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| Tim Tebow |
For Tim Tebow, the end apparently has arrived.
Who's Tim Tebow? He's a professional football player--or he was until he was recently cut by the New England Patriots.
For those of you who are familiar with Tebow, he was a quarterback who engineered several amazing comeback victories for the Denver Broncos during the 2011 season.
Prior to his professional career, Tebow played college football at the University of Florida where he won the coveted Heisman Trophy in 2007. He followed that up with another great season in 2008 when he led the Gators to the national championship.
Besides winning the Heisman Trophy, Tebow also set records for rushing touchdowns and passing efficiency in the Southeastern Conference. When he was drafted by the Broncos in 2010, he seemed destined for greatness in the NFL.
However, that greatness never came. Despite showing flashes of the brilliance that highlighted his career at the University of Florida, those flashes were fleeting. Tebow's brief NFL career was marked by inconsistency and mediocrity. From the Broncos, Tebow went to the New York Jets (2012) and finally to the Patriots this year where he performed poorly during the preseason and was finally cut.
What's so significant about Tebow's disappointing professional career? There have been many collegiate stars who bombed in the NFL. What makes Tim Tebow any different than all the others who failed?
What makes Tebow different is that he's a Born Again Christian. And Tebow's faith deeply offends a lot of folks. When he was on his amazing run with the Broncos during the 2011 season, Tebow attributed his success to his faith in God and Jesus Christ.
That didn't sit well with many people who attributed Tebow's success to luck rather than Divine Providence. What further irritated people about Tebow was the huge amount of publicity he generated by using his professional football career to promote biblical values and Jesus Christ.
And so, when Tim Tebow finally failed, many people celebrated. One of those who celebrated Tebow's demise was Dan Bernstein, a repugnant troll who's the co-host of a Chicago radio sports talk show on The Score 670AM.
Here's what Bernstein recently wrote about Tebow for CBSChicago.com: A terrible passer gained a legion of swooning fans who believed he functioned
as some kind of heavenly lightning-rod, chosen to receive divine power and
channel it to the gridiron. Successes were acts of god, failures all but
ignored.Since his college days, Tim Tebow’s role as religious football soldier has
been championed as a cause, with touchdowns serving for many as larger points on
the celestial scoreboard. His self-serving, pious poses were offered as evidence
of devotional strength, while the true-believers lapped up his “inspirational”
speeches that read as if cut and pasted from pamphlets handed out on street
corners by glassy-eyed volunteers.
I don't understand why professional athletes such as Tim Tebow, who openly profess their faith in Jesus Christ, elicit such rancor from folks like Dan Bernstein. Perhaps they just loathe Christians in general.
With the myriad of criminals, cheats, felons and liars such as Aaron Hernandez, Alex Rodriguez, Lance Armstrong, Ryan Braun etc. setting terrible examples for young people by their contemptible behavior, athletes such as Tim Tebow should be welcomed. But they're not. Instead, they're despised.
Perhaps Tim Tebow will catch on with another NFL team. He's still young. And he still has that Heisman Trophy on his resume.
But perhaps his career is over. If it is, then the Lord will surely find something better for him to do because he's a bright young man who's not afraid to share his faith in Christ.
And in a world devoid of good role models, Tim Tebow needs to be seen and heard, whether that's on or off of the gridiron.
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