The first time Florida quarterback Tim Tebow faced a large crowd, he trembled with nervousness. Still months away from emerging as a high school star in northern Florida, Tebow, then 15, had never felt 10,000 sets of eyes upon him.
And most unsettling of all, he was nowhere near a football stadium. In fact, he stood some 9,300 miles away from his home at a village in South Cotabato, Philippines. On the first of now-annual missionary trips with his father, Tebow stood behind a microphone and told the assembled high school students about his Christian faith, putting to the test evangelistic skills honed through years of speech classes at home.
Six years later, Tebow, the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner, has become so comfortable addressing crowds that he spoke to inmates at a Florida prison in April. And he has seen so much poverty and despair during his visits to the Philippines that he can’t imagine getting stressed out over something as inconsequential as the BCS national championship game on Thursday, when his No. 1 Gators will face No. 2 Oklahoma.
“Pressure is not having to win a football game; pressure is having to find your next meal,” Tebow said this weekend. “Even though we love it so much, football is still just a game. A lot of people bleed over it and love it, and I’m one of those people. But at the end of the day, I know what’s more important, and pressure is definitely not football.”
