On December 8th he said: "I don’t like cancer at all. I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer."
On Sunday December 9th Te'o said his girlfriend "made me promise, when it happened, that I would stay and play."
Here's the December 9th quote according to the LA Times.
The 2012 season was a Manti Te'o story book, although not all of the chapters were positive. On Sept. 12, within hours, he was given news that his grandmother in Hawaii and his girlfriend at Stanford had died, the latter after a battle with cancer.
He said girlfriend Lennay Kekau "made me promise, when it happened, that I would stay and play," Te'o said Sunday night.