In the last seven weeks, Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow has led his team to six remarkable, unlikely victories in seven outings. And approximately 14,116,288,201 articles about every aspect of his equally unlikely story—from his faith to his throwing mechanics to whether he’s got what it takes to go the distance in the NFL—have been written about him.
I confess, I’ve read 14,116,288,101 of those stories. Something about Tebow’s borderline mythical saga has been irresistible to me. And I wasn’t even that big a football fan to begin with.
Earlier this week, msn.foxsports.com contributor Jason Whitlock made some pretty interesting observations about Tebow’s journey. Observations, in fact, that I haven’t seen anyone else make—and that’s saying something.
Whitlock seems convinced that Tebow’s success is due largely to the fact that he was raised in a healthy, two-parent family. He’s equally convinced Tebow’s stable upbringing gives him a leadership advantage that other players might not enjoy. Says Whitlock:
Tim Tebow is not a religious symbol. He's a shrine to the power of a strong, committed, passionate two-parent upbringing. … Tebow's performance on the football field is testament to Bob and Pam Tebow and what they instilled in their youngest child. At this moment, no one knows whether the Tebow experiment Elway and Fox have been pressured into undertaking will result in anything more sustainable than Tennessee's Vince Young experience or Atlanta's Michael Vick roller coaster. What should be dawning on us—especially those of us who greeted Tebow's Broncos career with skepticism—is that, thanks to a rock-solid, two-parent upbringing, Tebow is quite different from Young and Vick in terms of mental and emotional makeup. Those differences raise the real possibility that Tebow is the athletic-freak quarterback an NFL franchise should embrace with a revolutionary offensive approach.
So how, exactly, might good parenting translate into a good quarterbacking? Whitlock continues:
NFL quarterback is a 24/7-365-day job that Vick and Young were unprepared for coming out of college. NFL quarterback is a position best played by young men who were raised by strong fathers. Quarterback is the ultimate leadership position. You have to be taught how to lead. You have to be taught how to prepare. Vick and Young, athletic freaks on par with Tebow, do not have Tebow's nuclear-family foundation. Vick and Young entered the league emotionally immature and with a set of values inconsistent with the values that lead to consistent, strong QB play. You can wing it in college and get by on sheer athleticism and talent. You can't do that at the quarterback position in the NFL. … You can't build a revolutionary offense around a quarterback who lacks the discipline or maturity to prepare.
It wasn’t that long ago, really, that the argument Whitlock is making here might have elicited a response like, “Yeah. And?” After all, it’s a pretty common-sense point: Healthy, intact families probably have a better shot at raising healthy, mature, disciplined children than families that aren’t raised in those sorts of environments. That’s not to say it can’t happen: Lots of fine and fantastic people have come out of broken or dysfunctional homes. But having a healthy, two-parent home gives children a great head start.
But these days, I wonder if Whitlock’s assessment is actually all that self-evident. After all, ours in age that enshrines individual talent and celebrity prowess. Discipline, maturity and integrity are not, I would argue, valued the way they were a generation ago. As for family and upbringing shaping those virtues, well, suffice it to say very, very few people pay much public attention to that connection anymore.
Old-fashioned as Whitlock’s assessment may be, I suspect he’s exactly right.
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