If there were a worldwide contest for the most USA couple in the world, Tim and Demi-Leigh Tebow would be trading very high on Polymarket. They check all the boxes of peak first-quarter-of-the-millennium Americanism: she is a former beauty queen and he is a former NFL quarterback and pro baseball player. They both do a lot of motivational speaking. They go to church together on Sundays. They watch Ted Lasso and The Chosen. They both have millions of followers on social media. And they were both briefly but blindingly famous.
And now each of them has a book out within a few weeks of the other. The works are similar: inspirational in purpose, devout in tone, and drawn from their own lives. Demi, as she is known, has written a 100-day devotional, Knowing Who You Are Because of Who God Is. It builds on the lessons of her memoir, about how she had to find a new identity after her reign as Miss Universe in 2018 and what she learned about where a sense of worth comes from. (Spoiler: it’s from being made in God’s image.)
Tim’s new book, Look Again, is his sixth for adults. It’s about how the world, especially the folks in it who follow Jesus, needs to recalibrate its attitude to people with disabilities. The book opens with a brief history of the Nazi program of extermination that killed hundreds of thousands of disabled Germans, starting with the children, under the justification that they could never make a contribution to society. In the pages that follow, Tebow and his ghostwriter gently walk their readers through the possibility that they too might not be treating people with disabilities the way they deserve, partly using what he learned working overseas with his missionary parents. (Spoiler alert again: all people are made in God’s image.)
People who know Tim, now 38, only from his football prowess or because of Tebowing, a posture of prayer that he often took after a successful play, which became one of the widely admired and just as widely mocked memes of the early 2010s, may not be aware that the dyslexic guy who won a Heisman Trophy while a sophomore at the University of Florida has had a solid career as an author. Four of the five books for adults he has published since 2011—one autobiographical and four inspirational—have become New York Times bestsellers. (He’s also written seven for younger readers.) “I’m so grateful I get to call my ghostwriter,” he says. “I’m grateful I don’t have to sit down with a pen and a paper and actually write it, because that would be miserable.”
And people who followed Demi as Miss Universe—the first South African to win the top prize in almost 40 years—may not realize she has, as of late, also found publishing success. Her memoir, A Crown That Lasts, debuted in August 2024 at No. 6 on the USA Today best-seller list. She followed it up in April with a children’s book, Princess Paris Finds Her Purpose, which also sold briskly. All three of her books address the same question: what do you do after you’ve achieved your wildest dream?
Demi, 30, spent a year at the apex of the pageant world, a world she had dreamed of since she was a little girl watching the competitions with her mother, and then politely but abruptly got dethroned when the next Miss Universe was crowned. “I felt like I was supposed to go a certain path, whether it be modeling or acting or things that former Miss Universes have gone on to do,” she says. “But I just didn’t feel that that was the calling I had on my life.” She floundered around, she estimates, for about a year and a half, dallying with modeling but finding it grubby. “I truly questioned my worth, my value. What am I without this title? There’s a next Miss Universe; there’s a replacement. So where do I fit in?”
Her husband faced the same challenges, just a little later. And more reluctantly. After his stellar college career—recently a collection of college-football sportswriters selected an all-time All-America team and put 2007 Tebow in as quarterback—Tim was drafted into the NFL in the first round. But after playing for two teams over three seasons, and doing preseason stints for two others, he shifted to baseball in 2016. He made his way through the minors to the New York Mets major league training camp in 2020, and then switched back to football in a different position, tight end. He got cut from the Jacksonville Jaguars, his hometown team, before the season started in 2021. He doesn’t pretend it didn’t hurt. “I was, in my opinion, really dealing with a lot of pride and ego as I got cut from the Jaguars,” says Tim. “If you turned on any of the sports stations, all you would see is my worst plays over and over and over again.”
Because he suddenly had time on his hands, Tim got to travel with one of the partners of his eponymous charity, the Tim Tebow Foundation (TTF), to Afghanistan, just as the U.S. was rather chaotically leaving. And on that trip, he says, he saw what actual hardship looked like. That, and the encouragement of his wife, who had already been shown the exit from her dream job, reframed his thinking to focus more on advocacy work on behalf of those he calls “the real MVPs” (most vulnerable people). “I felt like it was rejection, but it was actually redirection for something more important and I’m very grateful for that,” he says. There were other, higher callings than football, and he was in a position to answer them. “It wasn’t a truth that I didn’t know,” he says. “It was a truth that I needed to be reminded about.”
