By Cathy Lynn Grossman and Sean Leahy, USA TODAY
Tim Tebow�(FSY)��� is a 23-year-old second-year, second-string quarterback on a so-so NFL team.
By Preston C. Mack for USA TODAY
Tim Tebow has been working with Broncos teammates during the lockout in preparation for the 2011 NFL season.
By Preston C. Mack for USA TODAY
Tim Tebow has been working with Broncos teammates during the lockout in preparation for the 2011 NFL season.
So who's going to buy his memoirs?
What's to remember?
Only...
... The play-by-play of his life from conception (his missionary dad, Bob, prayed for a son and promised God to raise him to preach) to birth (a "miracle" tale told in a Super Bowl commercial).
... High school gridiron statistics that made college recruiters pant (he had 80 scholarship offers). An ESPN documentary called him "The Chosen One" when he was just 17.
... A Heisman trophy and college championships at the University of Florida, where Tebow is immortalized in a bronze statue on campus.
... His selection in the first round of last year's NFL draft by the Denver Broncos, along with a GQ profile that praised his physique in prose that read like a romance novel.
And throughout Through My Eyes, Tebow's book now in stores, is the bone-deep religious side of the evangelical young player who writes Bible verses beneath the play codes on his wristbands, just as he once inscribed them in his eye black for his college games.
The book, written with co-author Nathan Whitaker, starts each chapter with a Bible verse and is laced with as much with "glory to God" as it is with pages of grit-and-grunt details of Tebow's trademark punishing workouts. He trains relentlessly, determined to confound everyone who has questioned whether he can make it as a quarterback in the NFL.
So Eyes is for anyone who ever felt a sense of defiant determination in the face of skeptics.
And, it's aimed at anyone who finds Tebow's story just a bit insufferable.
It's the memoir of a no-drugs, no-drinks, no-arrests player whose idea of swearing is "Holy sweet cheese-and-crackers!" Even so, there are some smudges on Tebow's Jockey-endorsed T-shirt.
He admits to crying so often he could compete with weepy House Speaker John Boehner in a Kleenex Bowl. During his college years, a Facebook page called "I saw Tim Tebow Cry and Loved it" had 23,000 fans.
Tim Tebow, with writer Nathan Whitaker, weaves faith and football.
God doesn't make you a player or win your game:
"People often seem to think that when you're following the Lord and trying to do His will, your path will always be clear, the decisions smooth and easy, and life will believed happily ever after and all that. Sometimes that may be true, but I've found that more often, it's not. The muddled decisions still seem muddled, bad things still happen to believers and great things can happen to nonbelievers "
Tearing up is not unusual:
"I work so hard off the field and am so physically exhausted after games that I've been known to cry at times after losses, and, occasionally even after wins It's the way God made me.
He laughs off the anti-Tebow legions.
"If those people got to know who I really am as a person, we'd get along. Holier than thou? That's not me. I'm a real person. I fail and then I try keep improving and enjoying life," Tebow says in an interview with USA TODAY. "I'm a people pleaser. I would love everyone to love me but they're not, and I'm just not going to worry about it."
Live pure, work hard
Tebow seems happy, excited, eager, upbeat and any other bubbly adjective you can list as he talks about faith, football and a future he says he never worries about.
The NFL lockout that threatens the 2011 season? Beyond his control. Questions of whether he'll start for the Broncos in 2011? Keep training. Romance? Ha! No one special ? yet, he says, laughing.
Tebow's agenda: Live pure. Work hard. Leave it to God.
Bob Tebow got the preacher he promised his Lord. Tim says football is "absolutely" his pulpit.
"As a player, especially as a quarterback, you are blessed with so many things you can do with that platform. You can help a lot of kids." Tim says.
In the offseason, he has carried on with raising funds for orphanages through his Tim Tebow Foundation, running a celebrity pro-am golf tourney and tithing from his $8.7 million Broncos contract to the foundation and other causes such as Wounded Warriors.
