Tim Tebow's goal in college wasn't to win the Heisman Trophy or National Championships. With the Broncos, being MVP or winning a Super Bowl are secondary motivations. Tebow's primary purpose in everything he does is to witness to the world and bring the Word of Jesus to us all. And he has done that in a way few in this world ever have.
Regardless of my differences of opinion with him about religion and my never-ceasing stream of Twitter hatred for the guy whenever the Broncos play, I have to admit, Tim Tebow has made me understand Jesus in a way I don't know if I ever could without him.
From what I understand, Tebow is the Jackie Robinson of Christians in the NFL. After years of passing over strong, talented Christians in the draft, Tebow finally posed figure too large to ignore, so Denver reluctantly chose him and vowed to keep him on the bench his entire (short) career. But Tebow's talent and the overwhelming cries of the usually silent minority of Christians in this nation could not be ignored, leading him to disprove the critics by stepping in and lifting a terrible team to a win in the Super Bowl despite the protestations of the NFL, the networks, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and the Muslims, Jews, and atheists who run this country.
Unfortunately, that was not true. In fact, Tim Tebow is not a very good quarterback and Christians are rarely quiet about anything. Neither of those things, however, is a reason for me to hate him as personally as I have.
Say what you will about his goody-goody personality and overt religious zealotry, Tim Tebow truly believes what he says. In America, Republican contenders for President, who cheat on their cancer-ridden wives and suggest repealing child labor laws, make a daily point of reminding us how much they love Jesus and his teachings. Soon, Mitt Romney will secure the Republican nomination and will be able to shift the attention to how much more he loves Jesus than President Obama does. And, in turn, President Obama will have to make the case he loves Jesus more because a huge voting block in this country justifies its decisions at the polls with statements like, "Sure, President Bush ruined the economy by sending us to war with a country that posed no legitimate threat to us resulting in the deaths of millions, but he prays every day and I don't think Gore does that."
For so many in the public eye, religion is an accessory to be worn when one wants to appear good, noble, kind-hearted. But just as it's possible to wear a Broncos shirt or baseball cap without being a true Denver fan, only a minority of any religion's followers will show any devotion beyond the surface appearance.
Tim Tebow is the rare exception whose religious beliefs come from a pure belief in the Bible. While I may not agree with what he believes, it's refreshing to be able to accept it at face value. A sect of Tebow fans likes to put forward the idea that the quarterback might actually be the son of God, and I can understand why.
Tim Tebow's wins on the football field defy all reason. While the word "miracle" gets overused, there's a statistical improbability of a guy playing as awfully as Tebow winning even one game that can't be ignored. Tim Tebow is humble. Tim Tebow shares his beliefs and feelings with the world because he wants us to be--and believes we can be--better people. Tim Tebow loves his enemies. Tim Tebow seems like a genuinely good, noble, kind-hearted person.
His followers, however...
Before he'd started rookie training camp in 2010, Tebow's jersey was the highest selling jersey in the league. Despite his own insistence he had a lot to learn before he could be an effective NFL quarterback, Jesus freaks lambasted Denver's coaches and management for not starting Tebow. Every Tebow win fueled the blind devotion of his followers and made them less bearable.
And, worst, his winning ways drew the attention of non-football fans to the NFL, which drove network and league executives to make "All-Tebow, All-the Time" the strategy for the entire season. Watch a Buccaneers-Texans game and discussion among the announcers will turn to Tebow. NFL.com recently posted a gallery of Photoshopped images illustrating what it would look like if Tebow impregnated various celebrities. Every week this year, whether he was playing or not, one of the headlines on ESPN.com, CNNSI.com, or Yahoo's NFL page featured the word "Tebow."
And, thus, Tim Tebow accomplished his ultimate goal. He made me, a devout atheist, understand Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross in a way I never had seen it before. Because while I know Tim Tebow is a good man and I have nothing against him personally, his followers are ruining football for me.
