Wahoo Wire

For millions of viewers, Florida’s 24-14 victory over Oklahoma in the BCS National Championship was a confirmation of what they had already accepted as fact. The Gators, captained by their fearless leader, Timothy Richard Tebow, were vastly superior to even the machine-picked best opponent from the rest of the nation.

But for Brenda Miller and Stacey Welsh, two undergraduates at the University of Florida who volunteer with Shands Children’s Hospital in Gainesville through their sorority, Tau Beta Theta, the broadcast was quite an eye-opener.

“We already knew that he [Tebow] was, like, the best–and hottest!–football player ever,” Miller explained. “But when that announcer-guy said, you know, that spending five or twenty minutes with him could, like, change your life, we both thought of the children.”

Miller and Welsh started volunteering at the Gainesville-area children’s hospital during the spring semester of their freshman year, bringing gifts and spending time with the patients.

“We volunteer on weekends there, mostly,” Miller said. “Whenever there’s not, like, a mixer or a home game or something.”

The children whose plight had weighed most heavily on the girls’ minds was that of three young brothers, Thomas, Andrew, and Daniel Nguyen. The boys had been diagnosed with malignant brain tumors which had recently spread, afflicting each of them with near-total blindness. Despite the attention of the hospital’s world-renowned neurologists and staff, the boys’ conditions had continued to worsen.

“I mean, yeah, the people who treat them at Shands are, like, doctors and such,” Walsh acknowledged, “but they mostly just walk around writing on clipboards and do tests on the kids. A lot of medical-type stuff.

“That guy on television had talked to Tebow, not even about medicine, and he said it changed his life.”

“And then,” Miller added, “when he was on the four-yard line, with the Gators only ahead by three, and he acted like he was running and then jumped to pass it for the touchdown, we were like, ‘Oh-my-god, that’s a miracle!’ It seemed impossible, that one person could be running and passing at the same time. And I’ve never seen one of those doctors perform a miracle in three years of volunteering.

“We decided the next day at lunch to ask Harry [Harold Hodgkiss, the hospital's chief of medicine] if he could get Tebow in to see them.”

Dr. Hodgkiss admitted that he was initially reluctant to involve the quarterback in the boys’ case.

“We are very proud of the unrivaled team of neurosurgeons in our employ,” he explained. “I was confident that, with the proper precautions, we would be able to successfully operate on each of the boys in the near future–and, frankly, the girls’ suggestion was quite unorthodox. There isn’t a soul east of Tallahassee who’d dispute Mr. Tebow’s status as perhaps the greatest human being to ever touch a football, but I like to think of myself as an advocate of the power of modern medicine.

“Besides,” he added, “that spread option offense isn’t exactly brain surgery.”

But Dr. Hodgkiss was persuaded to grant Miller and Welsh their request. “We agreed that I would ask him,” Welsh said, “since I paid a girl $200 for her spot in one of his sociology classes. I was totally nervous since it was my first time, like, actually talking to him.”

Tebow agreed to accompany the girls on their next volunteer visit. “He said he was really busy, of course,” Welsh explained, “but that guy on TV said it only took five minutes, so we weren’t concerned.”

What followed, according to Dr. Hodgkiss, was “magic.”

“He walked into the children’s wing behind the girls,” Hodgkiss recalled, “still shaking hands and signing scrubs for a few of the doctors, and we brought him over to the Nguyen children. Andrew was lying there, propped up on pillows in the bed, and Mr. Tebow looked at him and said, ‘Hey, buddy,’ and the boy blinked–and looked up at him, and said, ‘Hey.’ And you could just tell that Andrew could see him.”

Miller and Welsh excitedly directed Tebow to the other boys’ beds, and soon Thomas and Daniel were looking at each other and Tebow.

“It was positively Christ-like, what he did,” Hodgkiss said. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind in church last Sunday–the first Sunday I’d gone in twenty years. I just had to thank God for Tim Tebow.”

MRI scans taken on each of the Nguyen boys after Tebow’s visit showed no trace of the tumors which had afflicted them. They were recently released to their parents’ care with the approval of the hospital’s neurological experts, who consider the possibility of the tumors’ regrowth to be negligible.

“I’m glad Mr. Tebow gave me my sight back,” said Andrew Nguyen. “I got to watch all the Gators games I missed. My favorite player is Percy Harvin. He’s so fast!”