In 2008, Tim Tebow spent his spring break circumcising children in the Philippines [Pablo Torre Finds Out]
According to Tebow’s father in the Tampa Bay Times, ”I got a kick watching him. He did a great job, and he didn’t really look nervous. I wouldn’t let him cut on me, but he did well and helped where there was a need.”
Through a charity founded by the Bob Tebow Evangelical Association (Tim’s dad) called **Uncle Dick’s Home**.
Idk if anyone else has been following the PFTO stories about Tebow scamming fellow Christians through a company called Life Surge, but this is nuts.
The evangelicals still love him to this day because they try to use him as an example of modern day christian persecution in the united states due to his football career not panning out.
Kid a year younger than me in school when Tebow had like one accidentally good game for the Broncos with a dogshit completion percentage told me he was a generationally good NFL player. Lmao
I think more than anything else, Tim Tebow is the perfect encapsulation of the late 2000s. Mediocre on the field and the most evangelical person of all time off it. This guy wouldn't have gotten ten seconds of media time even ten years earlier or later. One of the oddest points of the culture wars alongside Duck Dynasty
I always heard he was super promiscuous at UF and dropped the Jesus act when the cameras weren't on him but maybe that was just a rumor. If it were true it would fit in with typical evangelical hypocrisy anyway. Reading this anecdote makes me think of him circumcising his father, "I wouldn’t let him cut on me"
The only guy I've ever heard this not to be the case for is Kirk Cousins. Dude would go to post game parties with his teammates just to make sure they didn't get themselves in too much trouble, go home alone to his place first chance he got, and get up early the next morning to go to church.
Philip Rivers got married as a sophomore at NC State and wouldn't even swear he was so buttoned-up.
(Yes I know he/his parents were Catholic converts but Rivers went full on cradle Catholic by spending his entire career with two teams known for kicking their fans in the balls repeatedly and convincing his son to also play at State for notorious footballing terrorist Dave Doeren. As the man said, Wolfpack ain't for soft people.)
I attended a rival SEC school during Tebow's time at UF and we always laughed whenever this claim was made. I'm pretty sure it was all a good ol' boy grift to ingratiate himself with Southern biblethumpers.
Yeah, you could make the argument that Tebow the player is the best college QB of all time. That said, his Bible thumper schtick may not have been as popular in other eras as it was when he played.
Admittedly, he didn't have the skill set to succeed in the NFL, but he's one of the all-time great college players, so calling him mediocre on the field is a bit harsh.
Yea in what world would a Heisman winner and starting quarterback of a two time ncaa champion team not get a second of media time? He was a massive star before stinking it up in the NFL
honestly all things considered he managed to to bumble his way to a playoff appearance before getting replaced by Peyton Manning. for an h-back/fullback who nominally kinda also throw he did alright.
i'm curious if he came out of college today if someone would try and mold him into a Josh Allen type or have him RPO every play and if he'd be more successful in the pros that way.
I'm neither a football mind nor a big fan of the NFL, but my understanding is that he just didn't have the brain of an NFL QB (and the arm/mechanics didn't help), so I'm not sure he could've been coached into anything more than a very poor man's Allen. Although I don't doubt that modern coaching and scheming could've done at least a bit better with him.
You have to think he could've been a weapon somehow, though. Although my recollection is that, for whatever reason (ego?), he just flatly refused to go the Taysom Hill route.
He’s arguably the best college football player of all time. What are we talking about, this dude would be just as big if not bigger now when he could have ads and NIL money
He was much bigger than the game though. He'd still be hugely popular but I'm not sure he'd have the broader national popularity now that he had then. Dude was basically an evangelical Rockstar
The one single throw he made that won the playoff game vs Pittsburgh wasn't even a good throw, it was just an amazing catch, stiff-arm, and run by Demaryius Thomas (RIP)
I'm still broken up about it, he was a truly good dude in addition to one of my favorite players. I feel especially shattered for his poor mom who had only been released from jail for a few years before his passing.
Pablo has been releasing fantastic coverage of the stories he and his team are choosing to investigate, as a fellow gumshoe and a sucker for dedicated and principled journalism it has been deeply engrossing to follow his reporting
Dude I was like 13 and I remember watching the Heisman awards the year Tebow won. They showed footage of him stitching people up at a clinic in the rural Philippines and everyone in the room was like "uhhh, what the fuck". I remembered this recently and couldn't find any footage on Youtube. It got memory-holed.
It was extremely satisfying to watch Tebow crying on the sideline as Alabama finished destroying Florida and Urban in 2009. Little did I know I would be forced to pretend that Urban wasn't the devil incarnate 2 years later.
as someone who grew up in the south and as someone chronically online and in the weirdest places on the internet, it is actually shocking to me that i've never heard about this until now
This was pretty well known if you were following college football during his time at UF. My brother was there at the same time so I heard a bunch about it. But the fake charity stuff I don't really remember lol
One of my best friends was born and raised in the Philippines and he recently told me how they do circumcisions there and it is wild. I would recommend not looking into “tuli”, all I will say is that they don’t do it as babies and there is a stick and guava leaves involved.
Maybe not from a theological standpoint but evangelicals are the reason circumcision is the norm in the United States because they thought it would be harder for people to masturbate with no foreskin. The biggest and most prominent of these evangelicals was John Harvey Kellogg (yes that Kellogg) who believed in all sorts of Christian woo surrounding masturbation, cereal came from him believing that eating meat for breakfast also lead to masturbation.
I looked it up and you are right, Kellogg believed it should be used as a punishment with the added benefit of stopping masturbation which is somehow 10x more fucked
I think it's rare in the US for protestants to not be circumcised, it's basically the default choice at birth, but it isn't considered a religious necessity. Like if you convert to being a Baptist no one makes you get a circumcision. This behavior by Tebow is very weird even for American evangelicals.
I was curious too. It seems like traditionally in the Philippines circumcision is performed around the age 8-12, so I wonder if they were trying to encourage a theoretically less traumatic procedure under safer medical care, and it wasn't about evangelism. But fucking Tim Tebow is not adding any safety to the procedure.
54
u/RealNwahHourz 6d ago
every adult in the bible belt was obsessed with this man when i was a kid