It's hard to explain my friendship with Ryno. There's nothing particularly bizarre about it, but trying to explain it is difficult because most people never had and never will have a friend like him. I assume it's the way Harrison Schmitt must feel when talking about being an astronaut with anyone other than Buzz Aldrin or Charles Duke or the only other nine guys who have ever set foot on the moon.
To oversimplify, Ryno is generous beyond reason. I couldn't begin to guess the number of times he's bought me lunch or dinner, but it's a strong three-figured one. He's had to have dropped well over $1000 on sushi alone. And if you offer to pay your share, he usually waves your money back into your wallet dismissively. When he doesn't, you can't help but feel he's only letting you give him cash to boost your self esteem. After all, odds are he's going to use that $20 you slip him to buy your kid something she mentioned she was passingly interested in the last time she was at his house.
He bankrolled my first year of curling, something I'd been wanting to try since I was in high school, including buying our team shirts and getting me my own broom for my birthday.
And I hate to think of where we would be if his wife, our pediatrician, hadn't provided free medical care for my family during all my unemployed and uninsured years, but I'm pretty sure at least one of my kids would be dead, the other would have polio, and I'd be hobbling around on one foot.
He takes us to Vegas at least twice a year--always for the opening two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament in March and for our fantasy football draft in August and usually once or twice more when he gets free room offers--and when I say "we," our fantasy football league has ten owners. In each of my last five trips to Vegas with Ryno, I have eaten a steak that cost more than I'd spend on a weekly grocery trip. Last year, we're stayed in the Beatles Suite at the Sahara. The year before that, we were in a suite at the Bellagio.
Buying him a present for Christmas.
As you might guess, if Ryno wants something, he buys it for himself on a whim. Afterall, if you want something, there's a good chance he's bought it for you on a whim. If there's something he wants but hasn't bought for himself, it's not something I can afford. Our friend, Hollywood, and I were discussing this two weeks before Christmas, and as the conversation went on, we got downright surly.
"How dare he shower us with vacations to Tampa and Penn & Teller shows and tickets to the Diamondbacks game in Friday's Front Row on Garden Gnome night and opportunities to be on Fox NFL broadcasts and zamboni rides at Coyotes games where we happen to meet childhood idols and tickets to every Buccaneers game in Phoenix in the past 15 years?" I grumbled.
"If he's going to make it this difficult to get him a good gift," Hollywood said, "we shouldn't even try. We should get him a terrible gift. That would teach him a lesson!"
It was a stroke of genius. "What do you get the man who has everything he wants?" I cackled. "Something he doesn't want!"
Hollywood then suggested we book a sitting at a Sears portrait studio and get an awful portrait of ourselves in one of their classic cheesy poses. You know, like one of us sitting down while the other on stands with his hands on the first one's shoulder...
But instead of going to Sears, I called my old friend Tate Hemlock. He's shot my author bio photos and thousands of shots of women in various stages of undress. He loved the idea and admitted to a strange obsession with bad family portraits from the 1970's and 80's. We set up a session for Thursday.
Hollywood drove two hours up from Tucson. We had dinner with Ryno and Teacher Dave, and then drove another hour north to Tate's home. We were introduced to Kennedy, who was hanging out and staying with him for a few days. As we discussed what we wanted to do, Tate showed us some stuff from his most recent shoots, which made Hollywood's eyes go buggy as he realized he was looking at the same girl who'd just shook our hands in the living room.
We set up a backdrop in what would normally be a dining room. The shoot was temporarily delayed, however, because the backdrop had an ice cream stain on it from a previous shoot. Tate sliced off the ice creamy portion and we went to work, starting with the aforementioned pose.
Obviously, we couldn't pick just one image to be our portrait, so I got on Photoshop and created two collages, which we then printed at Costco in 16x20 and 14x18 sizes.
We framed them, but, unfortunately, our plan of buying the same size frame that holds all of Ryno and his wife's wedding photos, taking that down, hiding it in the garage, replacing it with mildly erotic images of ourselves, and seeing how long it took before someone noticed was ruined by the fact said frame is massive and would have cost about $150-200.
