The Next Best Thing to the Rapture: Tebow Named Broncos Starter

 

“We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

– H.L. Mencken

The stadium was rocking and rolling just like old Mile High used to last Sunday after a loss that dropped the woebegone Denver Broncos to 1-4 and only a bad Marvin Lewis call and a fourth down stop away from winless the place was going fucking berserk.  You would have thought that the Broncos had just won the AFC Championship Game. Back in the day when it actually meant something to be a diehard Bronco fan any loss would have had a surly crowd booing and looking for blood as they filed out of the place, the parking lots would be full of mean drunks and there would be fights and arrests. They used to take their football real seriously in the Mile High City and the Broncos were like a religion to many but that is a bygone era. Today it has degenerated into a freakish stew of yuppies, know-nothings and religious pilgrims more interested in a cult of personality than any of the real action on the field.

The jubilation was because the new Christ, Timothy Richard Tebow had finally been able to banish that reviled Kyle Orton to the bench and had come into the game to throw for a whopping 79 yards as the Broncos rallied from behind to put a scare into the haughty Phillip Rivers and the hated division rival San Diego Chargers. Orton was absolutely hideous, managing only 34 yards passing and a pick before he was given the hook. Let’s face it, there iss just no way to defend the guy anymore, never a playmaker to begin with his psyche had been crushed weeks ago by the incessant torment of the Tebow worshippers. Once in the game, never mind that Tebow looked pathetic until late when San Diego was in playing not to lose mode. It took an ESPN play of the week type acrobatic catch by soon to be ex-Bronco, Pro Bowl receiver Brandon Lloyd as well as an official review to keep that last drive alive. Lloyd for his part has now officially been placed on the trading block, his earlier critical comments about the “Tebow thing” were likely deemed to be of sufficiently blasphemous nature to have him exorcised from the locker room. Tebow finished 4 of 10 for 79 yards, 28 on a dump off pass to Know-show Moreno for a TD, another 31 to a wide open receiver while San Diego was in the prevent defense and the 20 to Lloyd. Otherwise the great one competed one pass to Eric Decker for no gain. Jesus Fucking Christ has the bar been set low in Denver since the John Elway days. Tebow did run for a score which is about the only goddamned thing that does well; any lesser being coming out of college ball would have been converted to H-Back, an area of sore need for Denver anyway. Nonetheless, the place was going amok because the larger battle had been won and the Religious Right had their man in his new role and the accompanying national media swoon would ensure that stadiums across the country would be their pulpit.

One loon actually conjured up the Roman legend of Horatio or Publius Horatius Cocles, the 6^th Century army office who held back the invading hordes of Clusium at the Pons Sublicius bridge. Horatius Cocles valiant stand became legend, somehow in their innate ignorance and usual stupid overestimation of their own self-importance the hordes of Jesus freaks in their number 15 orange jerseys seem to have created some sort of alternate universe where usurping the hapless stumblebum Kyle Orton is equivalent. Orton has been fucked from the get go, it was a losing battle and like Sisyphus he had one hell of a rock to roll. The rock started to roll back on the poor clod well before his phantom fumble against the hated Raiders in the season opener and had already crushed the hapless bastard into pulp by the time that he was given the hook after throwing for a miserable 39 yards against the Chargers on Sunday. Defenses looked into his eyes and saw a haunted and doomed man, at the time of his ouster he was tied for the NFL lead in interceptions with the notorious dog murderer Michael Vick. The doomstruck Orton was trying to hold back a force of nature, something that is still badly misunderstood by the sports analysts but to those who deal with the menace of Christian fascism on a regular basis it is crystal clear. The chants of TEBOW are at least somewhat understandable in Denver where other than during the John Elway era the backup quarterback is always the most popular guy on the team. Orton’s immense failure would have fans in any city bellowing for him to be pulled, but when the chants erupted in the waning minutes of a road loss to the Packers at hallowed Lambeau Field it should have been obvious to all but the blindest of blind what this is really all about.

