Through My Eyes (9 page)

Coach Howard asked if I could go back out. “Asked,” may be the wrong word, as he told me that this was what legends were made of, that it was probably just a charley horse, and that I should gut it out. We were trailing 17–0 at the time, and I went back in. At halftime, with my leg still hurting pretty badly, I tested it out for our trainer, who thought I should come out of the game. My dad had even come down from the stands to the locker room to ask how it was. I told him it really hurt and I could feel it click on every stride, but I was okay.

I stayed in, and late in the game I scored on a long run to tie the game. My mom said people in the stands were wondering why I wasn’t running any faster! In fact, when I scored on that run to tie the score at 24 with ten seconds left, I collided with their safety in the end zone, snapping his leg. Unfortunately, Menendez returned the kickoff to our thirty yard line and kicked a field goal to win the game. It’s probably a good thing that we avoided overtime, as I headed straight to the hospital where x-rays revealed I’d been playing with a complete break to my fibula.

So at that moment in my senior year against Columbia, I probably would have given Coach Howard whatever answer kept me in the game. I told him I didn’t know if it was broken, which was accurate. I didn’t. It hurt, but not as bad as when I’d hurt my leg during my sophomore year. It was a whole lot less painful to put my weight on it when I walked or ran. And so I went back in.

As it turned out, it was only a high ankle sprain. To give it a better opportunity for healing but still allow me to play, we cut down on the amount I ran for the next few games leading up to the playoffs. It required a lot of restraint on my part, but by that point our offense had clicked enough that we knew how to win against opponents without my running game. In fact, I didn’t even play in a couple of games at the end of the year.

All that ended when we got to the playoffs. We opened our run in the State 4A playoffs against Leesburg but I only played in five plays—four of them were passing touchdowns—before my day was over. We then had a battle with New Smyrna Beach High School, and, once again, we assumed that my ankle wasn’t healthy enough for me to run. We were right. Not to mention, I had a hard cast over my ankle that Mike Ryan, the head trainer of the Jacksonville Jaguars, made for me.

Late in the game it was still close; they were dropping nine guys into pass coverage, rushing only two, because they knew I couldn’t run.

Finally, I told Coach Howard to let me run, and he saved the moment for late in the fourth quarter, as we faced a fourth down with two yards to go. I ran. We scored. I ended up running one more time, and behind some great blocking, we scored then too. Most important, we survived to move on to the next round. That’s what playoffs are all about—in any sport—surviving to play again. Sometimes it seems like our days are a lot like that too—just getting through the stuff and challenges of the day, knowing that God is still there and allowing Him to use it all to prepare us for another day and the things He has planned for us to do tomorrow.

For that next round of the playoffs we traveled to Gainesville, and with my leg feeling better, we beat the Eastside High School Rams by a score of 57–21. I rushed for sixty-two yards, and with that running threat something they now had to defend against, our offense was freed up, allowing me to throw for over four hundred yards. The following week, we played Pensacola Pace. It was an intense game with a record crowd. In the crowd were many of the Alabama coaches, while Coach Meyer paced the sidelines, making comments to my two brothers. Near the end of the game, we used a play that Coach Howard had gotten from the University of Florida—“Bullets.” I threw a ninety-nine yard touchdown using their play. After winning that game, we found ourselves in the 4A State finals in the Miami Dolphins stadium, facing Armwood High School, a school located just east of Tampa.

Armwood had won the 4A State Championships the prior two years and were looking to make it three straight with a win against us. From the start, we played very well and jumped out to a big lead. At halftime Coach Howard congratulated us and said about our 34–15 lead, “They can’t come back from nineteen points against you guys.” He would have been right if we hadn’t eased up, I’m sure, but instead they came storming back. We finally woke back up in the fourth quarter and scored a few more points while our defense stiffened and hung on for a 44–37 win.

Our offense was solid, and as a result, I had a good game, passing for over 200 yards and four touchdowns and rushing for 183 yards more and two touchdowns. With that effort on offense, those six touchdowns set a Florida championship-game record. It was a phenomenal feeling as we celebrated the achievement that our hard work had brought to us as coaches, staff, and players individually and as a team, and as an entire high school.

