Manti Te'o told Katie Couric he "wasn't as forthcoming" as he could have been regarding his supposed girlfriend, but "I didn't lie." 

The Notre Dame football star's bizarre tale of a girlfriend who never existed was featured on Couric's daytime talkshow Thursday. It airs at 3 p.m. weekdays on Channel 2.

"What people don't realize is the same day everyone else found out about this situation, I found out," Te'o said, referring to the revelation that his romance was fiction. "What I went through was real. The feelings, the pain, the sorrow, that was all real. That's something I can't fake."

Couric hammered away with the ferocity of a Congressional panel vetting a Supreme Court contender, repeatedly saying the story of a girlfriend he never met, who emerged from a coma caused by a car wreck only to die of leukemia, was too far-fetched to ever seem believable.

"Why wouldn't you want a real girlfriend who you could spend real time with?" she asked at one point.

"This story was working for you. You were being considered for the Heisman Trophy," Couric asked later, following a line of questioning that suggested Te'o was enjoying the attention surrounding his sad tale of losing his grandmother (that part was true) and his girlfriend.

"Didn't a part of you want to tell the truth?" Couric asked. She also asked if the fake girlfriend was a different sort of ruse.

"Are you gay?" she asked.

"No," Te'o responded. "Far from it."

Couric also played snippets of voice mail messages supposedly left by Te'o's girlfriend.

"Doesn't that sound like a girl?" the athlete asked.

He became emotional at times, especially when revealing that he kept his parents in the dark about his phantom girlfriend.

"The biggest lie I'm sorry for is the lie I told my dad," Te'o said. But he said he truly was fooled and went through an emotional ordeal as a result.

Te'o's parents joined him on stage toward the end of the show and they all cried.

"He's not a liar. He's a 21-year-old kid," his dad said. Te'o said he isn't sure what his future, i.e. a career in the NFL, holds.

"As long as my family's okay, I can live with whatever happens," he said.