Why has Tim Tebow's comeback become more than a roster issue?

 By Tony Mangia

The news that Tim Tebow had a familiar new neighbor move in next to him came as no shock to many who know that the the Jacksonville native has always had a close relationship with his former University of Florida coach Urban Meyer. But, after that happy news made the rounds, reports that the new Jacksonville Jaguars head coach was giving Tebow a shot with the team as a tight end hit social media and the controversy began.

Suddenly there was less chatter about Meyer borrowing a leaf blower and more noise about fanning the flames of division, politics and conspiracy.

It didn’t take long for the pundits, prophets and naysayers around the NFL including most fans to voice disbelief that Tebow signed with the Jaguars. The Christian footballer doesn’t have a prayer they say.

Many considered it a publicity stunt and don’t expect someone who hasn't played in a regular-season game since 2012 to even have a chance at making the team. 

It wouldn’t be the first time Tebow — a Heisman winner and one of the greatest college quarterbacks of all time — was considered a gimmick or some sort of marketing one-trick pony. Who could forget Tebow replacing Denver Broncos starter Kyle Orton in 2011 and making the term “Wildcat Offense”  almost as popular as the "Tebow Kneel.”

Tebow’s legendary, but brief, NFL career was diminished after an uneventful year with the New York Jets and then spending five years as a minor leaguer with the New York Mets where he was one of Triple-A’s biggest names — albeit without ever getting called up to The Show.

He heard the same derisive screams as an average home run hitter …  but with exceptional gate drawing power.

Besides being a devout Christian, philanthropic do-gooder and all-round nice guy, Tebow is blessed with the size, physical abilities and mental toughness to compete and thrive in many sports.  And the last time I heard, those were all excellent attributes for a professional athlete to have.

So why all of the hate for Tebow?  Isn’t a feel good story about an athlete getting another shot the basis of almost every sports cliche?  How many sports movies would be made if this wasn’t the case?

The question for Tebow seems to be less about if he'll make the cut on Jacksonville's 53-man roster than why is he even getting a shot. It’s like when the name Tim Tebow pops up in various training camps, the social media trolls come out.

It’s one thing to shake your head about someone playing out-of-position, their time away from the game or even his advancing age of 33, but is there some other underlying reason people turn Tebow into a lightning rod of doubt and ridicule?

Maybe it's his Billy Graham homilies or the P.T. Barnum aura — which seemed to have surrounded Tebow his whole life in professional sports — riling people up? Or, more reasonably, the argument that he is taking the roster spot from a younger, position-ready player. 

Some, like ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, have gone as far as signaling it as white privilege.

Smith suggested that Meyer bringing Tebow to the Jags is just another example of “someone of a different ilk, a different ethnicity, getting opportunities that we know we would never get.”

“That’s where the words white privilege come in,” he tried to explain before exclaiming, “There’s no way to eradicate white privilege without white individuals giving up some of their privilege.”

The talking head quickly backtracked by mentioning that he didn’t believe Tebow was signed because he was white, but that race still played a role in how it even happened.

“I’m not saying he did it for Tim Tebow because he was white or anything like that. It has nothing to do with their race in regards to that. I’m simply saying when you see an opportunity like that happen, it is clear that it happens for white folks, and it doesn’t happen for everybody else,” Smith said, continuing to stir the flames of division.

Smith insinuated the same thing about the Brooklyn Nets hiring neophyte head coach Steve Nash last year.

“There is no way around it,” Smith said. “This is white privilege. This doesn’t happen for a black man.”

Smith’s point of view might work in the real world, but not in the pre-pandemic, already bubble world of professional athletes.

When was the last time LeBron James was chastised for anything? James seems to get a pass on everything from breaking NBA’s COVID safety protocols, threatening police officers on Twitter to being a complacent shill for the NBA's partnership with Communist China.

Former NFL great, Eric Dickerson, also voiced his opinion of Tebow's comeback as, "Bullshit."

After a gossip site reporter compared Tebow's opportunity to another kneeler's, Colin Kaepernick, the Hall of Famer steamed.

"Of course [Kaepernick] is getting punished," said Dickerson. "He's black."

But how many rants did you hear when 32-year-old malcontent Dez Bryant signed with the Ravens after his layoff?

If anything, Tebow’s comeback should be inspiring.

Even Brandon Jacobs wants to make a comeback … as a defensive end. The former Giants running back tweeted the announcement last week.

"I am really serious about coming back as a defensive end," he posted. “I can still run, I am strong and there's no way Tebow is a better athlete than I am. I just need a shot that's it!! If I can't cut it I'll take it like a man. Just give me one chance that's all!!"

Despite the politicization, who knows where this could lead? Maybe we’ll see a few more 40-something quarterbacks in the Super Bowl?

And all the ranting in the world won’t squash the fact that Tebow has already signed a contract and gained a spot on Jacksonville’s 90-man roster this spring. The next question becomes whether he’ll land on the 53-man team this season.

One NFL player who is excited to see Tebow on the practice field is rookie quarterback Trevor Lawrence.

"I never met Tim until last week, so I didn't really know him," said the new Jaguars QB. "But I was intrigued by his character, his work ethic and what he's been able to do throughout his life on the field and off the field." 

It is doubtful the once Friar Tuck- coiffed Tebow (Bet y’all forgot that timeline) will take any snaps from under the center this summer, but his experience and guidance could only help the rocker-haired rookie. 

The presence of Tebow, a two-time National College Champion, will also draw some of the media spotlight away from Lawrence, a one-time champion at Clemson.  

That could end up being Tebow’s biggest contribution to the team.

