Tebow Returns to the Headlines…… (with a lesson for us all)

I admit, dear readers, I was pulling for the Broncos yesterday.  My son and I are NFL nuts and have had season tickets to the local B squad in the league, called the Minnesota Vikings.

Viking fans who are hooked on professional football are used to looking elsewhere for good football, except a few years ago, the time Brett Favre rose from the declared  dead to remind us what an enspirited, skilled, loveable, talented, bright, winsome American guy really can accomplish in the profession of his life.     He was reviled for showing such traits.

Tim Tebow  has been reviled for being Tim Tebow.   The noisemakers in the sports industry don’t like what he says and demonstrates in public.    Tim Tebow smells Christian…….an enemy of the modern American university gods.    And worse, Tim Tebow looks and acts  like a white boy, the kind lefties hate most.

Pressure took its toll.   I took to watching Bronco’s  the last couple of Bronco games….the ones lost by big scores with Tebow playing poorly….seemingly afraid to pass, uncertain when to bail out and run.  “They, the coaches and the public had broken him, I thought.   They made him doubt his world.    I remembered  what Mike Holmgren tried to do when fresh and young talented Brett Favre when this kid and all of his talents began quarterbacking for the Green Bay Packers over twenty years ago.     Mike failed, thank God, but he was smart enough with enough good teacher in him to polish up Brett, rather than to squeeze  him into a mold.

Yesterday Tim Tebow led the Denver Broncos to battle the Pittsburgh Steelers.   Since Lefties make me  check  by habit for   personal racism    on a daily basis, for Lefties insist I, being a conservative who lives in America,  am inherently racist.    We are supposed to hate well-tanned people because Lefties  use racism as a basis  for  winning elections.

Mike Tomlin is one of my favorite football coaches.    Perhaps I, subconsciously see him as a blond.    But I have seen him too often on television and remember seeing him when he was one of the best defensive football coaches in Viking history.   I root for the Steelers against any other team in the AFC  except for the one coached by the best ever coach  in the business, Bill Belichick’s team.   Football male harpies don’t like him either.   He doesn’t fit their mold.

I think of Barry Sanders, Chris Carter,  Walter Payton, Robert Smith, Randall  McDaniel  and even Mewelde Moore, an exViking who plays for the Steelers, and a hundred  or five hundred or a thousand  other such well tanned whites I have in mind whom I have admired, envied, cheered  for, and would defend gladly  for their greatness of performance and character which advance the best  in life’s  lessons.

As my Protestant Mother used to instruct:   “Handsome is as handsome does.” 

Kriegel writes at Fox Sports:    “TEBOW’S MOST AMAZING TRAIT?    HUMILITY”

“Sportswriters and ballplayers have nothing in common so much as an urge to utter four favorite words:

 

• Broncos 29, Steelers 23 (OT)

‘I told you so’.

It’s become the coin of the realm in this business. Nothing inspires such opportunistic passion as a chance to hate the doubters and doubt the haters. I generalize, sure, but just the same, I find that most people in the press box (hell, yes, myself included) and the locker room would rather be right — or merely perceived as right — than be good. Sacred seems the chance to prove the doubters wrong. Hating can be hilarious; it offers a chance to tweet some one-liners. Then again, what’s mean-spirited fun to one man becomes motivation to another.

The exception — a glorious one, I would argue — is Tim Tebow, who threw for two touchdowns (including the 80-yard game-winner on the first snap of overtime) and 316 yards to lead the Denver Broncos past the heavily favored Pittsburgh Steelers 29-23 in overtime Sunday at Sports Authority Stadium. He was not intercepted. He did not fumble. What’s more, he ran for 50 yards, a number that includes four first downs, one of them a touchdown.

Yes, football is a team game. Tebow would be the first to tell you that. Just the same, he was the reason the Broncos won. He was 6 for 22 for 60 yards seven days ago against the Kansas City Chiefs. But he was masterful against the Steelers. That was the difference.

THE MAGIC CONTINUES

Tim Tebow showed the world he could throw in the second quarter. He converted many into believers in OT. VIEW PHOTOS

“I just needed to play better,” said Tebow, testing his own capacity for understatement.

What happened Sunday night was more than an

“I just needed to play better,” said Tebow, testing his own capacity for understatement.

What happened Sunday night was more than an upset. It was more than a thrilling playoff win for the Broncos. It was an epic rebuke to Tebow’s legions of doubters. Call it Tebow 3:16. (I mean, as long as everyone seems intent on demeaning religion by cross-pollinating it with sports, why the hell not?)