It was a wonderful moment.

In no small part because of Coach Howard and his staff, as well as the commitment that all of us as players made to one another and the success of our program, we won the state championship.

Along the way, I’d also managed to amass a high-school career I could be proud of. By the time I was done, I had been named to the First Team All-State team twice, was named 2005 Mr. Florida Football, and with the support of my teammates, set career marks in Florida for total offense, passing yards, touchdowns, and completed passes. I also now held the single-season records in Florida for total offense, passing yards, touchdown passes, and total touchdowns. I had worked hard, and my coaches and teammates had worked hard, but I had also been richly blessed by God and so many around me, who made me better as a person and student-athlete.

The day after we’d won it all, my mind had already moved elsewhere. It was now time for me to turn my attention to deciding what college I would attend. Earlier in the fall, I’d committed myself to making a decision by that next week, and I had no idea what I should do.

And Otis heard about it all.

“I know the plans that I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.”

—J
EREMIAH 29:11

One day during
my sophomore year I came home and found two letters in our mailbox addressed to me: my first ever recruiting letters. One was from Ohio State, and the other one was from Louisville. I was so jacked, even though they were not personalized and were clearly generated by a computer. Still, they were from colleges, and they were to
me
.

They arrived on a Monday, and as I sat with my parents that night watching
Monday Night Football
, I couldn’t help myself—I was still so excited about my first ever recruiting letters. And so when the players introduced themselves at the start of the game (“LaDainian Tomlinson, Texas Christian University”), I tried it out for myself from the security of my couch.

“Tim Tebow, University of Louisville.”

“Tim Tebow, Louisville.”

“Tim Tebow, THE Ohio State University.”

It was a fantastic night, rereading those two letters, watching the game with my parents, and daydreaming about someday playing college football, and who knows what else after that. We were laughing, having fun dreaming about it throughout the game. I still think it’s pretty fun to think about introducing myself for a
Monday Night Football
game.

As it turns out, the letters didn’t stop with those first two.

Instead, they continued to roll in, creating quite an impressive stack of interest over time. Lots of schools, and lots of conferences. The University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State, Florida State University, Miami, Michigan State, Notre Dame, Ole Miss, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Colorado, and others. By the time I had graduated, I had over eighty scholarship offers from schools across the country. When I started high school, I was simply hoping for one. It was a very humbling as well as heady experience.

One school seemed to have had an advantage initially for me, and it made for another great story line during our high school football seasons: Alabama, because of its fans.

Seriously. The University of Alabama fans. Honest to goodness, they used to come to our games en masse at Nease High School in their red and white Roll Tide gear, holding up home-made signs for me, encouraging me to head to ’Bama. I’d always liked the idea of a Southern school, not to mention one that was football crazy. It was very effective on this young and impressionable player.

And it needed to be effective, since I grew up in a room decorated in Florida Gator stuff. Orange and blue colors in all sorts of things and outfits had been decorating the walls, tables, and closets around our home for as long as I could remember. Of course, it was only natural that I would grow up with Gator stuff, since both my parents and my older sister Katie attended the University of Florida. And by my sophomore year of high school, Peter was already in Gainesville and enrolled in school there as a freshman. Three graduates of the University of Florida and another on his way, all in one family.

Given that background, you’d think that this would be the easiest decision in the world, but in truth I was pretty open-minded about schools, if only because I was such a big college-football fan in general. I’d grown up watching just about every game I could on Saturdays—that is, when Dad didn’t make us work around the farm. So I was very receptive to considering other options besides Florida.

My sister Katie claims that she did more to overcome that openness of mine and recruit me to Florida than anyone else. At her wedding, when I was fifteen, she recalls that I was very impressed with how pretty and nice her bridesmaids were. Apparently I also took notice of the fact that they were all classmates of hers during her college career at Florida. In fact, I’d remembered some of those bridesmaids from a couple of years earlier when I’d had a baseball game in Gainesville. For some reason, my parents were busy, so my friend’s dad drove me and him to Gainesville and dropped us off at ADPi, my sister’s sorority. There we were, two twelve-year-old kids hanging out; then my sister and two of her friends, Brooke and Stephie, took us to our game. We struggled to pay attention to the game, especially my friend, who kept going over to talk with the girls, hoping that those college girls would fall for a twelve-year-old. No such luck.

