Cory Gardner Even Lies About High School Sports

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE #2: Deadspin's Dave McKenna follows up:

Gardner campaign spokesman Alex Siciliano sent the following, presented in its entirety, via email: "Cory Gardner played football from Junior High through Sophomore year in high school." Eli Stokols of FOX-31 in Denver is reporting the Gardner campaign told him, "Gardner played football through soph year of high school, never played varsity." Reached Wednesday night at his home, Chuck Pfalmer, longtime stats keeper for Gardner's alma mater, Yuma High School, and a primary source for the story, told me: "Cory did play football for three years" in high school, and that his records show that Gardner spent his junior year "on varsity." During a lengthy conversation about Yuma High football on Tuesday, Pfalmer repeatedly said Gardner had not played football at the school.

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UPDATE: The Denver Post's Lynn Bartels reports that the main source for Deadspin's story claims his comments have been "mischaracterized."

The main source for the story by the online site Deadspin — a former Yuma High School teacher who had Gardner as a student and kept football stats — says the report mischaracterized his comments. Gardner graduated from the Eastern Plains high school in 1993.

In fact, says Deadspin source Chuck Pfalmer, Gardner played football his freshman through junior years in high school.

"He was not a starter, but he played in those years," said Pfalmer, 77, who retired from the high school in 1997.

In response to Deadspin's story this afternoon, which spread widely via social media, Gardner's campaign released two photos of Gardner in his Yuma High School uniform. Those photos would also seem to refute the central claim of Deadspin's story. We'll update if and when Deadspin responds–there's a pretty big gap between the quote in their story and Bartels' report, and we'd like to see it fully explained.

Original post follows.

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We're wayyyy past the point of talking about politicians who stretch the truth here — this is weird. Like, borderline-psychotic weird. Cory Gardner will quite literally say anything if he thinks it will help him get elected. ANYTHING.

Check out this story from the popular sports website Deadspin about Congressman Cory Gardner apparently lying about having played football in high school. For crying out loud, is there any subject that Gardner won't try to tackle in order to make a political point?

The Washington Post ran a long story about the campaign this week. Reporter Karen Tumulty opened the piece with a riff that had Gardner talking about his days playing high school football, and how the current opposition's campaign strategy reminds him of that experience…

…Later in the Post piece, the 40-year-old Gardner circled back to schoolboy football and the single-wing metaphor to blast Udall's politics as coming from "a tired old playbook."

Alas, other than spelling and grammar, there's not a whole lot right about those grafs.

First: So, in high school, Gardner played both ways?

No way, says Chuck Pfalmer, a now-retired Yuma High School teacher: "Cory Gardner wasn't on the football team." [Pols emphasis]

Everybody around Yuma (pop. 3,524) knows everybody around Yuma. Even when Gardner was a kid, folks around town saw him as somebody who was going to run for political office someday. And for an even longer time, Pfalmer's been known as the go-to guy for football facts about Yuma High, Gardner's alma mater. He kept stats for the Yuma Indians varsity squad from 1971 to 2010, a streak of 394 consecutive games.

But Gardner, who graduated in 1993, never played in any of the Yuma games Pfalmer saw under the Friday night lights. Not at "fullback" or "middle linebacker" or anywhere else.

Cory Gardner's capacity for just straight up lying is getting downright creepy. He lies directly to multiple reporters about a Personhood bill that has his own name on it. He lies about immigration reform. He lies about birth control.

This really is an entirely new kind of character flaw being exposed. As Deadspin writes, politicians are known to lie and fib from time to time, but those lies are usually based on some nugget of truth. What Gardner is doing now is writing fictional stories about himself from Page 1. He is making up this "Cory Gardner" person as he goes along each day, adding new nonsense at every opportunity. The next thing you know, he'll be talking about the time he landed on Mars when he was an astronaut with NASA.