by Tim Tebow
But there also can be a downside to that competitiveness.
This retreat included adult men as well as students and offered a tug-of-war, wood chopping, and a number of other events. I’m guessing the church didn’t even bother to try and get insurance to cover anybody or the church for that weekend—what insurance company would want to underwrite such events? Anyway, at the end of the night on Saturday, they had scheduled an arm-curl competition. As I recall, it was a fifteen-pound curl bar with two ten-pound weights on each end, weighing in at fifty-five pounds. I kept sliding back in the line as guys were taking their turns, because I was hoping to be the last one to go, in order to know the number to beat.
The number of repetitions that guys were doing kept climbing with each new guy. Thirty-five, forty, fifty. I think it was around fifty-five repetitions by the time it reached the guy who was next to last . . . me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to slide all the way to the end of the line, so I was going to have to put up a number that the guy behind me—the last guy in the competition—couldn’t beat. Better yet, I figured that I’d put up a number that he wouldn’t want to beat—and that way beat him before he even got started.
And so I began curling the bar as fast as I could. Thankfully, form didn’t matter, just raising the bar to your chest by whatever means necessary. Arching my back, jumping . . . whatever it took. Forty, fifty, sixty, and now I was the leader. I kept going, straight through one hundred, which seemed like a lot, but I wasn’t sure. He was really big—the guy behind me, that is.
At 175, my arms were really hurting, but by 225 reps, the pain was pretty much gone and numbness had set in. May as well keep going, I remember thinking. I couldn’t feel anything anyway and still seemed to have the stamina and energy to go on.
I put down the bar after 315 curls.
I won.
If “winning” had included being able to straighten my arms out afterward, I would’ve been disqualified. I had to pack that night to leave camp the next day with both arms bent stiff at right angles, and when we arrived at church the next morning, I still couldn’t straighten them. My biceps were still almost fully contracted from what I had subjected them to in that contest. By the third day the lactic acid and muscle shock had finally worn off, and I could use my arms again.
By the time I was preparing for my freshman football season at Trinity, my strength began to show itself more clearly on the field as well. When I attended the BMW Camp in Ocala (BMW stands for the last names of former Gator quarterbacks, Kerwin Bell, Shane Matthews, and Danny Wuerffel, who ran the camp), I was named the top quarterback at the camp, even though I was still only an eighth grader competing with high schoolers.
I also had a chance to work out with Gannon Shepherd, my future brother-in-law. At the time, Gannon played for the Jacksonville Jaguars. Katie, an intern for the Jaguars, chose to quit her job and date Gannon, rather than conform to their no-fraternization clause. The first time she brought him home, I was amazed at his size. He was a defensive end at Duke and became an offensive tackle in the pros, backing up the great Tony Boselli. At 6'8" tall and 320 pounds, he was huge. While my parents and the other kids were inside with Katie, I was outside with Gannon, working on pass rush moves.
Between my success at BMW, my strength victories, and the year as the Trinity JV quarterback that I had under my belt, I went into my freshman year with a lot of confidence. Peter was entering his senior year, and I felt comfortable on the team, with the program, and with our family’s history at the school. But then all that changed.
As the season got under way, Coach Verlon Dorminey insisted on moving me from quarterback to linebacker, despite the success I’d had at quarterback in eighth grade. Now to be clear, this was not the first time I’d had to face this concept. I get it. I always did. I understood where they were coming from. I was a big, strong, athletic kid, and I had an advantage over many of the other kids my age because of it. Coaches would therefore always project me to play somewhere else besides quarterback. They all seemed to have a particular body type and lack of athleticism in mind that they associated with that of a quarterback and therefore always looked for another position that better fit their stereotype of my body type.
Just because I understood this, however, didn’t mean I liked it. I always wanted the ball in my hands. I still do. My very first experience with the “playing position by body stereotype” philosophy and approach to the game was in my first year of playing Pee Wee football at Lakeshore. They asked where we’d all like to play, and I, of course, answered, “Quarterback,” so they put me at running back.
