Just because somebody's an underdog, that doesn't automatically mean that you should root for them. I mean, sure it, was great when Mine That Bird won the Kentucky Derby, and everybody loves that one movie where a hobbit gets to play football one time for like five seconds as a reward for twenty years of hard work, but sometimes—and I'm not even saying that it's often—just sometimes, an underdog is also kind of a poozer.
Take Tim Tebow, for instance. I think he was literally born under a dog, which is customary in the Philippines when the native midwife suspects that a woman might be giving birth to a demon (if the baby is not a demon, the dog will try to eat it; if the baby is a demon, it will eat the dog, but then the midwife (who travels prepared) will shoot it in the eye with a dart made out of an eggshell and send it back to Hell (I am positive that I read that in National Geographic, but it might have been during a fever dream)).
You see, Tebow's parents were missionaries in the Philippines when his mother got pregnant with him, and while she was pregnant she contracted dysentery, opening the way for some wonderful jokes about pooping that I am way to classy to make. Even the so-called “first world doctors” thought that she ought to abort the fetus for the sake of her own life, which was why twenty years later Tim and his mom appeared in a pro-life Superbowl ad which made no mention of that story and instead chose to merely irritate the viewing public.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAnyway. Little Timmy was born after all, and he escaped from the dogs and the midwives and like most children who are born in inauspicious circumstances, he fought hard against obstacles that didn't actually exist, excelling in general and making everyone around him look bad. His parents did not send him to public school; his mother homeschooled him and all of his siblings, which I have no problem with if she was actually a good teacher and I have no evidence to say that she wasn't. Tim Tebow has now become the poster child for homeschooling, although it is not clear to me how his representative skills are helping the cause. But the reason that the Tebows never actually come out and say for teaching their kids at home was that they wanted to make sure their kids were educated in the ultra-Christian environment that they felt no one else could properly provide. Which is also fine if that what you're into; I consider myself to be pretty pro-Jesus too, even though I don't walk around with bible verses painted on my face.
I decided to write an entry about Tim Tebow because I keep hearing his name and he only just barely got drafted to the NFL (by the Broncos, if you're curious), and his press crew is presenting him as an underdog—born against the odds, healthy against the odds, allowed to play football at a public school against the odds—but I'm not buying it. To me, he seems more like a football version of Dennis Rodman—but for Jesus. And like I said, I'm down with Jesus, but the showboating thing is not so cool, especially when you leave the coolest parts out. So, Mr. Tebow, I have a couple of requests for you, as (for lack of a better word) a fan:
One, just play football. I did all this research on you and I still don't know whether you're actually good. I'd like to know. I bet the Denver Broncos would also be pretty happy to find out.
And two, if you are pro-life, especially as a person without a vagina, and you don't have a story to back it up, you're like the white kid who majors in African American studies because they're really, really angry about injustice, even though they grew up in the suburbs and they were never really even picked on at school. Nobody's buying your manufactured passion. So if you are going to speak out about abortion, look back, face the memory of that Filipina midwife, and tell the world:
“I know about the evils of abortion. I am a survivor.”
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