I really didn’t get it. Why did people have such disdain and all out hatred for Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow? He seems like a nice enough guy, a person that one wouldn’t mind seeing his daughter bring home for prom pictures. He doesn’t curse, he is always positive, he always gives credit to his team, he is humble, he loves God, he loves his mama, he does charity work, and I bet he is nice to animals too.
Is he the greatest quarterback in the world? Not by a long shot. But is he effective and does he win games for his team? Absolutely. So, with all this information, I didn’t get the reasoning behind all of the venom spewed at and about Tebow. After all, it’s not like he is shooting up strip clubs or beating his girlfriend. He is an All American boy that plays football and loves Jesus.
And then something hit me today. I was writing about Louisville Cardinal point guard Peyton Siva and I wasn’t being very nice. I stopped and thought to myself, “Why do I hate this kid so much? He seems like a good enough guy, he seemingly does all the right things, so why is it that I dislike him?” And then I got it. It wasn’t that I hated him, I hated the fans and all of the nonsense that they talked about him, which in turn made me dislike Peyton Siva.
Louisville fans loved to talk about their beloved Siva like he was the next great American point guard. At first they said he was better than John Wall. He wasn’t. They then claimed he was better than Brandon Knight. Wrong again. During the preseason they talked him up bigger than ever, saying that he was a player of the year contender, a lottery pick in the NBA draft and that he was going to give Marquis Teague all kinds of problems on the court when the two faced off against one another. None of this happened and poor Peyton is having a sorry year by Louisville fans standards.
I was so sick of hearing about how great he is or was going to be that I turned my animosity towards him, an innocent kid that I will probably never meet or talk to in my life. I thought about this and about Tim Tebow. I then texted our fearless leader Paul Jordan, the biggest Tebow hater I know and a Florida resident. He confirmed to me that the reason he hated Tebow so much was that in his state, where the quarterback played for the Gators, Tebow was revered as a godlike figure. Paul had to read about him, hear about him, see him and endure the throngs of Tebowites in Florida, espousing his sainthood and greatness. He told me that his neighbor named his dog Tebow and he had to listen to him yell every morning at the crack of dawn, “Tebow! Come here Tebow! Tebow!!!” That’s enough to make somebody hate the name or the image of a person.
Paul, being the die hard UK fan that he is, was sick of Tebow and was sick of the Florida Gator fans. I wondered if there was any specific Kentucky Player or event that made people angry or sick to their stomach because it was thrown in their faces all day, everyday, non-stop. Paul again gave me some insight and reminded me of this little doozey:
The John Wall Dance became a phenomonon in the Big Blue Nation. We did it everywhere. On TV, in front of the Great Wall of China and right in the face of opposing fans whenever we got the chance. Louisville fans hated it and they hated John Wall for introducing it to all of us Big Blue nut jobs. The repetitive nature and the obnoxiousness of the dance was just too much to bear. Come to think of it, it’s a pretty stupid dance. All you do is make a muscle and move your hand back and forth while slightly thrusting your pelvis. Yes it’s a dumb dance but it is our dumb dance.
We Kentucky fans are disgusted by Christian Laetner. The fact that The Shot is shown every single year does not help ease the pain that the Blue Devil jabbed into our collective hearts on that ill faited day. It was the greatest college basketball game ever played and we were on the wrong end of it. The media and other basketball fanatics will never let it go.
There are true bad guys in sports but Laetner, Wall, Siva and even Tebow aren’t examples of them. Louisville’s Terrence Williams was a flashy prick while he was at Louisville and still is today. His original team, the Nets, shipped him to the D league and eventually to Houston where he is now riding the pine, because of the “Me First” attitude that he loved to display in college.
Pac Man Jones, Mike Tyson, Mike Vick, Ben Roethlisberger, Dennis Rodman, James Harrison are true examples of sports villains that people hate and for good reason. We don’t have to go through the laundry list of events, they have been well documented and all sports fans are familiar with the stories.
This all leads me back to Tebow. It’s not the actually person that everybody hates; it’s what his idolators make him out to be. They just won’t shut up about him and no matter how bad he may suck as a quarterback, mechanically speaking, they won’t ever let you forget that he wins. And that he is a good guy that goes to church, and circumcises little pagan babies in third world countries, and how dare you besmirch the name of Tim Tebow…I could go on and on. But I won’t because I think you get the picture.
Maybe one day his fans will let him down from that pedistal on which they have placed him and accept the fact that he is a really nice guy with a decent arm and limited accuracy. Until then, they are just making the rest of us dislike him to the point of disgust. Sorry Tim.