Roddy White Will Honor Duke-Mercer Twitter Bet After All

Let this be a lesson to all athletes and celebrities on Twitter: If you place a wager with a fan, the Internet is going to make you pay up sooner or later.

Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Roddy White did just that Thursday, announcing he would honor the bet he placed on last week’s Duke-Mercer basketball game and then some.

Responding to a tweet from a fan named Dylan Hoyt, White — a Duke fan — said he would give Hoyt season tickets if 14th-seeded Mercer upset his Blue Devils in the second round of the NCAA tournament.

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The Bears, of course, pulled off the upset, and White was hit with a wave of Twitter hate demanding he make good on his wager after appearing to try to get out of the bet.

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After a few days of silence, White announced — and the Falcons confirmed — that he will be presenting Hoyt with two season tickets, two tickets to the Super Bowl, a sideline pass to one Falcons game and the opportunity to be his VIP guest at training camp.

“I’m a man of integrity and definitely a man of my word, and the kid is a great kid,” White told ESPN.com. “We have talked about it for days while people were just speculating. And being a father, you have to be responsible for your actions. I have always been a ‘say what you do and do what you say’ type of guy. And I wanted to add some incentives because he was so cool.”

The wideout reiterated his desire to act as a role model in a tweet Thursday night.

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