While the newspaper columnists in Denver, notably the longtime reigning king of local sportswriting Woody Paige of the Denver Post sang the praises of Tebow, gloating and in even placing the onus on whether the most overrated college quarterback to turn pro since Akili Smith would be successful on the coaching staff. Paige has had a colossal hard-on for new coach John Fox for some reason, likely Fox wasn’t sufficiently deferential to the great one as well as having some sort of maniac interest in promoting Tebow at the expense of the team itself. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the season is spun so that every Tebow turnover, every into the dirt or otherwise errant pass and every stalled drive isn’t really poor Timmy’s fault at all, you see, when you have been anointed by God himself there are growing pains. Even Jesus Christ wandered in the wilderness for years before he emerged as the messiah and old Moses himself was raising sheep for an extended period before he smited Pharaoh and parted the Red Sea. As long as the Broncos win 3 or 4 games the rest of the year it will be the greatest moment in Broncodom since Elway hoisted the Lombardi Trophy in Miami.

There have been dissenters though, heathens and non-believers and questioners of the power of the shrine. Take for example this by a Fox Sports guy named Jason Whitlock, his email box must have been assaulted by a plague of locusts over these words in his piece Don’t Let Tebow Hype Fool You:

Maybe Tim Tebow is a football force of nature, the answer to Denver’s mile-high longing for the next John Elway. But it’s going to take more than a screen pass, a 12-yard TD scramble, constant fist-pumping and yelling and a moral victory to convince me.

I hope I don’t get struck by lightning or my Tebow-loving, FOXSports.com colleague Jen Engel for writing that.

I’m not for or against Touchdown Timmy. I’m a Kansas City-fed, Show Me State, fence-sitting skeptic when it comes to the religious symbol/Broncos quarterback. You have to show me more than a 4-of-10, 79-yard passing half to get my heart racing about a Tebow Era.

I was stunned Sunday night when none other than Tony Dungy declared on NBC’s “Football Night In America” that Denver coach John Fox had to start Tebow in two weeks after Denver’s bye in the aftermath of the Broncos’ 29-24 close loss against San Diego. Dungy, while a religious zealot, is a stone-cold football man, a methodical, by-the-books, measured coach. He’s not given to succumbing to emotion or public sentiment.

But he’s now apparently caught Tebow religion thanks to a screen pass that Knowshon Moreno turned into a 28-yard TD scamper, a Tebow run for another score and the intangible-reliant belief the Broncos played harder when Touchdown Timmy was yelling and screaming.

Dungy fell for the hype. It makes sense. He’s removed from the fire. He’s on TV now. He’s like the rest of America. We believe that whatever the last entertaining thing we saw on the boob tube is infinitely better than whatever we saw before.

Sorry. I’m in a very cynical mood today. Touchdown Timmy reminds me of the AMC drama “Breaking Bad,” the show idiots claim is on the verge of replacing “The Wire” as the greatest in television history. “Breaking Bad” aired its Season 4 finale a couple of hours after Tebow flung his final incomplete pass into the end zone.

Yelling, screaming and fist-pumping are intangibles and motivational techniques best used by assistant coaches and middle linebackers. They have limited value on the offensive side of the ball. Defense is emotional. Offense is intellectual. Ray Lewis can’t play quarterback. And Peyton Manning can’t play middle linebacker.

In a pass-happy league where Cam Newton came out of the box throwing for 400 yards, let’s not get carried away because Touchdown Timmy threw for 79.

Denver doesn’t have a quarterback controversy. It has a QB crisis.

The reference to Tony Dungy is of interest since the former Buccaneers and Colts coach has managed to  somehow become a revered sort of football oracle. Never mind that Dungy’s Tampa Bay teams were never able to get over the hump under the great football leadership of the man mockingly referred to by some locals as “the black Spock”. Dungy’s defenses in Tampa were of all time great quality but his inability to ever figure it out offensively doomed him to exile after his team quit on him in the playoffs for the second year against the Eagles in that concrete rat trap in Philly. Dungy was snapped up by the Indianapolis Colts to replace Mr. Coors Light Commercial Jim Mora. In Indy despite having Peyton Manning as his quarterback his teams racked up exactly one Super Bowl win, and that one should have an asterisk because Rex Grossman was the opposing team’s quarterback. Dungy is a sanctimonious sack of shit, a religious fanatic who in the past has lent his name to virulently anti-gay organizations and a media whore. He is no authority on the Tebow thing, his piety and failure to ever find a quarterback in Tampa other than Trent Dilfer or Shaun King disqualifies him as anything but another asshole with an opinion.