In the end, I spent more time, money, and effort to get a terrible gift for someone who has been nothing but good to me and my family for the better part of two decades than I did on any of the "good" presents I got for anyone else this year. So let that be a warning to anyone planning to be my friend!
In celebration of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, NFL cheerleaders will be demonstrating proper breast self-exam technique in a very special routine performed to "Rock Star" by Pink.
1. Stand in front of a mirror with breasts exposed and your arms at your sides.
2. Raise arms above your head. Look for dimpling, swelling, soreness, or redness in all parts of your breasts in the mirror.
3. Repeat with hands placed on hips and shoulders slightly forward.
4. With left arm raised, palpate your left breast with the fingers of your right hand, feeling for lumps. Feel both for the area just beneath the skin and for the tissue deeper within. Go over the entire breast while examining. Repeat with right arm raised.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so plan on seeing pink shit all over for the next 31 days. The NFL has announced players will be wearing pink wristbands and shoes (the one's pictured on the right belong to Cincinnati's Chad Ochocinco) and will have pink ribbon decals on their helmets.
Why?
Is the problem with having a tumor grow inside your breast the fact that so few people are aware of it? How many people have never heard of breast cancer? The official word from press releases is:
"It's about two words that were considered taboo in public conversation 25 years ago..."
Okay, the 80's were a weird time. We were nearing the end of the Cold War and suddenly had a realization of our collective mortality. In 1983, people who watched The Day After were shocked by the movie's contention that surviving a nuclear war might be a bad thing.
This flew in the face of the zeitgeist of America, which was about immortality. The Reagan administration had us striving to be proactive, especially after the Malaise Era of Carter. The very basis of Reaganomics was that you were the master of your own destiny. If you wanted to be successful, you would be! If you weren't successful, you didn't try hard enough! If you wanted to survive nuclear winter, you just had to want it bad enough!
This attitude made cancer, AIDS, and other medical maladies a tough subject. It was pretty clear that cigarettes caused lung cancer, but until 1985 labels merely said smoking was "hazardous to your health." AIDS, which was nicknamed "gay cancer" for a while, barely received any funding for research until the 1990's.
Add our fear of death to our long-standing American puritanical fear of discussing anything that goes on with the parts of our bodies covered up my bathing suits and it's no wonder breast cancer (and testicular cancer for that matter) was a taboo subject 25 years ago.
However, it's not 25 years ago anymore. Today, you can't watch a sporting event on TV without a barrage of ads reminding you that middle-aged-to-elderly men are fucking women against the will of nature thanks to Just for Men, Cialis, Enzyte, and Viagra. In 1984, the courage to discuss child molestation, date rape, or sexual assault on a TV show warranted a "very special episode":
Today, we have a version of Law & Order that discusses nothing but child molestation, date rape, or sexual assault.
The point is that NFL players aren't wearing pink wristbands in 1984. Major League Baseball players weren't swinging pink bats in 1984. This isn't about bringing breast cancer into the collective consciousness of Americans who are willfully ignorant because they are afraid of acknowledging terminal diseases and/or naughty body parts. Instead, it's about pandering and being behind the times. Why not have a month of games demanding women's suffrage or drawing attention to this country's need for some kind of proclamation of emancipation for the slaves?
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I understand that more than 170,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed each year, but the NFL's goal is not to cure breast cancer, only to raise awareness, which is what I find disingenuous. I will be shocked if one single person who watches a football game in October is led to look up how to perform a proper techniques for doing a breast self-exam because she saw Drew Brees wearing pink shoes.The suggestion that anyone watching an NFL game, much less a majority of viewers, might be unaware of breast cancer and its dangers is pure ignorance. The only reason the NFL has any interest in Breast Cancer Awareness Month is because it hopes that using its multi-billion dollar machinery to raise a couple thousand bucks to research a woman's problem will draw attention from the annual handful of domestic violence charges raised against its players and the fact that the highest ranking women in the NFL employ wear short shorts and shakes pom-pons to the beat of Jay-Z songs during commercial breaks.
