A second second coming for Tebow?
There are two kinds of people in the world. Those immune to Tebow Fatigue. And the rest of us weary souls.
It is now going on nine years that Tim Tebow, his glory days as a Heisman Trophy winner and a brief flash of pro football success well behind him, has been vainly chasing a second act of athletic prominence. Rejected by four NFL teams, Tebow turned to baseball, laboring for three thoroughly unremarkable seasons in the sport’s minor leagues amid aspirants a decade younger than he is.
Now, still not getting any younger, he’s trying the gridiron again, this time at a new position, as a 33-year-old. And, while his Sisyphean toil may not be fake news, it long ago began to feel like a transposed version of crying-wolf headlines. Over and over, there have been urgent prophecies, never fulfilled, of Tebow as savior or — at least — change agent.
Just months after his NFL apotheosis in a 2011 playoff victory, Tebow was traded by the Denver Broncos to the New York Jets, who spent all of the next season threatening to match the public relations hullaballoo by unleashing him in place of struggling quarterback Mark Sanchez, or as a runner-passer in the Wildcat formation, or as a receiver, or possibly as a running back.
Nothing ever came of any of that. Tebow, the erstwhile miracle man, mostly sat on the bench, was released after the season, spent one training camp with Philadelphia and another with New England but never played another NFL game. Always with much fanfare. Then, in what had to be considered his athletic foreign language, Tebow failed to hit his weight in the New York Mets’ farm system — .223 compared to 245 — even as the team repeatedly hinted it would give him a try in the Major Leagues. (But never could rationalized doing it.)
Against bush-league pitching, Tebow never hinted at big-time potential, prompting Jay Busbee of Yahoo! Sports to write in 2017 that Tebow “is playing baseball and nobody knows why.” In Tebow’s last hardball season, with Triple A Syracuse, he hit — if “hit” is the right word — a measly .163 in 77 games to reinforce Busbee’s point.
Even now, rejoining his old University of Florida coach Urban Meyer with the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tebow’s credentials as a celebrity — these days, mostly famous for being famous —are all that keep him in the public eye and in the sports news.
Surely, part of the narrative is Tebow’s recognition factor beyond sports, through his conspicuous displays of Christian faith. And even if his prayerful kneeling after football touchdowns — “Tebowing,” which he trademarked in 2012 — wasn’t necessarily embraced for religious implications, it provided a fad to be widely mimicked.
The pose also was compared sarcastically to Rodin’s famous sculpture, “The Thinker.” So, segueing from that, let us ponder the puzzlement of the ongoing publicity glut.
Really: Why? Tebow hardly was the first jock to attempt a football-baseball transition. Apart from Deion Sanders — who is the only man to play in both the World Series and Super Bowl — Bo Jackson, D.J. Dozier, Drew Henson, Chad Hutchinson, Brian Jordan and Matt Kinzer are just some recent names on a long list of men who reached the top level in both sports. Plenty others — including two former Heisman winners, Chris Weinke and Ricky Williams — worked both the NFL and baseball’s minors.
One of those was John Elway. In 1982, the summer before the Stanford quarterback was made the NFL’s №1 draft choice, Elway dabbled in the minors with the Yankees’ Class A team in Oneonta, N.Y., while Yankee boss George Steinbrenner was convinced Elway would be his Major League right fielder within three years. Yet there wasn’t nearly the fuss made over him that the more limited Tebow is experiencing.
Elway, furthermore, was a can’t-miss NFL star, who followed his 16-year Hall of Fame career with the Denver Broncos by becoming the team’s general manager — and is the man, skeptical of the quarterback skills of one Tim Tebow, who sent Tebow packing in that 2012 trade to the Jets.
Here’s another argument — flimsy, I admit — why the Tebow story feels overdone. If one will accept a spelling quirk, there already was a Tebow — Tebeau — in the Major Leagues. Three, in fact, in the late 1800s. George Tebeau (.269 average over six years), his brother Patsy (.279 in 13 years) and Pussy — so called, apparently, because his initials were C.A.T.; Charles Alston Tebeau — who was no relation to the other two. Pussy played only two games and hit .500, for the old Cleveland Spiders of the National League.
Anyway, with Tim Tebow, we’re back to football now. When the 2021 NFL season commences, he will be 34 years old, trying to become a tight end for the first time, and it feels like another stunt.
Best of luck to the fellow. He never seems to tire of his resurrection story. It’s just that plenty of us have.