He supports his father's efforts in the Philippines, where Tim was born after his mother Pam's difficult pregnancy. She rejected doctor's advice to abort their fifth child and toughed it out, as she recounts in a Focus on the Family-sponsored commercial that broke through the NFL's ban on issue-oriented ads during the last Super Bowl.
Groups objected in advance of the ad, expecting a diatribe from Tim and Pam. Instead, it was a sweet, short, funny spot in which Pam shakes off a Tebow tackle and viewers were invited to the Focus website ? where the heavy-duty tales are posted.
'You have to earn respect'
Tebow does plunge into controversial issues in football, as well. In his book, he acknowledges some recklessness with regard to one of the most sensitive issues in football today: concussions.
Tebow says that while at Florida, he ignored searing pains and played in a 2009 game at LSU despite suffering a concussion two weeks earlier.
Doctors had cleared him to play, but Tebow writes, "I could barely see by the end of pregame warm-ups, it was hurting so badly."
Even so, he talked coach Urban Meyer into playing him.
Now, Tebow admits, it wasn't "the most cautious or the wisest move. I was thinking with more adrenaline than I should have been." But, he says, "I don't think it was a mistake because I didn't have any side effects from it."
That's not a chance the NFL wants players to take, particularly in the face of statistics indicating there were 223 concussions suffered in last season's 333 games.
Next season, the league will employ new procedures for assessing whether players who suffer head injuries should return to games, including clearance by independent doctors. The process includes baseline neurological tests for players, assessing their preseason level of memory and balance. This raises concern that some might deliberately "tank" the test to give themselves a faster shot at returning to the field after a hard hit to the head. Tebow says doing so would be wrong.
Leadership is another thread in Tebow's open-book life.
In his memoirs, the high school champion who once ran for a touchdown on a broken leg, who committed to Florida early enough to help recruit future teammates, who trains as if chased by the phantom image of an opponent who might outwork him, always praises teammates by name but never identifies the lazy or uncommitted ones.
All very fine. All history. And history doesn't count for much in the NFL, where Tebow knows he's just another young player expected to listen and follow, not lead.
So there are the three-times-a-day sessions of running, throwing and lifting weights plus creative twists such as running up Pikes Peak to "take advantage of being in Colorado."
There's still time for hanging out with his older brothers, Robby and Peter, who live and work with him, to play Madden football video games, and to croon ("very badly!") along with country music favorites such as Kenny Chesney.
Tebow wants his teammates to see that improving his play and getting to know his teammates on and off the field is his top priority.
He says, "I'm with veterans who have played 10 to 15 years. But as quarterback, you have to have everyone looking at you. You have to earn respect. Show up first. Be last to leave. After that they begin to like you and play for you. Ultimate goal is fellows who will lay it on the line for you."
With just three confidence-building starts under his belt, he has set his sights on nudging Kyle Orton�(FSY)��� out of the starting job this year. Denver vice president of football operations John Elway hasn't discouraged Tebow, although he has said the second-year player needs to improve as a passer.
If Tebow weren't saying he wanted to win that role, the Broncos might be worried, says Charles Davis�(FSY)���, an analyst for the NFL Network and Fox Sports who predicted Tebow would be a first-round draft pick in 2010 when few others did. Now Davis speculates there will be post-lockout trade offers for Orton that might clear Tebow's path to the starting job in Denver.
Tebow is doing the right things to win the trust of his Broncos teammates, Davis says. "He's going to throw every drill, run every workout. I don't think he's leading with his mouth. I think he's leading with his physicality. He's not saying, 'Check me out.'
"You've got to understand what you've got in him," Davis says. "You're not coaching Tim Tebow in the standard way, but for who he is and what he brings to the table."
Improvisational smarts, the ability to turn broken plays into big plays, passion that booms from him like his hoarse voice in the huddle shrieking, "Game on!" and that final bent neck to a higher power. That's what Tebow brings to the table.
It's as if writing his memoirs at 23 is a way of clearing the deck for his future. Through My Eyes ends with Tebow, a preacher in pads after all, "tuning out all the white noise" around him ? and leaving the rest to Christ.
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