DC_fan
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How could I forget him. He has so over hyped himself in Philadelphia he has hyped himself out of the team.
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Tebow entertains, inspires and infuriates
OK, TAKE a knee, people. Because that's what the kids are doing. Not to mention brides, weathermen and, in one memorable case, a doctor just after he had saved a patient's life. All captured on camera, all trying to outdo each other. It's a phenomenon based on a phenomenon; the former being Tebowing, the latter being Tim Tebow.
If you haven't heard of Tim Tebow by now, don't fret, you will. He is coming to a screen near you, be it a small or big one. His is the type of story which will have Clint Eastwood clamouring for the rights to the movie, tentatively titled God Help Me. He might have a problem with the script, though. Tebow is still writing it.
What we know is this: Tebow is a devout Christian and the quarterback for the Denver Broncos, which means he prays and he plays. And that is the Tebow story, put simply. Only the newsprint generated would suggest it is a far more complicated one; his life has been dissected and debated so much that Lindsay Lohan might well be feeling bad about the attention he is getting. The phrase ''Tebow time'' seems to be used as much as ''tea time'' in American homes.
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Illustration: Edd Aragon
How good he is depends on who you talk to, and what stage of the game you tune in. He can be awful and then brilliant. Many spend as much time debating how bad he is as others do how good he is. He has won games when he has looked bad; like basketball, only really coming alive in the fourth quarter.
He has spawned phrases such as ''unorthodox offensive production'' due to his propensity to run the ball rather than do what a quarterback usually does and throw it. Yet he has helped Denver into the play-offs and in his first venture into the post-season, upset Pittsburgh off the first snap of overtime - and worked out how to throw in the process.
Many, including him, will say that God helped him get there; against the Steelers he threw for 316 yards, having made headlines previously for writing the Bible scripture John 3:16 on his eye-black while a college star at University of Florida.
In toppling a great quarterback, Steeler Ben Roethlisberger, Tebow helped broadcaster CBS break ratings records and social networking site Twitter traffic records; the latter was flooded with an average of 9420 tweets a second after he came good when it counted - again. God help anyone forced to count the numbers when Tebow faces Tom Brady's New England Patriots this weekend.
He's catching on everywhere, if for a while not his receivers. Sure enough, after he threw an 80-yard touchdown pass against the Steelers, he got down on bended knee and took a moment of prayer and reflection. Hence the phenomenon of Tebowing, which has spawned a website which allows you to choose a victor between one act of Tebowing and another; for instance, in the engine of a jet, on the Great Wall of China, in the Roman ruins of Volubilis or - truly - a mother's womb (via a 3D ultrasound).
The subject of Tebow has become so overloaded that nfl.com, the official website of the National Football League and thus a respected source of information, decided this week it would predict via computer software what the offspring of Tebow and various celebrities, including Katy Perry, Scarlett Johansson, Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Oprah, would look like.
David Letterman has made him the subject of one of his Top 10s, while fellow late-night talk show host Conan O'Brien re-enacted his game-winning pass to Demaryius Thomas using peanuts (because he was not authorised to use the actual footage).
He has also divided America, before he has quite conquered it. He thanks God regularly, blesses reporters at press conferences, and despite those bizarre attempts to computer-generate his children, he remains a virgin. He has polarised the population, which is nothing strange for an American sportsman, except that his talent is just one of the many things debated.
Being a devout Christian obviously gives him peace of mind but it can sure piss other people off. He is like the man on your doorstep trying to preach to you whom you can't shut the door on, because he is in every newspaper and on every television.
''Whose side are you on?'' isn't as simple as Denver or New England.
For his part, Tebow, born in the Philippines to a Baptist missionary father and home-schooled, appears to have reacted quite well to the hype and hyperbole. In his autobiography released last year, which he wrote as a 23-year-old back-up quarterback, he details how his mother, Pam, defied doctor's advice to continue her pregnancy, at a risk to her own life.
That he would win a college Heisman trophy, becoming a first-round NFL draft pick, defied more than doctors.
The rise of Tebow is a good story; pure entertainment, if maybe not for some purists. That should make him good for the sport, despite some being yet to decide whether he is actually any good at the sport. How many other second-year, not so long ago second-string, quarterbacks do you know who have much of a nation kneeling before them?
