“Once again God had to save Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos.”
Personally, I thought Terrell Suggs’ comments about Tim Tebow on Tuesday were a pretty mild (and probably a somewhat tongue-in-cheek) way of saying Denver got lucky to get into the playoffs. That’s not an entirely unwarranted assertion considering Denver lost over the weekend and put their fate in the hands of another set of teams: San Diego and Oakland.
However, what I find interesting is the headline that was on the Yahoo! front page: “NFL star’s explosive Tim Tebow comment.” The teaser read, “Terrell Suggs’s religion-based attack on the Broncos QB is an unnecessary low blow, a writer says.”
After reading the Shutdown Corner post by the writer in question, Chris Chase, my response was to scratch my head in puzzlement. A little while later I started to wonder why Suggs’ comments, which to me weren’t all that controversial, provoked such a strong reaction from Chase, whose blog is one I read regularly and like quite a bit.
I’ve written about Tebow a couple of times now. (Who hasn’t?) About a month ago I mused that we could all learn from how he handles adversity, and more recently I named him one of my top controversial sports stories of 2011. In the latter article I asked why he’s such a polarizing figure, but I didn’t really try to formulate an answer.
There have been a lot of different takes on the question, and while I’ve been hesitant to attempt to add mine, here it is: It’s not really about Tim Tebow as a football player. Instead it’s about where he’s positioned (and why) in American culture.
That Tebow is one of the most successful college football athletes of all time while being “mechanically-challenged” at the NFL level is like fingernails on chalkboards for a lot of football fans. Add how he subsequently led the Broncos into the playoffs for the first time since 2005 with a string of statistically-improbable fourth-quarter comebacks and there’s certainly an argument to be made about why Tebow is reacted to as he is strictly on football terms.
I just don’t think it’s the complete answer.
For better or worse, football is to the United States what soccer represents for much of the rest of the world, which is to say it is a reflection of who we are as a people. We collectively have invested so much of ourselves into football that fair or not, everything about it we take as a judgment of us all. And that means anyone who puts on a football uniform by default becomes much more than just a guy who’s handsomely paid to play a game.
That said, very few football players genuinely morph from athlete into athlete-celebrity. Most of those few who do, Tom Brady for example, work very hard to master the celebrity skill of being completely uncontroversial as much as possible while at the same time nailing our perceptions about what an NFL quarterback should be doing on the field.
Tebow, on the other hand, uncomfortably straddles some of the fundamentally deepest divisions — race, politics, religion — to be found in our society while being anything but a prototypical NFL quarterback. Add in how he’s not afraid to take a strong stand about what he believes on the biggest stages available — his 2010 Super Bowl commercial, for example, even before his NFL career got underway — and there’s little wonder why he’s so polarizing.
But again, it’s not about him.
What Tebow does is force those of us who watch him — and a lot of us are doing so — to, at the very least, acknowledge the reality of our cultural divisions, even if we don’t want to really deal with them.
And we just don’t like looking in the mirror that way under any circumstances, but especially not when watching sports.