I didn’t get it. And I didn’t like it.
And so they played someone else at quarterback and me at running back for one game and then decided to give me a shot and switched us. I was excited for the opportunity and was determined to do everything within my power to demonstrate that they made the right decision. I played there for the rest of the year, and then the following year they moved me back to running back—for the next two years. I hadn’t done anything wrong, I was told, but the second year, the coach’s son played quarterback.
I lived with that decision for those years in Pee Wee football, but it wasn’t very much fun. My family, though disappointed, supported me and the coaches’ decision, something that helped especially during those times where I really wanted to get in there and start taking snaps again. I hung with it to be a team player, but I was chomping at the bit to play quarterback. Football was my favorite sport, but what made it fun for me was playing quarterback.
Finally, I got to play quarterback again in my fourth year of Pop Warner, and we made it to the championship. The next year before the start of the Pee Wee League at Lakeshore, my coach came over to the house to talk with my dad. He had some thoughts about where I should be playing.
“I’m thinking of playing Timmy at fullback,” Coach said.
“Oh, okay.” Dad replied. “I’m thinking about having Timmy play for another team.” He was clear and firm. Apparently Coach agreed with Dad that I was the best quarterback on the team, but he, like the others, was always looking for a position that better matched his idea for my body type and athleticism. When Dad told him that I really wasn’t interested in playing football at another position, Coach agreed and moved me back to quarterback.
So, here we were again, only this time it wasn’t Pee Wee football; it was Coach Dorminey at Trinity, and he didn’t want me at fullback; he wanted me at linebacker like my two older brothers. It was merely the latest edition in this long-running soap opera that always had the same dialogue:
“Tim wants to play quarterback.”
“He’s too athletic to be a quarterback.”
Position by body stereotype. For that ninth-grade year, though, I stuck with it so I could play with Peter during his final season. It was Peter’s time to shine. But it wasn’t much fun. Some guys just have a nose for the ball on defense.
Not me. On defense, I just wanted to hit somebody.
But in all things we can find some good. Even though it was frustrating, I did, even in that latest move.
As I was struggling with the move to defense, I was continuing to work out and get stronger. By that time, too, Robby was in his junior year of football in college, and he started sending me his Carson-Newman College workout books and regimen that the team used. Of course, I always felt that I had to do more repetitions than each exercise called for, and I often added to the suggested workouts with additional running or extra exercises or more sets of those recommended exercises. Taken just as it was from Robby’s college, it was a solid workout schedule. For me, it was a great starting point.
In addition to Robby’s workout, I learned an exercise series called 10-10-E, which I used thereafter until I got to college. For your final set, you’d put about two-thirds of your maximum weight total on the bar and then do ten reps. After a short break of about a minute, you’d do ten more. Another short break, and then do as many repetitions until complete exh
austion; that is, you can’t move it anymore. That number should be between five and eight. If you could do more reps than that, you were supposed to increase the weight for the next time around.
I didn’t realize or ever give much thought to the fact that the body needs a rest period to effectively increase muscle, so for those first few years I made sure I worked out every day. My dad tried to tell me to alternate upper-body and lower-body exercises to give my body a rest, but I’m not sure I always heard him. After all, if four workouts a week were good and the number usually recommended, then seven a week would be much better, right? Eventually, I learned a better approach that would help me to get even stronger and more physically fit.
I also studied a number of different books to help with my exercise routines. My best friend since I was little has been Kevin Albers. From the time we moved to Jacksonville from the Philippines I was always hanging out with Kevin, playing with him at Lakeshore and being with him in Sunday school. In fact, the Albers’s house was one of the few that I was allowed to go to without my parents. His dad, Gary, who trained to be a Navy SEAL, gave me my first book on weight lifting, and I immediately started putting the exercises and principles in that book to use on a daily basis. A number of times when I would go over to hang out with Kevin, Mr. Albers would suggest some new exercise, or some variation on one I was already doing, for me to try. And then there were always the Navy SEAL moments that Kevin and I had with him, which made my time there working out and learning even more fun. He would often say something like, “Grab my shoulder,” and the next thing I knew, he’d have thrown me to the floor. He was always teaching Kevin and me various hand-to-hand combat maneuvers that he had learned and polished during his time in the SEAL training.