Tebow came out for the postgame presser in a knit cap and a vest, jeans and sneakers. He offered praise to God (which, for some reason, doesn’t bug me so much when he does it). He spoke of how privileged he was to spend time before the game with Bailey Knaub, a 16-year-old who has endured 73 surgeries battling Wegener’s granulomatosis, a rare disease that attacks vital organs. And he credited his teammates — wideout Demaryius Thomas (204 yards, the game-winning score), presumably first among them — “who make me look a lot better than I really am.”

• Broncos 29, Steelers 23 (OT)

 That’s all great, but I had to wonder if some part of him didn’t want to tell a whole bunch of people “I told you so.”

I can’t think of an athlete, who has been judged by such bipolar standards. Tebow began the season as a bum. Then he became a savior (not just the garden-variety redeemer of a franchise, but spoken of as a true messianic figure). Then he became a bum again. By Sunday morning, ESPN’s various broadcasters were pontificating on his crushed confidence and predicting his replacement by Brady Quinn, who is not only a proven failure as an NFL quarterback but hadn’t thrown a pass all season.

After all that, if anyone was entitled to a self-righteous “I told you so,” it was Tebow. Instead, he said: “I’m just blessed to have an opportunity to be the quarterback for the Denver Broncos and play in a game in front of such great fans and with great teammates.”

That leaves it to me to tell you what really happened. Yes, the Steelers — nine-point favorites on the road — had some injuries. But according to the numbers, they were also the best defense in the league. Their plan was simple: dare Tebow to beat them throwing the ball. Toward that end, they kept blitzing their safeties. After all, they were going against a guy who couldn’t get 61 yards off the Chiefs. Tebow wasn’t going to beat the Steelers with a vertical passing game, right?

But he did. Once again, Pittsburgh sent the safeties on the first play of overtime. That left Thomas alone with cornerback Ike Taylor. Tebow hit him on the run, and Thomas did the rest.

“Once I stiff-armed Ike, I knew I could take it all the way,” Thomas said.

With the safeties blitzing, there was nothing between Thomas and the end zone. An 80-yard touchdown ended the overtime just as it began 11 seconds earlier. The stadium erupted in a way I have never seen, not at a football game.

Other salient details of Tebow 3:16 include Thomas’s other catches of 51 and 58 yards in the second quarter. Then there was Tebow’s 8-yard touchdown run. For all that is said of what he cannot do, little is said of what he can. He’s the only passer who can double as his own red-zone fullback. Finally, the biggest number of all: Zero. Tebow committed no turnovers.

And being neither as good nor as modest as America’s saintly quarterback, I don’t mind telling you a bit.

http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/tim-tebow-denver-broncos-defies-critics-defeats-pittsburgh-steelers-overtime-29-23-stays-humble-no-i-told-you-so-010812

Margaret Thatcher…. “one of the great leaders who has arisen in a thousand years of British history”

  Conrad Black:

“Vindication for the Iron Lady”

from the National Post:

Though it is probably happening too late to be overly gratifying to her, events are piling on to vindicate Margaret Thatcher completely in her reservations about British integration in Europe. Her response to the proposal to reduce Britain to a local government in a federal Europe was, memorably: “No, no, no, and never.” And her reward for her refusal to get on board what was then the thundering bandwagon of Eurofederalism, was to be sent packing by her own ungrateful party, though she was the only British political leader who had won three consecutive, full-term election majorities since before the First Reform Act expanded the electorate in 1832.

She was immensely popular with millions of Britons as a patriotic and courageous leader who took Britain off financial life support, saved it from strangulation by over-mighty, almost anarchistic unions, built a prosperous, home-owning democracy, threw the Argentinians out of the little corner of the British Empire they had wrongfully seized (the Falkland Islands), and played a starring role in winning the Cold War.

But Thatcher was virulently unpopular with some influential groups. In particular, there were those who resented a female leader. A swath of males, from the “luvvies” of the British entertainment and cultural scene to Euroleaders and left-leaning journalists, were so frightened in her presence, they seemed to fear being hand-bagged, or even having a hair-brush taken to them.

And as she liberalized the economy; imposed a free, secret ballot for labour strikes; lowered all taxes; privatized industry, housing, airports, almost everything except the National Health Service and the BBC; jolting economic growth resulted. Unfortunately, its most conspicuous exemplars included many successful entrepreneurs and financier types who offended British sensibilities by their garish and spivvy ostentation. The basis of Margaret Thatcher’s support was the Daily Telegraph-reading, gin and tonic-drinking, cricket-loving middle class, the backbone of the nation. But her enemies identified her with an infelicitous combination of Colonel Blimp fuddy-duddies and sticky-fingered, vulgar parvenus.

