My dad never coached us formally in a team setting because of international trips and his irregular schedule. What he did was spend lots of time with us, teaching us not only to hit, but also to throw. Apparently, some people have even commented of late on that throwing motion.
Dad’s fault.
He was not only focused on our arms, but also on our overall well-being. Eventually I felt that I’d taken working out with surgical tubing attached to doors as far as I wanted or could and had done push-ups and sit-ups, for hours, and I wanted to start on weights. My dad kept reminding me that Herschel Walker had turned out to be a pretty fair player with only push-ups and sit-ups, but it did little to dissuade me—I really wanted to start on weights.
“Not until you get your first pimple,” he would tell me. He was a health and human-performance major at Florida, and people in the athletic world had convinced my dad that there was no point in training with weights before puberty, when the body starts manufacturing enough testosterone to be able to effectively begin to build muscle through weight training. I had no reason to doubt him, but that didn’t stop me from asking. Over and over.
Finally, he gave in. He says it was because I had hit puberty, while my recollection is that it was just a bit earlier than that. Either way, I finally got a weight set that we kept in the barn. I think Mom felt like the barn would give the furniture and other items in the house a level of protection. That was all I had asked for as a Christmas present, and it was a gift that allowed me to change and improve my training regimen.
I kept push-ups and sit-ups in my routine, doing four hundred of each, every day. I also began to add weights and certain exercises with them, but Dad wouldn’t let me use any weight heavier than one with which I could do at least fifteen repetitions. He was still being cautious, not wanting me to be injured or somehow stunt my growth or otherwise negatively impact the proper development of bones, tendons, and the like. In the process, I think I built up as much in endurance as I did in strength. As I began adding strength later, I think that foundation of stamina served me well, which was an expected plus.
At some point, still in Little League, I believed and imagined that everyone around me was also trying to improve. In retrospect, I’m not really sure how much most kids were training at that age, but at the time, I was convinced everyone was working hard to get better.
And that’s when I adopted one of my mantras for getting stronger and better and for all my workouts:
Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard
.
Because I assumed that everyone was trying to get better, I began looking for ways that I could get an edge, an advantage that would serve me in competition. I would end up doing things above and beyond whatever was expected to get an edge. I also began working out at odd times of the day and night, thinking,
I’ll bet there are no other kids in Jacksonville working out right now
. Whether that was actually true didn’t really matter—what mattered to me was that I
thought
it was true. It was just another thing that motivated me to work longer and harder.
I’m sure that God made me in such a way that I was willing to work hard, but there was certainly a lot of parental encouragement and nurturing as well. From the earliest days I can remember, my parents always told me they believed God had big plans for me, even though they didn’t know exactly what they were. Mom used to quote her paraphrase of Isaiah 64:4 over and over to me,
We haven’t even seen a God like ours who acts on behalf of the one who waits for Him.
My dad would also reinforce that promise of God. For my whole life, he has told me that he and Mom have always prayed for me, and knew that God had a special plan for me. They told all their children the same thing. That’s true, of course, for me, for my brothers and sisters and for all of us, because God clearly has a plan for all of us. But my dad felt that somehow the plan God had laid out for me was going to involve a lot of visibility. He didn’t say it exactly like that but, rather, more like this:
“Maybe it’s through baseball or football, but somehow, some way, what we do in the Philippines to share Jesus with people, you’ll be able to do and share right here in America, in ways that we’d never be able to. I can’t walk into any high school to share the gospel, but you’ll be able to. I believe that God is preparing the way for that to happen.”
That’s a great blessing to give a child. To remind them, pray for them, and assure them that God has a great plan—in His terms and for His purposes—for their lives.
I tried to work as hard as possible in every area in order to live up to it. Waiting on the Lord, as referenced in the passage from Isaiah that my mom always quoted, doesn’t mean being complacent. It means understanding that He has a time and a plan, and that we’re not the ones in control. In the meantime, however, we need to strive to use our gifts and abilities fully and to the best of our ability for whatever He does have in store for us, whenever the time comes. I was beginning to see more clearly that God always has His hand on us—preparing us for His purposes.
And I began to see that as not only a great blessing and promise, but a great responsibility.
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
—P
HILIPPIANS 4:13, NKJV
After I’d been playing
at Normandy and Lakeshore for a while, it came time for me to start playing for a school. There was only one that interested me: Jacksonville Trinity Christian Academy.
I was the third in our family to play sports at Trinity Christian. Since we were all homeschooled, we needed a way and place to participate in sports, and Trinity had provided that and had been a good home for us for years. As if the three of us playing wasn’t enough, for years my dad had been videotaping every one of Trinity’s games for the coaches’ use, so it really was a family legacy that we were building at Trinity. And we continued to build it when I, as the third Tebow boy, began playing quarterback on Trinity’s JV football team in the eighth grade.
We were undefeated during my eighth-grade year, and I was called up to the varsity team at the end of that season. (The varsity season lasts longer.) I didn’t play at all that year on the varsity, however, but was biding my time for ninth grade.
After the season ended, I continued to train and lift as much as I could, but it wasn’t until I was preparing for my freshman-year season at Trinity that I realized how much progress I’d been making. Before going into ninth grade, I went to a youth camp that featured, among other events, an arm-wrestling competition. Robby was back from college and had gone along to serve as a counselor for the camp, while Peter and I were there as campers.
That competition was one of the moments when I realized that all my extra hard work was beginning to pay off, providing me with an advantage I hadn’t planned for. It was no surprise that Robby, as a college football player, made the finals at a high school camp, but as someone about to be a freshman, I certainly didn’t expect to make it. Sure enough, though, I found myself in the finals against my brother. Of all people, my big brother.
The finals of the arm-wrestling competition? Me, about to be a freshman in high school, against my brother Robby, a college football player, and six years older than me.
Funny, I just can’t remember who won.
It was apparent, though, that all the additional training I’d been doing was having a real and noticeable impact on my strength. Seeing that progress and the results of it in different settings made me even more motivated to work hard.
Heading into that first year of high school football, we went on a church-planned weekend called the “Burly Man Retreat,” in Hilliard, Florida, located about thirty minutes north of Jacksonville and just inside the Florida–Georgia border. The events of that weekend have become the stuff of family legend and probably illustrate as well as anything just how competitive I am.
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 exhaustion; 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.