Along the way I also tried other exercise regimens too. I would add various items from each of these books or from research I was doing on a regular basis on the Internet, but the core exercise protocol remained the one that Robby provided early on, one that he also used, from Carson-Newman College and Mr. Albers’s physical-training manual and additional Navy SEAL techniques. I also added exercises from Rocky IV.
In addition to all the training, I’d also been drinking protein shakes in conjunction with my workouts, something that had begun when I was in eighth grade, thanks to homeschool. The reason I had homeschool to thank was that for months I’d been trying desperately to convince my parents to allow me to use the protein shakes, and for months they’d been resisting. That is until my mom suggested that I do a homeschool project to prove to them that the protein mixtures were safe.
My parents’ hesitation came from the fact that they didn’t want us taking anything that wasn’t simply from a natural food supply or some kind of appropriate and generally recognized vitamin. I persisted because I kept hearing about guys mixing protein powder with milk or water and drinking it before or after their workouts. The protein in muscles needs amino acids to regenerate, so I was interested in drinking these shakes high in protein to supplement the protein in my diet that my muscles needed to heal and grow. My goal was to let the science out there persuade my parents that additional supplements of protein in my workouts—protein shakes in particular—were safe for me to use.
All this created a perfect atmosphere for learning—for all of us. Because of my homeschooling, my mom gave all of us the latitude to study the things that interested us beyond the required course load we had each year. At this time, I was particularly fascinated by whatever might help me improve athletically, and so we turned the building of muscle and protein’s role in that into a science project, with an emphasis on any dangers or side effects from supplements and activities that would stimulate or affect the building of muscle. For weeks I did a lot of research in books, magazines, on the Internet, and at the nearby GNC store, putting together what I believed was a well-thought-out and articulated presentation.
After all, my athletic preparation was riding on it. In addition, I figured, why not go ahead and try to win the local middle-school science fair while I was at it? I tested my output of energy through a given workout and how much protein it would take to generate that energy. I even calculated how much protein I could take in through diet alone, and I was able to show that supplementation was necessary to get enough protein.
When I was done with my project, I presented it to my parents. Any grade I might receive was secondary to what I really hoped to achieve with this project and all the research that went into it. It worked. It really was a killer presentation, showing them that the protein shakes from GNC and similar places were completely safe, and I had the science to prove it. From that point forward, I was able to use protein along with my working out.
And yes, I won first place in the science fair.
The protein shakes, though, were just the start. I paid a lot of attention to what went into my body, and around this time I also decided to give up soft drinks for a year. My parents had witnessed over and over how committed I was to taking care of and improving my health, and so on this subject they had decided to challenge me, talking with me about, and demonstrating to me through their own research, concerns about the detrimental effects of ingesting too many carbonated drinks. As an enticement to quit, they offered me one hundred dollars if I went without having one soft drink for a full year. I did it.
I should have held out for more money, but in the end, it was worth it. To this day, I still don’t drink soft drinks.
While watching my diet and working out in the right way helped me train, much of my early strength came from working on the farm. Some days it was just for an hour before we’d begin schooling; other days it might be all day, especially if there was a particular project on the farm that needed our immediate attention. We put up fences, chased and herded cows back to where they should be, planted gardens, felled and cleared trees that were dead—or to create some clearings we needed for other things—chopped firewood, and did whatever other work that needed doing on the farm. We joked that we were getting ready to dial Child Services when the work got too tough.
And as if there wasn’t enough for us to do on our farm, about six times a year or so, Dad would loan us out to a neighbor friend, Mr. Bell, to help with whatever needed doing in raising and caring for his chickens. If you thought that I was complaining about working on our farm, trust me . . . I wasn’t.
