Tim Tebow is a remarkably detestable football player.
There’s the endless media fawning, the squeaky-clean image, the dumbfounding Heisman acceptance speech and, of course, the God complex.
Tebow, the bruising, gee-golly face of college football, is the ambassador from a world of early bedtimes and rubber wristbands. After winning two national titles quarterbacking the Florida Gators, Tebow became the proselytizing poster child for everything annoying about his sport.
On the field, he’s a bizarrely upright, unstoppable rusher, and he’s averaged 31 touchdowns through the air in the past two seasons. He’s equal parts Joe Namath, Joe Jonas and Jimmy Swaggart.
In short, he’s the bro messiah.
So, on Saturday, when the Chosen One took a nasty shot, clanked his head on the way down and lay motionless on the field, I should have felt some tinge of schadenfreude. But I didn’t.
Hard as I try, I just can’t bring myself to hate Tim Tebow.
On the one hand, listening to Tebow is a bit like driving behind a Hummer: maddening, uncomfortable and ideologically offensive in a way you can’t quite put your finger on. But on the other hand, you can’t blame the sun for rising.
To most people, a postgame interview might not seem like the proper place to explain that God has a plan for everyone and that your motivation in throwing footballs at people is to get to heaven. But for Tebow, a man who was raised by missionaries and spends his spring breaks spreading the Gospel to Third-World kids, a career in football is just an extension of the family business.
Furthermore, the guy’s entire biography reads like a parable. While his mother was pregnant with him, she came down with amoebic dysentery while out building mud huts in the Philippines. Her doctor recommended she terminate the pregnancy, because having a child would put her life at risk. But she, of course, refused, bringing into the world a brutal football force, smashing fellow human beings on Saturday and getting up for church on Sunday.
That story, along with other tearful testimonials of Tebow’s general blessedness, is just a glimpse at the culture in which he was raised. If you were told your entire life that you were a walking miracle, wouldn’t you start to believe it at some point?
And as much as Tebow rarely passes up an opportunity to plug the Book of John, it’s hard to tell which came first: Tebow’s postgame preaching or the sports world’s fascination with his divinity.
Would a reporter ask Colt McCoy if he was saving himself for marriage? Would ESPN speculate that Jacory Harris asked Jesus for some downfield blocking? Tebow fields all manners of nonsensical questions and, in a sense, his willingness to bind faith and football for his interviewers is kind of endearing.
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As tempting as it is to snicker when Tebow explains that Jesus “already tweeted enough; we just have to look at it,” there’s no pretense to his madcap preaching. The guy’s just doing what he knows: saving souls and winning football games. You can’t hate an athlete for being honest with himself.
So, when Tebow gets to the NFL and turns every postgame presser into a revival, it won’t bother me. Unless he gets drafted by the Cowboys.
