I think I am in the minority of people in the Denver area: I both hope for and want Tim Tebow to succeed spectacularly while acknowledging that, right now, he’s not a very good quarterback.
That makes me a minority because Tim Tebow is a fascinatingly polarizing person. Thirty years ago, a character like Tebow would have been universally celebrated, or else largely ignored; today, there are those who absolutely love him, and those who truly despise him, and not a lot in the middle.
And to be honest, I’m not sure a lot of that has to do with football. People who love him are drawn to him because of his personal story, because he seems to actually be as good and as nice a person as advertised, and at least in part because of his outspoken cultural conservatism.
People who hate him do so at least in part because of his outspokenness, because he had the audacity to make a Pro-Life commercial that ran during the Super Bowl, and I think they want more than anything for him to not only fail on the football field, but to somehow get sucked into the cultural cesspool and experience a very public fall from grace.
How else can you explain the open mockery he enjoys from opponents and fans alike (one Facebook friend asked during the Detroit game “Has God abandoned Tebow?”)? And both sides couch their arguments in football terms, but the reality is that no mere second-year player on a bad football team should ever draw this much attention.
But Tim Tebow has become a mirror on our culture that we in Denver get to stare into every day.
This all became shockingly clear to me as the story of the Penn State sexual abuse case broke into the headlines — not just the sports headlines, mind you, but the front page of the news.
For 46 years Joe Paterno has been a beacon of integrity and propriety in a college sports world that has grown increasingly self-serving and cynical. As one radio host put it, to find out that Joe Paterno failed in this simple test of character shakes the foundation of what he believed college athletics is about. The discovery that Paterno knew about the allegations and didn’t take forceful action casts a shadow over all that he has accomplished.
If this had been the University of Miami, or Southern Cal, or even the University of Colorado of ten years ago, this story would not, I submit, be the headline that it is. You almost expect bad things to happen at schools with those reputations. But it’s not just about the criminality of it, or even the nature of the crime — it’s the spectacular fall from grace that draws our attention and forces us to be interested in this tawdry story.
I think many of us, in this post-modern world, still want something to believe in. Fans of college athletics want to believe there are still schools and programs that can be clean and successful; the Occupy Wall Street movement wants to believe that government can intervene and make corporations be nice; a generation of new voters wanted to believe that great oratorical skills and an upbeat message could translate into a national rebirth; and those of us who are fans of Tim Tebow want to believe that character is important and can overcome a lack of talent, or that it can’t be corrupted by fame.
And, sadly, there are many who believe that nobody is that much cleaner or morally stronger than anybody else, and the moment they try to appear that way, they deserve to be mocked, scorned and eventually brought down.
Tim Tebow is important in more than just football because, whether he wants to do this or not, he helps us learn which side of that particular cultural divide we fall on.
Michael J. Alcorn (mjalcorn@comcast.net) of Arvada is a public school teacher, fitness instructor and father of three.
