STRONG START: Tim Tebow may not develop into a deft passer, but he sure is impressive facing a room – or fieldhouse – full of reporters, says Mike Vaccaro. (
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We can obsess for months — will obsess for months — over what we don’t know about Tim Tebow.
Will he ever develop a professional arm? Don’t know.
Can he replicate, at all, what he created in Denver, when for a few fleeting moments it seemed he could perform the Jedi mind trick on one defense after another? Don’t know.
Will he be a distraction in the locker room? Kryptonite for Mark Sanchez? A target of envy, derision, or both by jealous teammates? Don’t know.
It will be fascinating — or a fiasco. Right now, it’s guesswork, all of it.
So yesterday was for discovering things we can be sure of about this new addition to the Jets’ toy box of personality. Tebow surely delivered that much. We talk all the time about new coaches standing in front of skeptical scribes and winning the press conference, but that is precisely what Tebow did.
He won the press conference.
He was sincere. He was funny. He talked about the “honor” of playing for the Jets, and you wonder if there have been five Jets going back to 1960 who bothered to say that, or even fake it. He was deferential to both Mark Sanchez (“The exciting thing is me and Mark have a great relationship, we are going to have a great working relationship and I think we will have a lot of fun together”) and the Giants (“I’m not qualified to be in that argument”).
He talked about the best way to gaining status in a fractious locker room: “It is my job to come in here and try to earn guys’ respect. I want them to respect me by me coming here and working hard and proving myself in the weight room, in sprints, on the practice field.”
And even when the 8,000-pound elephant that follows him into every room was raised — his very public religious faith — Tebow made a smart choice: Though he cited several times how important his relationship with Jesus is, he said that not only was his signature move a puzzle to him — “I’m pretty sure I’m not the first athlete that’s ever gotten on a knee and prayed, yet somehow it’s known as ‘Tebowing’ ” — he made clear he understands teammates and Jets fans will be won over by his play, not his proselytizing.
“I think the greatest way to share the Gospel is by acting it and letting them see who you are as a person, and that’s how I approach it,” he said. “It’s not about what I say, but more about how I act and who I am as a person. I think that’s the greatest way you can have an impact on people’s lives is by who you are, your integrity, your character and how you go about handling yourself.”
It is impossible not to come away impressed, harder not to like him, harder still not to hope he can be what the Jets insist he can be, someone who makes them better as a football team and not just more interesting as a freak show.
The last time a Jet was given a stage like this one, the setting was Toots Shor’s, the date was Jan. 23, 1965, and it’s entirely possible Don Draper and Roger Sterling were there, knocking back vodka tonics with the sportswriters. The next day’s Herald Tribune, for instance, marveled at the horde of “five sets of klieg lights, three cameras, various microphones and what have you,” after Joe Namath delivered his first money line when asked what would become of him and his $427,000 contract if he didn’t make it.
“I’ll make it,” was Namath’s pitch-perfect reply.
Forty-seven years later, the quarterback is more modest, the welcoming ballyhoo exponentially greater. Maybe it’s worth remembering that most people in New York — and in 1965, the Giants cast an even larger shadow than they do now — believed Sonny Werblin’s boy was just a publicity stunt, the hiring of a celebrity in a celebrity town.
Sound familiar?
We know how that played out. We don’t yet know about this one. But it ought to be a helluva — sorry, heck of a — fun ride finding out.