Chicken farming was brutal. Mr. Bell had a hundred thousand chickens. Upon arrival each time Dad sent us over, we’d immediately begin putting the new biddies (young hens) into his chicken houses, while also removing any dead biddies and chickens that happened to be in those houses. He had four chicken houses, and it was common for us to easily fill up three good-size buckets with dead chickens from just a single house.
But the fun was just getting started. We would then take the dead biddies to Mr. Bell’s composter, where we alternated layers of chicken manure, which we had shoveled up from the chicken houses, and the dead chickens we had also just gathered up from the henhouses. The job—the smell, as the chickens cooked after being mixed in with the fresh chicken manure—would be a shoe-in for that Dirty Jobs television show. It was horrible.
Farmer strong. On so many levels.
On occasion we’d need to empty the composter when it got ripe and ready, which, as you can imagine, could get full fairly quickly on a chicken farm with a hundred thousand chickens. This process happened shovelful by shovelful through a door down at the bottom of the composter, loading the end product of fertilizer into a trailer. We would then drive the trailer to our property and begin scooping it out, throwing and spreading it evenly onto the garden or pasture as someone slowly drove the trailer along.
How many times was the wind blowing—in the wrong direction—as we threw this concoction onto the garden plots? Every time. It never failed that it ended up all over us—in our mouths, on our clothes, and in our eyes, hair, and ears. It probably doesn’t have to be said that Mom would never let us in the house when we returned but instead forced us to
strip and shower outside.
Looking back, I don’t know if it’s funnier that we only got five dollars for working all day or that I thought it was worth so much more when I was young.
Funnier still may have been the days when Mr. Bell would drive us to Burger King as an additional treat afterward, and before we’d had our outdoor shower. It must have been painful for other patrons and the Burger King manager and employees—not a treat for them, to be sure.
In the end though, being farmer strong, being trained, taking care of my body—it all felt like it would be futile if I couldn’t play quarterback. Despite the fact that I kept improving and had good practices when I was allowed to play at quarterback, the coaches still used a different starting quarterback. That was how my freshman fall at Trinity went, and as the season came to a close, my future as a Trinity quarterback didn’t look very bright. I continued to play hard and did what I was told at linebacker and tight end, while my dad kept filming each game every Friday night, dutifully making copies and delivering them to Coach Dorminey. But even with that loyalty, we were all beginning to see that something needed to change.
• • •
Between football, homeschooling, and farm labor, that freshman year I kept pretty busy. And when I wasn’t doing any of those things, I was busy at our church. My family attends First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, and I was involved in their plays and youth meetings and activities whenever and as much as possible. Every Sunday morning we were all there, and the other times were a bit more sporadic, weaving things in with the pretty regular schedule of sports, which was often easier said than done.
First Baptist always had great kids’ musicals, directed by Miss Nancy, who has supported me through my acting and football careers. I would never try out for special parts in the Christmas musicals because of football, but I had some memorable roles in the summer ones. My first role, however, did not exactly portend greatness on stage. I was in second grade and was cast as the back end of the camel. Please, no comments. The next few years, I played some “front end” roles, but I only had action parts, never ones that required speaking. That would come later. In third grade, I was a sailor, a supreme court justice in fourth grade, and in fifth grade, I was chosen to play Superman. It was a fun action part with a great costume, but I had such a dilemma when I realized that the required dress rehearsal was the same time as the semifinals for the city baseball championship. My mom and I prayed (Dad was in the Philippines), and my team won without me. That meant, however, that the championship game was the same time as my musical. We prayed again. To their credit, my coaches made an appeal to the city, and the final game was changed to Monday. I learned a lesson about giving the Lord my burdens, and this was a huge burden to me at the time. With no game on Sunday, some of my teammates came to the musical. And we won the city championship on Monday. My final action part in a children’s musical was the first summer after I started college. I returned home to play Goliath and had a ball with all the kids.