Something occurred to me after finishing my last post. If a Raiders fan stood outside Qualcomm Stadium with a gun strapped to his leg or slung over his shoulder, holding up a sign that implied someone should kill LaDainian Tomlinson or Phillip Rivers--not saying so outright, but rather saying something like "The thirsty grasslands of the Raider Nation can only be slaked with the blood of Charger quarterbacks!"--I will bet you anything he would be arrested regardless of his Second Amendment defense for his actions.
Decades ago, the Raiders were a force to be reckoned with in the NFL (and the AFL before that). But beyond the team's success on the field, what was more impressive--and intimidating--was the attitude the franchise exuded. The slogan "Just Win, Baby" said it all. If winning is all that matters, everything else goes by the wayside. Sportsmanship, fair play, respect, rules, all out the window if they interfere with victory. "Who needs class when you've been to five Super Bowls?" many Raiders fans will say in online forums.
Decked out in silver and black, the Raiders broke rules and broke bones with the express approval of owner Al Davis, and their collective persona became one of violence. Raiders fans will identify it as toughness, but it's not the kind of blue collar toughness that teams like the Steelers and Packers try to represent. Instead it's "do the thing you opponent won't/win at all costs" violence you'd find in street fights where a guy shoves a broken bottle into another guy's face because he was "eyeballin' my girl."
Two types of people are attracted to that illusion of toughness: Thugs and Weaklings.
Thugs become Raiders fans because they have found an outlet for their antisocial, sociopathic actions in an environment where they will be not only accepted but lauded. If you went to a Costco and stabbed a guy for wearing a shirt with a logo for a sports team you didn't like, you'd go to jail and get hundreds or thousands of hours of psychological examinations. Do it in Oakland's Black Hole and you're a hero.
Because the illusion is why they are there, Weaklings must support it even more strongly than the Thugs. Like the Weakling above, they are more inclined to start a fight for the Thugs, then take credit for the way "they" "totally fucked up that Chiefs faggot!" even if their contribution consisted mostly of jumping around, waving their arms, and maybe getting a kick or two in after the victim was unconscious. The Weakling's contribution to the illusion is to expand it. Where a thug might be willing to just punch a guy in the face, the Weakling will convince him of the need to throw the victim out of a moving car, to burn him with cigarettes, or to piss on him.
Thugs and Weaklings are the Raiders' loyal base, but they aren't the only fans they've ever had. The Raiders' success in the AFL and years after the NFL merger attracted many fans. The tinge of danger combined with on-the-field success, plus the late 80s-mid-90's merchandising push by rappers like NWA, drew in hundreds of thousands. Unfortunately, most were Sycophants.
The Sycophant isn't a fan of a team. The Sycophant is a fan of winning. The golden age of NFL Sycophantaltry came in the early 90's when thousands of "football fans" identified their favorite team as "I like the Cowboys and the 49ers." Ask those same people today where their Niners gear is and they'll proudly show you their #18 Peyton Manning jerseys and Patriot Super Bowl Champion T-shirts.
The remaining fraction of the fan base was made up of the Reasonable, thoughtful NFL fans who saw the Raiders' intimidating style of play, commitment to speed in the secondary and receiving corps, vertical passing game, and lightning rod personality of Al Davis and believed those elements were a recipe for football success.
Of course, it's not "decades ago" any more.
Now the Raiders are terrible.
With every losing season, more fans jumped off the bandwagon, starting with the Sycophants, who left to root for the Broncos and Packers and Rams and Steelers and even the Buccaneers for a year, but slowly the Reasonable began leaving, too, coming to the conclusion that Al Davis's bizarre personnel decisions, lopsided trades, and refusal to advance his football knowledge beyond 1985 might override whatever successful aspects of the above recipe they once believed in.
With his organization bleeding fans, Al Davis had a decision to make. He could revamp the team, embrace a new attitude, and risk upsetting the Thugs and Weaklings who would see change as a threat to their comfort zone, or he could play to his base.
