An American Ex-Pat Living And Working In East Asia
I was surfing for some college football news and I came across the above video. Most of you who know me, know that I LOVE college football, I LOVE the Florida Gators and that living in China, I don’t get to watch any live football games.
I’m okay with that, I’m willing to give that up. But when this video also has to very prominently display that it is the “Dr. Pepper” drive for the championship… well, that”s just rubbing it in!
Go Gators!
We all know the outcome of the game (in case you don’t, the Gators played the #1 ranked Oklahoma Sooners and they won 24–14), but the phone call that Tim Tebow received a couple of days later when he was back in Gainesville is where this story becomes interesting.We all hear about the incredible family Tim is a part of. With everything going on in the world, you just know there is no way Pam and Bob Tebow can be as perfect as they are made out to be.
I am here to tell you I witnessed the most amazing conversation which is the truest testimonial to how incredibly good the Tebows truly are.
A few days after the championship game I sat at a table in the back of the Ballyhoo restaurant with Tim, Pam and Bob Tebow. It was just the four of us and I listened in amazement as Tim’s future about moving to the next level of football was decided. Unbelievably, the NFL was never once mentioned. Tim’s dad started the conversation by saying that Brett Farve spoke about his faith and no one ever listened. Here was a future Hall of Fame quarterback and no one heard his message. Tim then said…”I can think of 93 million reasons why I would want to stay in school and play my senior year at the University of Florida .”
That’s how the decision was made.
Now I know there are skeptics out there, especially those who are anti-Gators and/or anti-Christian. Seems to me though, it’s very hard to deny that Tebow is the real deal. It no doubt helps that I’m a Gator fan through and through and that I graduated from UF at the same ceremony as Danny Wuerffel in 1996, but I am really hoping that Tebow has an unprecedented senior year at UF!
Go Gators!
At least not if you live in Clarke County, Georgia where school has been canceled today due to the high number of “sick” teachers they traditionally get the day before the Bulldogs and the Gators square off in Jacksonville!
Call it a case of the Red and Black flu.
Tired of struggling to find enough teachers to staff its classrooms on the Friday before the annual Georgia-Florida football game, the Clarke County (Ga.) School District — which includes Athens, home of the University of Georgia — decided to cancel school altogether.
According to area media reports, 137 teachers last year called in sick the day before the big game, and the district was able to find only 113 substitutes. Source: ESPN
Interesting… Maybe they should call “Dr. Tebow”, he might have a cure for their ‘flu’!
Go Gators!
(Don’t forget to take the poll in the sidebar of this blog – so far it’s looking like most of my readers are Gator fans!)
By quarterback Tim Tebow’s reckoning, his offseason training regimen stretched over three continents and included four countries.
Tebow, the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner and a member of Florida’s 2006 national title team, begins two-a-day practices with the Gators on Aug. 4. He spent his summer with his father’s ministry that took him to the Philippines, Croatia and Thailand.
“I have been a lot of places, and it’s been a bit of a whirlwind for me,” Tebow said Wednesday in Hoover, Ala., at the Southeastern Conference’s annual news media summit. “You get to do a lot of unique training, running up mountains, running up steps. I trained Rocky-style a little bit. It was pretty cool.”
“I love doing it, and it’s something I’m very passionate about,” Tebow said about helping others. “Doing those things, taking my platform as a football player and using it to be an influence and change peoples’ lives — that’s more important than football to me.”
I don’t think I could like this guy any more than I do. I believe that even if he wasn’t a Gator, say a Seminole, a Volunteer, or a Bulldog, I’d still love him!
Looks like there’s gonna be a race in Gainesville today…
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Florida coach Urban Meyer is searching for the fastest student on campus.
He’s quite certain it’s one of his football players — Louis Murphy, Chris Rainey or Deonte Thompson. But just in case, he’s having a race Saturday to find out for sure.
And what happens if someone beats his speedsters before the team’s spring game?
“They’re on scholarship,” Meyer said
Percy Harvin was supposed to be the main attraction for the race, but he had heel surgery Monday and is out for two months.
That left Murphy, Rainey and Thompson as the fastest Meyer had to offer.
