There were seventy reporters credentialed to the New York Mets instructional league in Port St Lucie, Florida, this week. The 29-year-old college-football broadcaster, Christian evangelist and former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow was taking his first swings and shagging his first flies as a professional baseball player. Tebow hit .494 at Nease High School in Jacksonville in 2005. But that was a long time ago. He doesn’t even know what position he’s going to play. It is hard to look at Tebow’s inside-out swing today and believe his baseball career is going anywhere.
But since the Mets signed him on September 8, fans have gone berserk. The team is selling number-15 “Tebow” shirts like hotcakes. (Get your own here.) Children are lining up for his autograph. It was the same way in 2012 when he briefly became the eleventh-string quarterback of the hapless New York Jets, in 2013 when the New England Patriots gave him a brief tryout before cutting him, and in 2015 when the Philadelphia Eagles signed and cut him in turn.
There are plenty of top athletes, and plenty of them are Christian. What is so special about Tebow that he should draw so many fans?
Born in the Philippines to Baptist missionaries, home-schooled, Tebow has been both praised for his courage and written off as a weirdo. As a quarterback at the University of Florida he scratched scriptural citations into his eye black. For the 2010 Super Bowl he made a commercial for the anti-abortion group Focus on the Family. (The ad itself will someday be a historical document of considerable interest. Furious protests surrounded it, but it contained no political advocacy of any kind.)
Tebow’s teammate and top receiver at Florida was Aaron Hernandez, future New England Patriots tight end and first-degree murderer. Tebow tried and failed to put Hernandez on the straight and narrow.
But he did win the 2007 Heisman Trophy, awarded each year to the best college football player. The Heisman does not automatically translate into later success. Witness the recent travails of 2013 winner Johnny Manziel. Even the thrilling Johnny Rodgers, who won in 1972, played only a couple seasons in the NFL.
Tebow was doomed to be one of those players whose career flames out after college. His problem was simple. He has the least efficient throwing motion of any player who has ever seriously aspired to quarterback an NFL team. His “release time” is about .6 seconds. Tom Brady’s release time is half that. What looks like a dart in Brady’s hands is a discus in Tebow’s. The man has no more business spending a Sunday afternoon behind center than your great aunt does.
But for a few games in 2011, this seemed not to matter. After the Broncos started their season 1-4, Tebow took over at quarterback and squeaked the team to a .500 season, including a series of comeback victories seemingly won by the sheer force of Tebow’s will. The Broncos even won a playoff game before getting clobbered by Brady’s Patriots. And it was over and out for Tebow’s career as a starting quarterback.
Tebow is sort of a sports tragedy. He is really an extraordinary athlete: Strong, with what Bodybuilding.com calls “the sort of wide shoulders that would make Atlas envious.” Fast. Decisive. But he is not quick, and so he will forever be excluded from playing at the highest level the games Americans most love to watch. To be a fan of Tebow the Athlete is to commiserate, to feel like the only person who understands his predicament.
And the same goes for Tebow the Christian. Sometimes he can be a conventional American, when he talks about following your dreams and blah-blah-blah. But at other times, his spiritual approach to things is unconventional and profound. Last week, a sportscaster asked him a question that was meant to do little more than sow dissension and generate gossip:
And Tebow replied in a way that made this entire perspective on life sound petty and servile:
When he talks that way, it is easy to see one thing that is special about Tebow. He presents Christianity the way most of his fellow Christians have always understood it—as a message of liberation. Christianity, of course, is not the only way to protect oneself from the tyranny of other people’s expectations. But for most Americans, and at most times, it has been the main one.
