“Superman Returns,” by Taylor Antrim, was originally published in the October 2012 issue of Vogue.
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A perfect late-summer Cincinnati evening—aquamarine sky, cotton-puff clouds—and a low-stakes preseason game: This is as languorous as professional football gets. Beach balls bounce around the stadium, and a few high-decibel seconds of Nicki Minaj’s “Pound the Alarm” fail to stir the easy, contented crowd.
But when a certain quarterback takes the field—Tim Tebow, a newly minted New York Jet, the most debated, celebrated, denigrated, and all-around marveled-over quarterback in the NFL—the mood shifts. Scattered booing quickly fades to an electric quiet. Thousands of camera phones flash.
Tebow’s first play is a twelve-yard pass. A surprised cheer goes up. Two snaps later? A spinning, charging fourteen-yard quarterback scramble. “It’s a miracle!” one spectator says, only half-joking. These are Bengals fans, but already you can hear the chant begin—as if they can’t help themselves: “Tebow, Tebow, Tebow!”
Tim is used to that reaction. This 25-year-old devout Christian heartthrob has palpable charisma, a radiant magnetism that one of his fellow evangelicals might call a halo. The gossip pages—which have tirelessly documented his appearances on the red carpet—would call it heat. And yet critics point out that his arm is slow, his accuracy is poor. He simply doesn’t play like an elite NFL quarterback. “I have fun,” he says, brushing them off. “I enjoy life and getting after it. I still have a lot of joy doing this.”
Still. Because he’s been getting after it since being raised by missionary parents on a farm in Jacksonville, Florida, since joining a Pee Wee football team and “lifting” with surgical tubing attached to doors until his father relented and put a weight set in the barn. Tim was a fiercely, cheerfully competitive kid—whether playing board games with his two older sisters or every sport under the sun with his big brothers. “They loved to play in the rain and the mud,” recalls his mother, Pam, who home-schooled all five children. “They even made their own golf course in the pasture.”
But Tim didn’t look like a natural quarterback; he was so big and bulky that his earliest coaches wanted him at fullback or linebacker. And yet there was only one position he dreamed about, so he and his dad sought out a team that would let him play it. Nease High School had one of the weakest football programs in the region; with Tebow at QB they won state. Next it was the University of Florida, where he took home the Heisman Trophy as a sophomore (a first) and led the Gators to two national-championship titles. And then the Denver Broncos drafted him as a backup. So much success, and yet commentators harped on his size and his bruising, physical style of play. “ ‘You’ll never make it in the NFL,’ ” he remembers them saying. “I just love that! I try to thrive off of that—off of challenges and obstacles, overcoming them.”
He overcame his critics in astonishing fashion with the Broncos last season, scrambling this way and that, eyes darting around for receivers, slinging more than a few badly off-target passes. Yet somehow, some way, he kept winning game after thrilling game—often in the final heart-stopping seconds of the fourth quarter. He sparked a nationwide insta-craze with his knee-down, fist-to-forehead victory prayer called—naturally—“Tebowing.” He took a friendly ribbing on SNL (from Jason Sudeikis’s acerbic Jesus) and admitted to a reporter that yes, he was saving himself for marriage. Heartland churchgoers, urban sophisticates, football neophytes—everyone got swept up in his will to win. “A presence that can’t be explained but can certainly be felt,” said Bob Costas at the height of his streak.
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