Tim, the Giant Who BroughtAmerica to Its Knees (But Only to Pray…)

John 3:16. What seemed like a scheme was rather a call to Jesus. “God has given his one and only son, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” It seems like Pulp Fiction, but it’s the Bible — John 3:16 — sacred scripture.

The verse is painted under Tim’s eyes, like a Sioux Indian chief before a battle, on the strip of black paint that players wear to deflect the rays of the sun during the game. Tim Tebow, the arm of the Lord, has just punished, according to His will, the Oklahoma Sooners in a game of extraordinary madness and won the BCS National Championship Game for the Florida Gators in American football, the paradise of giants. Immediately after being watched by the eyes of 92 million Yankees on the Internet, not to see the movements on the ground and in the air of the coolest quarterback of the moment, but to discover something hidden, like the Da Vinci Code was, the quatrain 3:16. After that nothing was much like it was before: with the personal rule, renamed much to avoid making a mistake, came the “Tebow Rule,” certain unseemly exhibitions are forbidden to all for eternity. The purity is not of this world.

But God sees and provides. Tim the Templar, the all-powerful quarterback, as he has been dubbed in the in the baptismal font of the Wall Street Journal, obeys only the tablets of the law given by Moses, not the regulations of the National Football League. And once on the field on any given Sunday, for faith and for ringworm, he kneels in prayer before the indifference of the world, his fist on his forehead, like Rodin’s Thinker, thanking “my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who has done so much in my life.” Oh God, he is not the only preacher in the sport. Kaka has already decided — he left the ball to become an evangelical preacher — that “he belongs to Jesus;” Taribo West has been a Pentecostal pastor for years.

No one has forgotten the hands of George Weah, his hands raised to the sky, the sermons of Muhammad Ali, the Bibles of Amarildo. But none became a national obsession, a mass rite of purification, a vague idea taken generally for a ride like Tim. An epidemic of Our Fathers, which have contaminated VIP and mini-VIP, ordinary people and extraordinary people, new vocabulary, slang, common language. “Tebowing” is the neologism now. To bend over in English means “to bow,” but also there’s the site where Jared Kleinstein, ultrafan of the Denver Broncos, Tim’s team, collects as relics the pictures of the faithful in prayer, imitating the quarterback of God from the beaches of Ecuador to the heights of Machu Picchu — practically everywhere. Nary a pastor from San Francisco to New York has not mentioned Tebow in a sermon in a midnight mass, “for rendering justice to a great man who has put Christ back in Christmas,” and almost one American in two, according to a poll from the Washington Post, is convinced that Providence guides his successes, in hoc signo vinces.

He, born in the Philippines to missionary parents, feels his birth was a miracle of God. Better he be aborted, counseled the doctors to his mom, Pamela, during her pregnancy, when an amoeba had caused a very grave infection, since he would not live long anyway. Twenty-four years later, this baby has a salary of $1.5 million, seven times the paycheck of his rival quarterbacks according to the papers. His audience grows at least by 10 percent every time he shows up, and his autobiography, “Through My Eye,” is practically stolen off the shelves, even though stealing is a mortal sin. “I am the baby of a miracle,” he said in an anti-abortion commercial that the Christian association and pro-life group Focus on the Family paid to run in the Super Bowl. The feminists have never forgiven him. But it is the plain truth.

And this gentle giant of a meter and 90 to 107, with his clean face and bulging muscles, is not the best there is. Ill-humored, inconstant, at times embarrassing, at times magnificent, he arrived at a shot at the Super Bowl, before the Patriots put him out. He turned from the field, like Saint Sebastian, with ribs, lungs and chest in pieces. But in the field, writes Time, “he seems to impart a mystic aura of invincibility on the entire team, everyone expects a moment when the backs of the players sprout wings and in their hands appear flaming swords.”

And then there are the spectacular comebacks, the last minute reversals, as he throws the Hail Mary pass and doesn’t look back. Cold because life is nothing more, sure because God is with him. Tim, said to be a virgin, “but only until marriage,” is a phenomenon that surpasses faith to become a national custom, but also a popular figure of parody. T-shirts with the face of Jesus and Tebow’s number 15, come from God, but there’s also the salty biscuits that a baker in Atlanta has made for him, in the shape of a praying Tim — daily bread, the body of Christ. There are those, also among the devotees of the Lord, who consider it an exhibition that he would do better to keep his own faith private. The same ones that protest naked in the street say that he is a champion of freedom. He keeps his eyes high to the sky, smiling and forgiving. He can even keep his head high while he bows it.