So Tim Tebow’s shepherding of the Broncos will ironically begin next Sunday in the same stadium where John Elway won Super Bowl XXXIII and then retired from playing football. If there is a seriously winnable game on the Broncos schedule the remainder of the season this is it. Miami is a disaster, earlier in the year rumored as a potential partner in a Kyle Orton trade that would have left Tebow the starter from the get go the Dophins have stank up the place this season. The key free agent acquisition, former Saints running back Reggie Bush, more famously known for the monstrously unseemly scandal during his college days at USC than his NFL accomplishments has to put it diplomatically sucked. The Dolphins also lost their starting quarterback Chad Henne to a season ending injury and likely will trot out journeyman backup Sage Rosenfels under center. Miami is 0-4 pending Monday night’s game in the New Jersey swamplands against Rex Ryan’s Jets, a team looking to unload a very serious can of whup ass on someone after three straight crushing road losses. The Dolphins will be lucky to get out of there alive and will surely have the living shit beaten out of them by a Jets defense looking to emerge from it’s recent funk. They will be getting Denver on a short week and at home where they are in inexplicable 1-9 over their last ten games in Sun Life Stadium.It gets worse quickly after that, the resurgent Lions come to town as do the Jets and Patriots. Really the only other sure win on the slate is a week 13 game against the dismal Vikings. In an interesting note Jay Cutler, whose petulance and pouting set into motion the chain of events that led to Tebow being given the keys to the team comes to Denver on December 11, it would be a huge humiliation if he is able to beat the Broncos. But humiliation and a masochistic tendency for self-destruction are now requirements to be a Broncos fan, it is going to take years of being a league doormat and wandering in the football wilderness led by Tebow before anything changes. For the NFL, the networks and owner Pat Bowlen it all comes down to merchandise, concession and ticket sales, if they can sell the place out while putting out a product with the collective talent of an arena league team then they will do it. And the suckers in their number 15 jerseys will eat it up and empty their wallets.

Tebow’s Florida Gators championship teams will also be honored at the Dolphins game, it is damned near assured that there will be a national television audience and it should be practically a guaranteed win for the Broncos. It’s a game that not even Orton could have fucked up so what barring serious injury will be the opening game in a long and dark period in Broncos history under Tebow should be a certain victory no matter how badly that Denver plays. The real nightmare for real Broncos fans will be if Tebow is able to win several games and finish 6-10 or so. There is no way in hell that Elway and Fox will be able to draft a quality starting quarterback in next April’s draft because now that they have already surrendered to the Tebow cult they will forever be enslaved by it.

 HORATIO

Sucky Fucky: That would pretty much describe Kyle Orton and the already floating in the shitter Broncos season but it brings to mind lurid tales from the past as well, it was the “Horatio” comparison that did it.

I used to have a buddy named Horatio Hicks, or Horace Hicks, which was the name on his birth certificate. He was a tall, lanky piece of work, a real oddball who always wore hiking boots, heavy metal band t-shirts and denim overalls and had slicked back hair, he went through the pomade in a day when letting it grow out was fashionable. He also had a schnozzle so big that we called him “Horse” which he dug. He always would boast that his penis was as big as a horse’s and when the mood hit him, he would on occasion unzip his jeans, extract it and wave it around. He loved to go through fast food drive through windows with it out and if it was late enough, after a night of heavy boozing and doping he would play with it until it was erect and then laugh hysterically when the poor night girl at Jack In The Box would notice. It was actually pretty repulsive but in this sorry day of foul social deviance, rampant boy-buggering by once respected institutions like the Catholic Church and the proclivity of perverts and freaks to engage in not only sexual crimes but often murder and dismemberment it was in a way quite innocent, at least by 2011 standards.