Later, along the way, I at least tried to justify my decision as to which college I would ultimately attend with more principled reasons than simply recruiting letters, fan or family apparel, or gorgeous bridesmaids.

During my sophomore year,
my parents and I had begun making unofficial visits to schools and continued those visits throughout the rest of my high school career. If we felt a particular visit would be helpful to my decision-making process, then we made the trip. Although you only get five “official” visits, where the school pays for your trip, you can take an unlimited number of unofficial visits on your own dime. Thankfully, my parents were willing to take the time and underwrite the expense to allow us to do that. On occasion, when for one reason or another my parents couldn’t go, different people—usually my brothers or my friends—would accompany me on trips. It was great since it was a chance to see great college football and some great educational institutions up close.

One unlikely trip we made was to see the University of Virginia play at Florida State. I say unlikely since I had never been a particularly passionate supporter of FSU, to put it nicely. When I came of age as a Gator fan, FSU was the program that we seemed to be having the most trouble with, and being right there in the same state . . . It left me in the unusual position of liking and admiring Coach Bowden but not Florida State. That particular day, it was all about the football, though, as Dad, Peter, Kevin, and I caught the game between the Cavs and Noles at noon and then drove down to Gainesville to see Florida play Louisiana State University that night. One day, two unofficial visits.

Over those high school years, we also traveled to Alabama repeatedly, along with LSU, Florida State, Miami, Ohio State, Michigan, USC, and Florida, among others. Some of our experiences were unique, for reasons other than the game. I couldn’t believe how cold South Bend, Indiana, was when we saw Notre Dame play Boston College; we scratched them off my list for just that reason. I couldn’t imagine living there for four years. And at USC, I loved the energy of Pete Carroll and his assistant coaches, including Steve Sarkisian and Lane Kiffin, but it was so far from my home and support base.

Robby even came back from one of our trips to LSU with a girlfriend, which complicated matters. During our weekend trip that year to Louisiana State, we ended up driving all around Baton Rouge with my dad, Mr. Bell (our chicken-farming neighbor), and Robby’s new girlfriend in the front seat, and, along with me, Kevin and Robby in the back seat. That crowd in the car made for a crazy trip.

And, of course, along the way Dad and I saw some great football, because Dad thought we should make the recruiting process a fun life experience: Florida–Tennessee, Florida–Florida State, Ohio State–Michigan, Florida–Alabama and then Miami–Virginia Tech for the ACC Championship.

We also visited Clemson University a couple of times, but I ended up not making an official visit there. That school could have been a good fit for me: it fits in nicely and similarly with the Floridas and Alabamas of college football—a football-crazy, knowledgeable fan base, at a Southern school. The uniforms, the fans, the sweet tea, the passion, the traditions—including Howard’s Rock that the team touches as it runs down the hill and onto the field before every game. Clemson was awesome. Plus, Charlie Whitehurst was just finishing, so I would have competed to be a four-year starter at quarterback, which would have been nice. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the problem, but I wasn’t sure we would be able to compete for championships, at least not compared to Florida and Alabama. But I was seventeen. It’s hard to make that determination at any age, but especially when you’re seventeen.

Once schools started getting more serious about recruiting me, it was important to discern whether they were being honest. That was the most difficult part—trying to figure who of all those I met was being truly honest and forthright in how they dealt with me. It wasn’t always easy, but over time I felt like we were able to figure it out.

It was also interesting to see how well they’d done their homework on me and my family. Alabama may have been the best at this. Every single time we visited, we were surrounded by the most beautiful girls, who had Southern accents, were smart, and loved the Lord. And if that was all an act (which I seriously doubt), they certainly had all the vocabulary and talking points right! On the other hand, at some schools you’d be surrounded by girls who would be throwing themselves at you—I was surprised at how effective an approach that was with certain recruits, but I guess I shouldn’t have been all that surprised.

