It’s 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 15, 2005. A Saturday, faintly chilly for Jacksonville, Florida, but that doesn’t stop the crowd from pouring into the Nease High School auditorium, half clad in red and white, the other orange and blue, split down the middle of the rickety bleachers as they argue brazenly over someone else’s life decision to be made in under 30 minutes on national television.
“And I’m outside getting ready to throw up,” said two-time national champion and Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow at the spring's first installment of the Delta Speaker Series.
He admitted his 18-year-old nausea to a crowd just shy of 3,000 Auburn students and guests piled into the Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum at Auburn University Thursday evening — an auditorium not much different than the one he sat outside 14 years before, with no idea what name to fill in at the end of the sentence: “And next year, I will be playing college football at the University of…”
“Finally, my dad gets to the school, and I’m like, ‘Dad, help. Where do I go?'" he recounted. "And he’s like, ‘You still haven’t made up your mind?’”
With the countdown dwindling down to the 15-minute mark, the air fell heavy on Tebow’s shoulders. No one would tell him his choice, let alone their opinion, not even his family. Then, his dad asked what the number one priority in making his decision was.
“The people,” he said.
The people he’d be around every day, the ones he’d pass on the sidewalks, interact with, play with, his mentors.
“It’s always the people, no matter what.”
“I love it, that’s perfect, that’s great,” his dad said as the clocked continued to tick. “But what if it was just one person? One person at either of the schools, who would it be?”
The Delta Speaker Series is a monthly opportunity for Auburn students to learn from successful leaders in their respective fields on topics related to the Emerge at Auburn program. Thursday's installation also featured a leadership panel of three Delta Airline executives and Auburn alumni: Kurt Sasser, sales accountant executive for Delta; Jared Hodge, Delta pilot and Brittney Rieben, project manager of international finance for Delta.
When asked what constituted a good leader, the Delta executives agreed on three attributes: listening, humility and compassion. For Tebow, it was belief.
“Belief is something that is so powerful that it can transform a life,” Tebow said. "It can change oneself and all those surrounding, but you need to believe it, not hope it. Hope is not a strategy."
“There are a lot of people who show up, and they hope they’re going to win," Tebow said. "Then, there’s other people who show up, and they believe they’re going to win. Those who hope, nothing in their lives matches up to what they say, to what they actually do. But, when you really believe something, your actions are going to match your words.”
Just about any college football fan knows Tebow ultimately finished that sentence with the word “Florida.” He went on to win two collegiate football national championships his freshman and junior years and became the first sophomore to win the Heisman Trophy, the most prestigious individual award in college football.
“But I almost wasn’t a Gator,” Tebow said.
Ten minutes before he would sit on stage to announce his decision, surrounded by family, his coach, the ESPN camera crew and a dozen reporters ready to share his choice to the world, Tebow had called University of Florida head coach Urban Meyer after calling University of Alabama head coach Mike Shula to break the news of his decision.
“I’m wiping off tears from the call earlier [with Alabama],” said Tebow, who admitted it wasn’t the only time Alabama had made him cry.
“It’s not that funny, y’all know what I’m talking about,” he said to a chorus of laughter coming from the 3,000-person crowd that understood the reference to when he was crying on the field following the SEC Championship loss to Alabama.
But, as Tebow was getting ready to tell Meyer his decision to become a Florida Gator, Meyer’s Blackberry died. As Tebow dialed back and back with no response, the ESPN crew pushed him onto the stage with his family, placed a microphone on his shirt and began counting down from two minutes as the Florida and Alabama fans pit their fight songs against one another in a deafening roar.
“And I lean over to my dad, and I’m like, ‘Dad, I didn’t actually tell coach Meyer I’m going to Florida. I could still go to Alabama.'”
For Tebow, people matter. Those who surround him and push him to be his best are important. What it means to be a leader is no different to him.
“I’ve been around a lot of powerful people, and no one follows them, and I’ve been around a lot of people who have never been given a position, but they’re great and powerful because everyone wants to follow them,” Tebow said. “Why? Because they make people believe in themselves.”
Tebow called this attribute being a servant leader, a leader who attends to the people around them, makes others believe in themselves and believe in the leader, all because they care more than anyone else.
As Tebow sat on the couch on Dec. 15 during the three-minute ESPN interview that seemed to last for am eternity, he returned to the one question: What if it was one person?
“One person said something to me, and I believed it," Tebow said. "When he said you can reach greatness, I believed it. When he said you’ll be great, I believed it because something about him made me believe in what he was doing and in myself."
So, at the last second, Tebow said, “I will be playing football at the University of Florida.”
“And the reason I did that was because I got the chance to be around a leader who made me believe in myself — coach Meyer," Tebow said.
Today, Tebow works as a college football analyst for ESPN. Prior to that, Tebow played three years in the NFL. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books: "Through My Eyes" and "Shaken: Discovering Your True Identity in the Midst of Life’s Storms." He released his latest book "This is the Day," in September. His Tim Tebow Foundation sponsors a nation-wide prom for people with special needs, provides care for orphans in four countries, adoption aid for grants for families that adopted international children with special needs and provides surgeries to children in the Philippines through the Tebow Cure Hospital.
But all of his accomplishments return to one specific moment — a belief in a leader who made him believe in himself.
Leaders don’t have every answer or the perfect clothes or the most social media fans, Tebow said. A leader has the things everyone wants: love, belief, passion and sacrifice.
“And it’s contagious, so if you want to lead your friends, a company, a university, you show up every day whether you feel good or not, and you will be willing to sacrifice," he said. "And let me tell you, you will be different, you will be contagious and people will want to be around you. I’m telling you, you will make a difference in people’s lives for the better.”
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