Florida Folk Artist Kevin Clucas: One Man's Refuse Is Another Man's Re-purpose

 Article and photos by Tony Mangia

It was about four years ago when I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin Clucas while on my daily bicycle ride through Port Charlotte. I remember buying a manual lawn edger for two dollars at his garage sale, and then being delighted when he threw in a wooden flamingo head as a bonus. Almost every day afterwards, while peddling to and from Kiwanis Park, I sometimes noticed him tucked away behind parked cars and working at a bench in his drive way. The drone of jigsaws or the hum of electric sanders occasionally interrupting the faint sounds of reggae or bluegrass wafting through the air around him as I cruised by. We gave each other an occasional friendly wave — the kind that strangers who see each other, but don’t really know a lot about, give in a neighborly fashion. 

One day I happened to spot a couple of brightly colored fish hanging from a rack on the grass beside him.  And, as an unofficial collector of marine life replicas  —which I hang from a lanai wall  in my house — my curiosity got the better of me. That wonderful school of interesting looking fishes gave me a reason to stop and find out more.

Kevin goes by the nickname Trap —and signs his work likewise. Trap is a moniker Kevin, working as “car-man” for the Santa Fe Railroad in Chicago, simply picked up after being near a supervisor who accidentally slipped on the job and jokingly asked Kevin, “Are you trying to trap me?” in front of some co-workers. Like a lot of things around the workplace, that’s all it took for a new lifetime sobriquet.  

One afternoon, Trap, wearing what seems his trademark white Santa Fe Railroad cap, took the time to energetically tell me about his projects. I soon became his first paying customer after humbly asking to purchase a hand-painted wood cutout of a dolphin with a blue marble-like eyeball that had caught my attention.

The tri-colored, ever-staring fish became a permanent feature on my own wall of sea creatures.

Over the years, I always saw Trap out in his driveway putting bigger and more eccentric fish wall decorations on the rack. I occasionally stopped to chat about his handiwork — which I would describe as Florida Folk Art. It was a rare day I didn’t see Trap’s familiar white cap lowered as he sanded or cut common discarded items into works of art in his el fresco workshop.

During that time, I watched his craft evolve from dazzling painted fish cutouts made from old planks and discarded shelves to more elaborate fish figures carved out of branches, tree stumps or whatever materials he can scavenge and put together. 

I liken some of Trap’s more colorful. imaginative and playful creations to a sort of three-dimensional Aquatic Boterismo — or what I imagine Botero might have produced … if his models were fish.

According to Trap, he began fashioning these works of art after retiring from his old job of checking the mechanics of railroad cars and coming to Florida full time in 2016. 

Where the desire to work in this expressive medium came from, he has no idea.

“I never had any art experience,” Trap claimed in his Great Lakes twang. “And I am not what you would consider a fisherman.”

It seems that any sort of formal training came from working the rails of the Santa Fe…ba-dum-tshh.

The humble artist claims he used to refinish furniture as a hobby and cites the fishing culture surrounding Charlotte Harbor as a possible influence on his choice of subjects.

“I just like to think of myself as a re-purposer,” he jokes about his use of discarded items. 

In other words, to paraphrase the old saying, one man’s refuse is another man’s re-purpose.  

Trap has the gift of turning even the most mundane of rejected objects into fabulous visual entities which can be proudly shown and appreciated. It’s easy to imagine blue waters, tropical settings and diving locales while gazing at his work and then wonder how he looks at a particularly plain object and comes up with his sometimes whimsical and exotic ideas.

My favorite is a sperm whale he constructed out of an old mesh-metal ironing board.

Always looking for different material to utilize wherever he can find it, Trap roots through neighbors’ front lawn discards finding table parts, siding planks and even using sections from an an old barbecue smoker. In the vivid coral reef of Trap’s mind, I imagine he could find a purpose (porpoise?) in anything from wood to metal to plastic.

An angel fish made from an old washboard is just another testament to that creativity.

“I always use natural wood and no particle board,” Trap stressed about his most commonly used material.

And while most of his components come gratis from scrap piles or friends’ contributions, Trap shows me a stack of prized Aspen planks he purchased for $50 piled outside his garage.

“These are great for woodworking,” he beamed while wiping some stain off his fingers onto his paint-smudged cargo shorts.

Trap usually works eight to ten hours a day in front of his garage. It’s where these abandoned, inanimate items come to life as sea denizens in his abstract and vibrant style.

“I usually work on one project at a time, “ he said. “ But I have a short attention span and might get distracted to one or two other pieces.”

Trap and his wife, Jackie, disagree on how many of those pieces he has completed. The artist lowballs it at about 40, while Jackie says it’s well above 100.

“We have fifty-five in-laws who have probably gotten one,” she laughed.

Trap usually gives his mostly hand-tooled designs names like Abalone Annie or Anjail” (An angel fish with stripes that resemble prison bars) and named a lime-colored fish for Jackie’s mom, Limey Lily. He is currently working on “The Woodorado Series” a comical wording pertaining to his new series of wood-carved el dorado fish.

His favorite piece? Hurricane Harry, a nearly five-foot wood sailfish priced together from ornate chair legs that Trap made for his father. 

I like to call myself Trap’s first paying customer, but either way, his handiwork is finding its way into many other people’s homes. Funkie Junkie (with shops in Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte) recently started displaying his work on consignment and Trap has become an in-demand artisan who has sold about a dozen pieces in only a few months — with some going for as much as three hundred dollars.

Many of the more elaborate pieces take at least three full days of careful cutting, intricate carving and specialized coating or painting. Trap had lately started on making snakes from trimmed, wavy-shaped tree branches a friend happened to find and drop off, but since then, he has returned to marvelously immortalizing his first interest and inspiration — fish.

“I never thought I’d make money doing this,” Trap told me. “I just wanted to make something out of nothing.”

Sometimes nothing becomes something magical.

—Trap’s artwork can be followed and purchased at: Kev’s Coastal Creations on Facebook