Still the contrasts between all the schools kept bringing me back to Alabama. I kept telling my parents how much I liked the quality of the people there, and my dad kept reminding me to look beyond the Campus Crusade girls who were with the recruits all weekend. I did my best to heed his words and advice.

A few schools helped make the decision for me. Once Georgia had a commitment from Matthew Stafford, they quit recruiting me. I understood. They were, as you would hope, very gracious and up front about it with me. On the other hand, I visited Tennessee on an unofficial visit my junior year and was excited to be there. To me, it had a number of the same qualities as Alabama, Clemson, and Florida, so I was very intrigued. However, my unofficial visit didn’t go very well for us, as Jimmy Ray Stephens (a former Florida player) was the only Tennessee coach to talk with me or my family all weekend. The other coaches were busy spending time and interacting with Jonathan Crompton, who was a high school senior at the time. It was easy to read their preference, or at least so it seemed, so I moved on.

In August of my senior year, coaches were allowed to call me after 12 midnight on a specific day. I received my first call at 12:01 from Louisville, and the calls continued from there. Recruiting was also a good time to listen and learn more football. There were some great offensive minds in the mix of colleges that recruited me. I would look forward to the calls from some of those guys, like Jimbo Fisher, then the offensive coordinator at LSU, Ralph Friedgen, the head coach of Maryland, Dabo Swinney, then the receivers coach at Clemson, and Marc Trestman, then the offensive coordinator at North Carolina State, just for the chance to learn more football.

Choosing between the many scholarship offers I was blessed to receive really boiled down to relationships. As with most areas of our life, whom we will work with and who will be our friends makes all the difference. I wanted to be in a place where I could improve my skills and win championships. The relationships I developed with certain coaches began to separate their schools from the pack. During the recruiting process, I became very close to Les Miles at Louisiana State, Mike Shula at Alabama, and Urban Meyer at Florida. These men were the main reason I chose these schools for three of my five official visits. In the end, the other two official visits I went on were to the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan. I grew up such a big college-football fan, and they are, after all, Southern Cal and Michigan.

My senior year we traveled to Baton Rouge to see LSU, ranked tenth in the nation at the time, play Florida, which was ranked eleventh. We had a lot of company, as it was the largest crowd to see an LSU game in the history of Tiger Stadium, and they’ve had some big games and big crowds through the years. What a great stadium that is, with its passion and the night games and a live Bengal tiger in a habitat—located far too close to the visitors’ locker room, something I would learn more about a few years later. Florida led that game until the very end, at which time JaMarcus Russell and Joseph Addai carried LSU to an impressive and exciting come-from-behind win. It was a great game and a great trip, but it also underscored just how difficult the recruiting process was for me.

Sometime a few hours before that LSU–Florida game in Baton Rouge I was talking with LSU’s Coach Miles, and as we were speaking in the middle of that madhouse with both teams on the field in warm-ups, I spotted Florida’s Coach Meyer looking my way from across the field. We locked eyes, and I smiled at him. His expression never changed but remained as serious as ever as he slowly shook his head and turned away.

I liked LSU, but I was having trouble moving them into my top two. In fact, as great as Coach Miles and Coach Fisher and the others there were, for a lot of reasons related to Alabama and Florida, I never could get them above third place.

My official visit to Alabama seemed just as crazy as the one to LSU—it was my fourth trip there, after three earlier unofficial visits. I was with my brother Peter and my parents, and as we came out of the tunnel onto the field before the game, we were greeted with chants of “We want Te-bow” and saw signs and banners that read:

STABLER
NAMATH
TEBOW

That was really flattering to see.

We even got to meet the legendary Hall of Fame Coach Don Shula on the sideline right after we came out of the tunnel. That was so cool, just standing there on the sidelines with Coach Shula in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I loved everything about Alabama, including the Shula family. Maybe even, especially the Shula family.

In the meantime, Coach Meyer and I had also become very close. He said he’d first heard of me when he landed in Gainesville at the University of Florida in December of 2004 as their new head coach, coming there from the University of Utah. Then, a few weeks later, he attended a coaches’ convention in Louisville, Kentucky. He claims that my coaches from Nease High School were everywhere in their green and gold shirts, helping to keep me foremost on Coach Meyer’s mind.