Murphy, a senior from St. Petersburg, caught 39 passes for 590 yards and six touchdowns last season. Rainey and Thompson, both redshirt freshmen, were two of Meyer’s prized recruits in last year’s top-rated class.
Although Meyer promised a full scholarship to any student who beats his players, the coach’s reason for organizing the event wasn’t to find a running back, receiver, defensive back or kick returner from campus.
The game will be televised on ESPN, offering Meyer a chance to spread his recruiting pitch about wanting to be “the fastest team in America,” and having a race featuring three of his stars could help sell the school.
All I’ve got to say is, don’t underestimate what a poor college student will do for a full scholarship!
Tim Tebow, winner of the 2007 Heisman Award, has been receiving calls and letters of congratulations from people all over who have been impressed with his athletic achievements as well as his excellent display of character.
In addition to a phone call from Chuck Norris, he received a letter from President George W. Bush on December 9th;
Dear Tim,
Congratulations on winning the Heisman Trophy. More importantly, I appreciate your priorities as stated in your speech! Faith, family, academics and sport. If your mission was to allow the Almighty to shine brightly, it worked. I appreciate the love and pride that your parents obviously felt last night. Please give them my best.
Sincerely, George Bush
BTW, it was a handwritten note, not something done by some aide.
Dr. J. Robert Cade, who invented the sports drink Gatorade and launched a multibillion-dollar industry, died Tuesday of kidney failure. He was 80.
His death was announced by the University of Florida, where he and other researchers created Gatorade in 1965 to help the school’s football players replace carbohydrates and electrolytes lost through sweat while playing in swamp-like heat.
“Today with his passing, the University of Florida lost a legend, lost one of its best friends and lost a creative genius,” said Dr. Edward Block, chairman of the department of medicine in the College of Medicine. “Losing any one of those is huge. When you lose all three in one person, it’s something you cannot recoup.”
Now sold in 80 countries in dozens of flavors, Gatorade was born thanks to a question from former Gators coach Dwayne Douglas, Cade said in a 2005 interview with The Associated Press.
He asked, “Doctor, why don’t football players wee-wee after a game?”
“That question changed our lives,” Cade said.
Cade’s researchers determined a football player could lose as much as 18 pounds — 90 to 95 percent of it water — during the three hours it takes to play a game. Players sweated away sodium and chloride and lost plasma volume and blood volume.
Using their research — and about $43 in supplies — they concocted a brew for players to drink while playing football. The first batch was not exactly a hit.
“It sort of tasted like toilet bowl cleaner,” said Dana Shires, one of the researchers.
“I guzzled it and I vomited,” Cade said.
The researchers added some sugar and some lemon juice to improve the taste. It was first tested on freshmen because coach Ray Graves didn’t want to hurt the varsity team. Eventually, however, the use of the sports beverage spread to the Gators, who enjoyed a winning record and were known as a “second-half team” by outlasting opponents.
After the Gators beat Georgia Tech 27-12 in the Orange Bowl in 1967, Tech coach Bobby Dodd told reporters his team lost because, “`We didn’t have Gatorade … that made the difference.”
Stokely-Van Camp obtained the licensing rights for Gatorade and began marketing it as the “beverage of champions.” PepsiCo Inc. now owns the brand, which has brought the university more than $150 million in royalties since 1973.
Cade said Stokely-Van Camp hated the name “Gatorade,” believing it was too parochial, but stuck with it after tests showed consumers liked the name.
Tebow had an amazing game against our rival, FSU on Saturday. I don’t think there is anything he could have done differently to show he deserves to win the Heisman this year. Now it’s up to the people who vote.
Here is alittle about the caliber of person Tebow is;
In high school, with his team holding a precarious 7-point lead in the state championship game, Tebow, an elite quarterback recruit, ran on the field and played nose tackle — nose tackle — without telling his coaches. The other team didn’t score again.
A devout Christian, he grew up on a farm in west Jacksonville, the youngest of five siblings. He spent his high school summers on family missions in the Philippines working alongside his father, Bob, an evangelist, to care for orphans — an experience Tim describes as life-changing. “You’d see people in Dad’s orphanage who had nothing, no material things at all, yet they were so happy to see you,” he says. “That’ll keep you humble.”
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