He was another of the miscreants from the old days, a childhood friend who I happened to hang around with well into my early adult years. Horse was a party animal with a mean streak, one day he drop-kicked his own father in the balls over some money that he had borrowed from the old man – Horse used it to buy pot of course.  He was a dopehead to the nth degree, hell, a lot of my old friends were, we grew up in the 1970s, the last decade when Americans actually were taught to think critically and challenging authority of the lemming colony wasn’t deigned to be tantamount to treason.  Horse was into the tittie bars too. He pissed away nearly all of his money at Denver area flesh emporiums like Shotgun Willies, P.T.’s, Boogie Down, The Landing Strip, Pecos Junction and Doug’s Place. Many of these are likely now long defunct but Shotgun Willie’s was the Mecca of Mile High City gentleman’s clubs and still is. Horse would get good and jacked up on Yukon Jack and devil weed (he also was a speed freak), stuff his overall pockets with a roll of one dollar bills and hit the circuit. The girls who knew him loved him, he was a tipper who reliably could be counted on to piss away all of his money on lap dances and ogling enormous sets of the pink-nosed puppies being massaged an inch in front of his face. He would disappear for long stretches of time during his soirees, likely to go and jack off in order to bleed off the pressure lest he explode in his fruit of the looms.

One night I was with Horse at a place out in Commerce City on the way to the old Stapleton Airport called the Landing Strip. This was one of the raunchier tittie bars on the circuit, the girls there weren’t as managed as they were at some of the other more prominent clubs who were not about to run afoul of the law by allowing actual physical contact to occur. The majority of them were biker chicks and their old men were often in the place drinking, there was no problem as long as they were not molested or groped in any serious way by the patrons. For some reason “Horse” had a particularly nasty gleam in his eye that night, maybe he was backing down the Yukon Jack with black beauties or something. As the heavy metal music blared, Horse was violating the rules of strip clubs, he was going for it, flicking his tongue at nipples and at one point he even grabbed a handful of ass. I was watching the table of four or five leather clad, bearded dudes who looked like the thuggish roadies of the early day Allman Brothers Band (there is a picture of them on the insert inside the Fillmore Concerts cd) the one who seemed the most pissed off bore more than a passing a resemblance to Gregg Allman himself.

I often wondered what Horse would have been like were he to have ever visited Subic Bay in the Philippines as I did back when I was a youngster in the U.S. Navy. Club Jolo sat at the end of Magsaysay Drive, the long main drag of Olongapo City running from the Subic Bay Naval Base over the infamous Shit River and populated by hundreds of bars/whorehouses. Of all of the nastiest of the nasty dives in the P.I. this one was by far the gold standard. It was totally nude dancing in front of one of those psychedelic style back screens where hippie style swirls and lights were interspersed with some of the sickest porn that existed. There were 8 mm projections of a woman fucking a pig, a series of various objects being crammed into anal and vaginal orifices and even a toilet cam style scat view. Of course the stuff was so perverted that it really was a turn off but it served to reinforce Club Jolo’s legendary among Pacific fleet sailors as the raunchiest bar of all. They would actually have girls who would come table side, stack pesos on a beer bottle, squat and suck them into their cooze. That act  was a huge hit with the customers, all of them U.S. military members, drunk off of their asses on the fabled local concoction mojo and eager to engage in primal style fornication with the “little brown fuck machines (LBFM’s) that made Subic Bay the top port of call. Horse would have run absolutely amok in the adult “Disneyland” as it was known to those in the U.S. Navy.

But I digress….

