As the Mets keep popping up in the press for men behaving badly, let's take a moment to salute one of their true good guys.
Tim Tebow has taken his final swing, and now that his batting helmet joins his football helmet on the shelf of memories, we can safely say that Tebow's career as a professional athlete has ended. After announcing his retirement from the Mets, Tebow's statistical legacy is a .223 batting average with 18 home runs and 48 doubles in 287 games, all in the minor leagues. As he crept up the minors to get invited to spring training, Tebow faltered, batting .151 in 34 games. He belted his lone spring training homer last year, just before the pandemic shuttered the sport.
But Tebow is one of the few athletes rarely measured by stats. Widely considered one of the best college football players in history, Tebow was a star before he even graduated from Florida, winning a Heisman Trophy and national championship with the Gators. In a sport known for seedy dealings and auctioned loyalties, Tebow shined like a beacon from the sewers of college football business. He didn't curse, was ardently religious, and was about as wholesome as a modern athlete can get, as if pulled from a Rockwellian portrait.
Tebow was also movie-star handsome, big and cut and eye candy for many. Yet for every woman who adored him, there were men who hated him, calling him out as some evangelical freak who spent a bit too much time in the good book and not in the playbook. All Tebow did was more charitable deeds, from traveling the world to visit sick kids to touring our prisons to preach hope to convicts feeling hopeless.
So sure, he seemed too perfect, more comic book hero than a professional jock. There was no middle ground on Tebow; you either loved or loathed him. If you look objectively at his baseball career, it makes sense that it ends where and when it did. He got more time to make the majors than most 30-year-olds because he's Tebow. There was a symbiosis there: the Mets get a celebrity to sell tickets in their minor league outposts, and Tebow gets to chase one last dream of athletic glory.
What is curious was how quickly Tebow got dumped by his true sport - football. After his legendary college career under Urban Meyer, Tebow was drafted by the Denver Broncos and led them to the playoffs in 2011, where they stunned the much better Pittsburgh Steelers with Tebow rifling the winning TD pass in overtime.
Then he was booted by a much better quarterback, John Elway, in favor of a way better quarterback, Peyton Manning. Makes sense. Elway saw Manning as a unicorn who could carry them to Super Bowls, and he did. What's curious was how resoundingly dismissed Tebow was a pro quarterback with 29 total touchdowns and 9 interceptions. He spent one season with the Jets, where he threw eight passes and completed six of them but was all but welded to the bench. And then, at 25 years old, with an 8-6 career record, Tim Tebow was finished as a football player.
Was it because of his name and his fame? Was it because of his Christianity? Was it because of this "awkward throwing motion" that, despite his success, became the chief bullet point of all NFL scouts and GMs? Was it because he was too much of a distraction to take a chance on his talent? It's hard to think of a healthy football player with Tebow's moderate success who was tossed so far out of the NFL that MLB became his last option.
But since the world rarely observed Tebow through an objective lens, it was love or loathe all the way. When it came to Tebow the people were ride or die, as they say in pop culture. But his public stature, which has reached fun house distortions, is not really his fault. He became an outsized star as a teen, did not meet projections as an adult, and was overanalyzed for his Wheaties values and cinema-star contours. The truth is Tim Tebow is a healthy 33-year-old man who played two professional sports at the highest level, and leaves with plenty of life and TV jobs awaiting him.
Maybe his second act didn't match his first, but he gave every ounce he had, which is a lot more than most folks have, or give.
Follow Jason Keidel on Twitter: @JasonKeidel
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