His future in New York seems more tenuous than ever. Rex Ryan wouldn’t play him during the Thanksgiving Day massacre — a game so hellacious it generated its own series of Internet memes, several revolving around Mark Sanchez’s collision with a teammate’s posterior. In the following game against Arizona, when the Jets finally benched Sanchez, Tebow was out with fractured ribs, and it was Greg McElroy, the third-stringer, who stepped in to provide the game-winning heroics. The cosmos has been laying the ironies on thick this season for Jets fans.
I am not a Jets fan, nor am I a Christian, and I’m certainly not a believer in Tim Tebow’s abilities as a quarterback. But I am utterly on the side of the Free Tebow crowd. Tim Tebow proves, if any proof is necessary, that people don’t go to sports events just because they enjoy watching men throw balls and catch balls and hit one another. Stadiums are full of people like me, carrying their hidden fears and struggles to games in the hope of seeing a story unfold that will help them deal with life.
In that light, Tebow has to play again, if not in New York, then somewhere. Not because it would be good for the Jets or good for the fans or good for football, but because of what he has come to represent (to me at least): the necessity, and the beauty, of absurdity. And it all began with a little girl falling down a flight of stairs.
In the early fall of 2011, I was showing off my attic study to friends visiting from New York — a feeble attempt to demonstrate the advantages of living in Toronto by means of square footage — and their 3-year-old daughter, Emmy, wandered away while we were chatting. I looked over, then rushed over, both too late. All I managed to catch was the sight of her falling, a kaleidoscopic chaotic tumble. She flipped over three times. Her head hit the stairs, then her feet, then her head again, leaving a crumpled ball at the bottom. I knew instantly she must have been seriously hurt.
My imagination whirled with body casts and neck braces. Emmy’s father, rushing to her side, calmed her while surreptitiously and meticulously checking her body, piece by piece. She could move her neck, her legs. She could put her arms over her head. Relief poured over me like a pitcher of ice water. At least nothing major was broken. Then her dad began to look her over more closely. Not only was she uninjured, but she wasn’t hurt at all. Not a bump on her head. Not a bruise on her leg. Not a scratch. She didn’t need so much as a Band-Aid.
It’s not too much to say that Emmy’s wholeness shocked me. I could barely stand to look at her afterward. Every time I thought about what might have happened to my friends’ child, a fierce constriction grabbed my chest and a sickening feeling roiled in my belly. Over the rest of their visit, I kept randomly repeating, “That was a miracle.” It was the only phrase I could come up with. I didn’t know how to deal with inexplicable good fortune. Even after my friends returned to New York, the strange constriction in my chest persisted.
Christians famously have the problem of pain: how can a benevolent and omnipotent god permit evil to exist? But atheists like myself have our own paradox to contend with: the problem of joy. Why do randomly good things happen? In Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory,” a priest gives the explicit defense of their reality to his Red Shirt captor: “Can’t you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn’t breathing anymore, his pulse has stopped, his heart’s not beating: he’s dead. Then somebody gives him back his life, and they all — what’s the expression? — reserve their opinion. They won’t say it’s a miracle, because that’s a word they don’t like.” C. S. Lewis described his conversion to Christianity as a process of being “surprised by joy.”
Emmy was my confounding miracle, my joyful surprise. How had she survived without a single scrape? It didn’t make sense, and I couldn’t make it make sense.
Then Tim Tebow, playing for the Denver Broncos, subbed in for Kyle Orton and led a wholly improbable march to the playoffs, and sense started drifting toward me.
It has nothing to do with Tebow’s religion. The show-business aspects of Tebow’s Christianity off the field are mostly a distraction. The virginity, the anti-abortion ad, the praying, the laying on of hands, the Tebowing — a pose in which he drops to one knee in prayer, the imitation of which became a brief Internet sensation — they’re all so many stunts. What appealed to me was his absurdity.
Last year, he took a team that was 1-4 to the A.F.C. West title and its first playoff game in seven years — and now he doesn’t even play. How is that possible? What’s more, even his ardent supporters admit he’s physically incompetent at the very position he’s supposed to be playing — his throwing motion is awkward, his passes are wobbly — yet, they argue, he seems to possess some higher talent, the oft-cited but ephemeral “intangibles.”