Look at a typical Raiders game and it's not hard to see what decision he made. And it's also not hard to see that the rest of the NFL despises the Raider Nation and considers the organization as a whole and its followers in particular to be a joke. The Raiders have nothing left but the Thugs and Weaklings, and a few Reasonables, like my boss, Ron, who don't like to be associated with the sociopaths, but stay with the Raiders out of a sense of loyalty and a hope that eventually the Raider values from Al Davis's "recipe" above will someday come around and prove successful again.
There is a valuable lesson here for Republicans.
"The mindfuck is a motherfucker. We skullfuck them bitches."
-Raider Milt
Watch that video again, but imagine these same people saying "Barack Obama" instead of "LaDainian Tomlinson," "Democrats" instead of "San Diego," and "Kathleen Sebelius" instead of "Kansas City bitch."
Like the Raiders, the GOP has turned to its most loyal fans, Thugs and Weaklings, to find its direction. The Thugs want wars so they can go kill a bunch of brown people who pray to different gods and talk in crazy moon-man languages. The Weaklings want the Thugs to torture the funny-talking brown people. The Thugs want the rich to get richer. The Weaklings want to make sure any opportunities for poor people to stop being poor get snuffed out. The Thugs want you to pay out the ass for health care. The Weaklings want you to pay out the ass, but then never get the care you paid for. The Thugs want to make life miserable for you just because you're not one of them and the Weaklings want to make sure you'll never become one of them because it makes them less exclusive.
Meanwhile, the Sycophants who marched in lockstep with Reaganomics and the Contract with America and Mission Accomplished have jumped ship. The Reasonables recognize that every time a Republican says, "Sarah Palin has some good ideas," that, in fact, no, Sarah Palin does not have any good ideas and any one who says she does is either lying or stupid. There are a few loyal Reasonables who honestly believe trickle down economics will work--just like my boss believes a bunch of receivers who clock 4.3 40's running fly routes all game long can win a Super Bowl--if given enough time, but they tend to be silent for fear of being associated with the nutcases--just like my boss insists, "I'm not one of those Raider fans."
What kind of Raiders fan? The kind that wears ridiculous costumes to draw attention to one's self?
The kind that drags their kid into their own delusional world, making the kid look stupid before he's old enough to know just how inane what he's doing is?
The kind that still believes unwaveringly in the plans of a dead old man whose ideas weren't very sound or well thought out even before he went senile?
The point here is not that Republicans can't have good ideas any more than the Raiders can't field a good team. Rather that both organizations must realize that their current personae prevent those realities. Republicans who shun so-called RINO's, "Republicans In Name Only" who disagree with party leaders, Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, chase brilliant minds from their party's ranks just as the Black Hole intimidates would-be Raiders fans from taking a rooting interest in the team. Blindly adhering to the economic plans of a leader who came to power with the intent of bankrupting the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War makes as much sense as expecting a team built around the one-dimensional blueprint for roster building outlined by John Madden in One Foot Equals Two Feet to result in a championship contender.
On the other hand, no Raiders fans have openly expressed a need for the NFL fans to rise up and kill Commissioner Roger Godell. It says something that I couldn't find a Raider fan equivalent picture to go with this:
Robert Baker
Dan O'Leary
Dan Sheldon
Sam Adams
And while everyone except my grandmother calls me Jake Bell, my given name is Jason Bell.
Also, I have a friend named Brian Birch and apparently there was a soccer player with that name and in other countries soccer is called football, so I'm going to say that counts.
And no, there was no point to this post. Move along.
I still can't name names until we finalize a deal, but there are two major publishing houses (major meaning even even people who've don't read much have heard of them) vying for I Think My Teacher is a Superhero. There's another smaller publisher interested as well... we think. We expected to have a deal finalized by yesterday, but one editor is on vacation and the other made an offer but needs to get the acquisitions people to sign off on it before it's official, so we won't be able to make a decision until Monday.