She had a somewhat hectoring manner in debates, and was notoriously impatient with what she considered pusillanimity from senior colleagues, sometimes calling cabinet members “blanc-manges,” or “suet puddings,” or even “spineless, boneless, men” (not necessarily inaccurately). Naturally less known was her exquisite courtesy and unaffected and egalitarian kindness to subordinates and strangers. It annoyed feminists that she was such a traditionalist, and weak men that she was a strong woman. But she triumphed by perseverance and courage; to the end, though a stirring speaker, she was nervous before a speech. She was a strong woman, but not at all a mannish one.

Because she was the first British female party leader, and the first in any important Atlantic country, and such a formidable character, Margaret Thatcher’s personality encroached upon her public record as the principal source of voter opinion about her. She is rivalled only by Churchill, Disraeli, Walpole, Pitt (the Elder), Wellington and Palmerston as the greatest personality among the 53 people who have been the British prime minister, but she has even fewer rivals as the greatest of them.

When she came to office in 1979, it was because only she had dared challenge the twice defeated former prime minister Edward Heath for the Conservative leadership, and because she dared to propose a sharp break from the bipartisan consensus for soft-left, high-tax, social democratic government. Britain was under daily audit from the IMF; currency controls prevented anyone from taking more than a few hundred pounds out of the country; and in the “winter of discontent” preceding the 1979 election, the garbage collectors, undertakers, transport workers and electric utility unions had all been on strike. The national newspapers never knew from one day to the next if they could publish the next day over the whims of the shop stewards; the railway and coal workers’ union leaders had shown their ability to bring the government to heel.

Thatcher cut personal income taxes, forced democracy on unions, and broke those that imposed illegal closed shops and secondary boycotts. British Airways went from horrifying losses as a state-owned concern to huge profits and general recognition as the world’s finest airline, once in private hands. British Steel followed a parallel path. Millions of slovenly tenants in tumble-down council houses became proud home-owners. Investment skyrocketed and London surged back to world financial leadership as Thatcher broke up the little log-rolling, back-scratching association of accepting houses (merchant banks) at the feet of the governor of the Bank of England.

When Argentina seized the Falkland Islands, Thatcher took great risks in sending two of the world’s largest liners (the Queen Elizabeth 2 and the Canberra), crammed with soldiers, into a war zone, and sent practically the entire Royal Navy to take the islands back. (As an unintended bonus, she also restored democracy to Argentina.)

When her polls were low and traditional elements of her government and caucus were wobbling badly, she sacked a handful of ministers despite a slender parliamentary majority, and told her own party conference: “U-turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.” She was instrumental in assuring the installation of intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe in response to the Soviet Union’s deployment of similar weapons, ignoring huge protests. She replied to calls for a nuclear-free Europe with her declared preference for a “war-free Europe,” and carried British opinion with her. With Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl, and notwithstanding the wafflings of the French and opportunistic appeasers of the Kremlin such as Pierre Trudeau, she secured the intermediate missile agreement and the definitive wind-down of the Cold War.

No one who heard Margaret Thatcher’s spontaneous 1984 address to the Conservative Party conference at Brighton a few hours after the IRA brought much of her hotel down to rubble (almost killing her, and murdering several of her MPs), in which she foreswore any compromise with terrorists, will ever forget it.

As the privatization of state-owned industries proceeded, and unemployment temporarily rose to one million, then two, and finally three-million (before sharply declining), the London County Council, dominated by Marxists, was almost screaming for her blood. Mrs. Thatcher replied by abolishing the municipal government, put one of the greatest cities in the world under direct rule from the Home Office, sold the London government headquarters, County Hall, the largest building in the country, to Japanese developers to be turned into an aquarium, and London enjoyed better municipal administration.

She warned that one currency for all Europe, with a shared credit rating between all participating countries, would not work. She warned that fixed exchange rates would not work; that surrendering powers from Westminster to Brussels and Strasbourg wouldn’t work; that importing to Britain European industrial relations, tax rates and union-dominated labour markets wouldn’t work, and that subsuming British foreign policy, especially relations with the United States, into a European foreign policy wouldn’t work either. In all of this, and in most other policy matters, she has been proved correct.

When Margaret Thatcher spoke at my company’s annual dinner in Toronto in 1988, I introduced her as “one of the great leaders who has arisen in a thousand years of British history.” This was nothing but the truth, and I can add that she is also a convivial companion and a loyal friend, as gracious out of office as in; that rarest of statesmen, a world historic figure who is also the salt of the earth.

Comment:   Whatever the best words that could be said regarding this gracious, polite, powerful quick thinking, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to describe  her  statesmanship, citizenship, and leadership  abilities are never enough to do justice to this most remarkable woman of any  century.   What a conservative!   Every session of Parliament was a pleasure to ‘observe’ when she was in control, and she did control that noisy pack  with skill, brains, and elegance.