Tebow asks a profound question of his sport: Can a football player be different from his results? Evaluations of performance — beyond the stark statistic of victories over losses — can be notoriously poor, particularly for quarterbacks. After all, Tom Brady wasn’t picked until the sixth round of the draft. The commentariat’s description of Tebow’s “intangibles” are just another way of saying, “I have no idea what’s going on.” Can a quarterback with a 7-4 record be considered a bad quarterback? Was Tebow winning last season because he was somehow good in a way that nobody could explain? And if he wasn’t any good, why was he winning? According to Livy, the great Roman general Fabius said that results are the teachers of fools. But what teachers, other than results, do we have in football? Or in life?
I found myself following Tebow, and the Broncos, religiously. And I thought about Emmy every time I watched a game. I know that others were having as much difficulty as I was in figuring out how the Broncos’ season was unfolding. In the crudest analyses, Tebow’s inexplicable record pointed to some kind of divine intervention. Karlos Dansby, a linebacker for the Miami Dolphins, explained his team’s overtime loss to the Broncos after a stunning fourth-quarter comeback like this: “Young man is blessed. Young man has a special anointing on him. . . . And God working through him like that, it opened up a lot of eyes.”
As Tebow kept winning, each time more unlikely than the time before, the Broncos’ progress seemed to speak more clearly to the miracle I saw with Emmy. His wins tended to increase the gnawing in my stomach. I felt every one of his comebacks right in my core.
Football is the most rational of sports, grounded in higher-level thinking, both strategic and tactical. Tebow was making a mockery of that rationality.
Then came Week 15, a game against the Patriots. That was the first game since my childhood in which the outcome could have fundamentally changed my worldview. I’m not saying I would have started believing in God if the Broncos won, but I might have wondered if I should.
The Patriots play football the way I imagine the ancient Romans would have. Rationally. Cruelly. Without mistakes and with the maximum amount of preparation. The Patriots play with pagan wisdom: “We’ll take the material world. You take the miracles.” Even the manner in which they lose speaks volumes about who they are. The two defeats to the Giants in the
Super Bowl required two of the most miraculous plays of the decade — “The Catch” by David Tyree and the spectacular 38-yard completion to Mario Manningham that was in bounds by the most ridiculously small of margins. The Patriots versus the Broncos seemed like a contest between the visible world and the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
When Denver went up 16-7 at the beginning of the second quarter, I thought I was going to be sick. It momentarily seemed possible that the absurdity would keep going forever, without end. The tension of an infinite absurdity rose to real possibility. Then, mercifully, it fell apart. Rationality — or, more specifically, Bill Belichick standing in for rationality — prevailed. The Patriots churned through the Broncos with 27 unanswered points. Tom Brady dismantled Tim Tebow. My stomach began to relax. The material world made sense. The Patriots won. The problem of joy was momentarily solved.
I watched every Tebow game for the rest of the season, but they no longer felt like events happening to me personally. Appropriately, the Patriots beat the Broncos again in the playoffs, in a game that included what struck me as a fascinatingly vicious display by Brady, who punted on third down with a few minutes left, putting a diabolical punctuation to an afternoon of humiliation.
Final score: 45-10.
Kierkegaard believed that the failure of human beings to be able to understand the ultimate meaning of the universe throws us into an absolute submission to God, toward total faith. This radically Christian idea was the root of atheistic existentialism. For Sartre, the collapse of meaning produced what he called nausea — a feeling not unlike the one that followed me after I saw Emmy falling down those stairs. For Camus, the situation was nowhere near so bleak. For him, the absurd contained spiritual relief: “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth,” he wrote in “The Myth of Sisyphus.” “They are inseparable.”
Tim Tebow is a prophet of happy absurdity. He is a moment of inexplicable joy. Which is why the Jets must play Tebow even though, evidently, Mark Sanchez (and most likely Greg McElroy) is a much better quarterback.
This is an atheist’s plea: Let Tim Tebow play. What do the Jets have to lose now? Are they seriously considering passing on absurd beauty just to possibly win a few more football games in a season that is now all but beyond hope?
They might even get lucky. You never know. It has happened before. The whole world is like that little girl falling down the stairs. Tebow shows us: Sometimes good things happen. Deal with it