When I got the email detailing this around three o'clock yesterday (6:00 back East), I said, "Well, that's a letdown," and Rachel, my agent, smacked me back into perspective:
| Okay, you win. This is a major, major let down. Huge. But, please don't tell any new writers that your manuscript went to acquisitions meetings at three major publishing houses (I'm including Random House), because then you might just realize how good you have it. And we wouldn't want that to happen now, would we? |
The truth is, I am spoiled. I've had a lot of success in my life. One thing that kept coming to me throughout this experience was a story from 2002 when I was working as a sportscaster in Panama City Beach. I was covering a celebrity golf tournament and set up at one of the greens to get some shots. While waiting for the next foursome to tee off, Ray Wilson struck up a conversation with me.
Back in 1994, Ray Wilson made his NFL debut as a back-up safety for the New Orleans Saints. After getting on the field in three games, we was either traded to or was cut and signed with the Green Bay Packers (I can't find any evidence of which).
Ultimately, his NFL career was over with a stat line up six games played, zero games started, and zero tackles, fumbles recovered, interceptions, or any other statistic that shows up in a box score.He asked about my job and I told him I had out some resume tapes, trying to get to a bigger market, and he asked how tough it was to get a job. I explained that you have to start in small markets (Yuma and PCB for me) and try to move up. There are 212 media markets in the country and they have an average of fewer than three news stations each (i.e. Yuma has only two because its ABC affiliate is the station from Phoenix; PCB has just two because the local CBS station is out of Dothan, Alabama) and each news station employs an average of two sportscasters, though that's always dropping as more stations rely on sports packages produced by networks or just have a feature reporter or a weather guy go cover any important local sports. On top of that, there are thousands of new J-school graduates every semester trying to break in. When a job gets posted on TVJobs.com or any other broadcasting site, a newsdirector can expect at least 80 resume tapes within a week and a total of more than 150.
Ray was quiet while I got some video, but he wasn't just being polite to avoid causing background noise. He was doing some math. "So it's actually harder to be a sportscaster than to play in the NFL," he pointed out.
At first it seemed unlikely, but he laid it out. If you figure an average of five sportscasters per market, that's 1060 jobs. Throw in another hundred or so for national outlets like NBC Sports and ESPN and FoxSports, and you're still around 1200. There are 32 NFL teams, each with a roster of 53 players. That's 1696 guys without counting practice squads.*
He was right. My crappy job put me in an elite upper-99.999% class. I was making $20,000 a year, working 60-80 hours a week, wallowing so deeply in debt that for one month I ate nothing but rice, ramen, and fish and squid I caught myself from a pier down the beach from my apartment. From the time I arrived in Florida, Terry Cole, the station GM, treated me like a bastard son from a wartime tryst who'd shown up unannounced at his front door and actively tried to make my job duties so miserable that I'd quit, but despite all that I was the envy of thousands of people who would have traded their souls for my misery.Ray was a prime example of someone who understood exactly that. He made it to the NFL... but played only a handful of snaps before his career was over. It would be easy to look at him and call him a failure because he doesn't have even a tackle to his credit, but that overlooks the fact he even made an NFL roster, something millions of people dream about but never come close to accomplishing.
In the end, I blame being raised during the Reagan era. Like too many Americans, I have that Gordon Gekko mentality. Only where the Wall Street hustlers say, "Sure, I have a million dollars, but you know what would be even better? Ten million," I say, "Sure, I have a deal on the table for a four book series with a major publishing house, but you know what would be even better? A Newberry medal and a movie deal."
Of course, considering what the Reagan era has begotten our economy today, maybe I should just shut up and start working on the second book in the series.
* In point of fact, I should note that it's actually harder to make an NFL roster since those 1696 guys play several positions that are not interchangeable. Of the 53 men on a roster, only five to seven will be defensive linemen and a player who is built for that position and has played D-line his whole life isn't going to make an NFL roster as a wide receiver or a punter. So really there are only about 192 potential job openings for him and for other positions (i.e. kicker) there are even fewer. Still, Ray's heart was in the right place and his point was still valid.
I can only assume the moral of the upcoming story arc will be "If a doctor ever tries to convince you that three-in-the-pink-one-in-the-stink is necessary for a football physical, tell your parent or guardian immediately."
I wish this panel was out of context.