I looked over at Horse and was horrified to see that in between the dancers that he had stood up and had actually extracted his cock. He had laid it out on the little buffer area behind his pack of Marlboros and his beer, you couldn’t see it unless you were either right next to him or looking down. Even more distrubing was that Goddammit, the crazy fucker had pasted a set of those little googlie eyes that you buy at arts and crafts store on the head of his dick!  I muttered something and immediately started eying the clearest path to the exit. He was just standing there leering with a dollar bill folded up and extending from his mouth as the bleached blonde girl on stage slowly gyrated her way towards him, her meat globes a bouncing. She sashayed over to Horse and closed those things over the dollar bill, she then looked down, noticed his crank on the stage padding, recoiled and screamed. The bikers were up and split into pairs, with military like precision two of them cut through the pool table area to come at us from the right and the others through the restroom area to descend from our left. I grabbed Horse by the back of his overalls and growled “LET’S GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE NOW!!!” while I started to violently and quickly pull him towards the door, his dick was still hanging out and there was about ten dollars in ones sitting there as we bolted. He quickly saw the writing on the wall and we both broke into a sprint, out the door and into the parking lot. We were in the car, a 1984 Dodge Daytona throwing up gravel on the way out of the lot as those biker dudes emerged from the place along with another longhaired dude in cook’s whites who was brandishing a large meat cleaver, it was the blue neon lights glint off of that fucking potential murder weapon that haunts me to this day. Fortunately the I-70 highway access ramp was only a block or from the bar so by the time that they would have been in hot pursuit we were already long gone, laughing madly at the entire situation.

I lost touch with Horse over twenty years ago and have made no attempt to contact him since because some things and people are best left in the past, especially when it comes to hardened reprobates like Horse. For all that I know he is doing time in Canon City for waving his dick at little girls on a playground, frankly given his deep degenerate streak it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. The last time that I talked to him, not long after the escape from what would have been a brutal beating in the parking lot at The Landing Strip he was managing a combination arcade/headshop out on East Colfax and dealing dope out of the back door, he also dabbled in burglary and got a real kick out of preying on gays and the elderly. Were I to venture a guess I would certainly say that no good came of him, he was a seriously twisted dude. Then again, perhaps he ‘reformed’ himself and found God, as the saying goes, “religion is the last refuge of a soundrel”, he may even have been in attendance at Sunday’s game wearing an orange Tim Tebow jersey. Who the fuck knows… and in the end who the fuck cares?

So why the fuck am I going off on this riff about Horace Hicks in the first place? It was just that the dysfunction on the Broncos and the fairly recent DUI bust of Denver kicker Matt Prater on his way back home from Shotgun Willie’s dredges up the corpses of the past. The present is the time when the serious monsters are on the prowl, they have taken over the political system and the vomitous torrent of cultural sleaze that emanates from the electronic crackpipe is only surpassed by the militant societal perversion of American Cristendom. This potent mixture is exemplified by the Great TebowCrusade and the swarming of what passes for a sports media to descend upon it like buzzards or more appropriately heathen bastards worshipping their false idols and golden calves. As a force they are not to be trifled with, just ask Kyle Orton whose elderly years will likely be spent wracked by cold night sweats and the nightmares thanks to how the animals treated him over the last four months. I have no doubt that many of them prayed for the death of his new child just so Tebow could be anointed the starter, that’s just the way that the putrescent fuckers are. They are pro life but worship war, the death penalty and have no qualms with poor children starving to death, I often wonder what Jesus would think of this scum… I sure as fuck know that they wouldn’t have been down with his long-haired, liberal ass.

Hell, what is more hypocritical than Pastor Ted getting plowed up the back forty on a regular basis while denouncing gays like an establishment version of the cruder Fred Phelps? Or Reverend Gary Aldridge, my all time favorite homophobic Christer who was found dead, suffocated in a Pulp Fiction style Gimp leather suit with a massive dildo stuffed up his asshole. Really, these rotten Christers, especially the Tebow worshippers are as full of shit as Reverend Aldridge’s lubed up anus was full of pink vulcanized rubber. The triumph of Tebow is a tale of the triumph of a very militant element that has existed within this country, on of enormous political power and on that the average American Joe has no true idea even exists. Of course her in Der Heimat, circa 2011 the Average Joe is a jacked up on anti-Muslim hatred, self-centered, willfully ignorant rock-headed buffoon like Joe the Plumber so none of this resonates nor could it. Jesus Tebow’s ascension is especially significant in that it came in the exact same venue that the loathed BLACK man in the WHITE House claimed the nomination for the Democratic Party back in 2008. While Americans in general seem to be doomed to never realize one of the central tenets upon which the United States of America was founded – that religion and politics don’t mix, perhaps by the end of the season Bronco fans will realize that neither do religion and football.