The way Tim and Demi tell it, they were each other’s manifest destiny.
TTF focuses on victims of human trafficking, vulnerable children, and people who lack access to medical care or have special needs. Some of the work is very dark, but one of its most joyous initiatives is a yearly prom, on the Friday before Valentine’s Day, for children and adults who are disabled, known as Night to Shine. Churches and other willing groups around the world—currently it’s in 60-something countries—host the kids and cheer them on, and the Tebows drop by as many as they can manage, high-fiving and celebrating like they’re in the end zone. It’s through that enterprise that the two of them met.
The genesis of their relationship, while not a total Hallmark movie plot, would make a decent pitch for one. Demi, who was born and raised in South Africa, had a half-sister, Franje Peters, with a congenital brain defect. Her father and stepmother had reorganized their lives in order to look after Franje, who required around-the-clock care. Franje got invited to the Cape Town Night to Shine in 2018, but was too sick to attend. Demi, who was then Miss Universe, contacted Tim—she thought his last name was pronounced “Tee-bough”—to thank him anyway. “Our family had been so secluded for such a long time and really didn’t feel that support,” she says of her mindset. “And then here comes this really cute-looking American guy that loves people just like my little sister.”
Both of them were working in New York City at the time, but baseball and beauty-queen commitments being what they are, they first connected by email and then phone. It took one two-hour-24-minute-and-six-second call to establish they had a lot in common, even beyond an appetite for competition, a belief in the resurrection, and an optimized level of body fat. “I kind of felt that he was the one before we actually even met in person, which I know is a very bold thing to say,” says Demi. “It was love at first conversation.” They were engaged within a year.
The meeting came during a turbulent time for Demi. Early in her reign as Miss South Africa, she was carjacked, during rush hour, by armed men. She surrendered the car, but one of the assailants tried to force her back in. Well-trained on the perils of going to a second location, she punched him hard in the throat and, in six-inch heels, ran for her life. It took many entreaties before a vehicle—driven by another young woman—pulled over to let her in. That experience, especially the rebuffs from drivers who saw her distress but did nothing, inspired her to start #Unbreakable, a campaign to educate young women on self-defense, which she was able to amplify after she won Miss Universe.
Demi’s “getting cut from the Jaguars’” moment came when she had to surrender her crown. It wasn’t just because she had lost the access to a car, an on-staff lawyer, a stylist, the spotlight, and a manager—although she admits to creating an email account for a pretend personal assistant—but because she had lost her sense of purpose. She had no way to keep the campaign going. Franje died during that time—four months after Demi and Tim got engaged—adding to Demi’s sense of despair.
Being the partner of a high-profile sports star didn’t help, because people often assumed that her career would be just to support Tim’s. “I wish I could go back and do better at surrounding myself with a community of people that would point me back to the truth,” she says. “One of the things that I write about in this book is finding the thing in this life that is bigger than yourself, that has the opportunity to have an eternal impact.”
What she found was a natural extension of both her faith and her work helping keep women safe that was also, helpfully, an issue her husband’s foundation works on. “In 2017, I thought human trafficking happened somewhere else, some other country, some faraway place,” she says. “Today we know that it’s prevalent in every single country all over the world and in all 50 states,” she says. “Do people get shipped in containers? Yes. The Liam Neeson movie thing, it does happen. But close to 50% of trafficking cases happen via somebody in that person’s inner circle, somebody that was supposed to protect that person, whether that’s a family member, a father, a husband, a boyfriend.”
When asked for a definition of what constitutes trafficking—the TTF’s areas of concern include organ-harvesting, fair labor practices, forced marriage and most prostitution, for example—she has a ready answer. “Force, fraud, and coercion,” she says. “Those three things are nearly always prevalent when it comes to human-trafficking cases. And there’s usually three parties present. A buyer, a seller, and the victim.” Demi sits on several TTF boards that support trafficking victims’ recovery. “One of the greatest honors of my life is to be able to fight against human trafficking alongside my husband and the Tim Tebow Foundation,” she says, and despite the clunky, approved-by-the-board-style language, she sounds genuine.
The Tebows married in Cape Town in 2020, and their daughter, Daphne Reign, was born this July. During our interview, conducted via videoconference, Demi shows off the ruby and moonstone “Daphne” necklace with which Tim, an exuberant gift giver, celebrated the birth. Ruby is Daphne’s birthstone; moonstone is Demi’s. (His wedding proposal, complete with a surprise live serenade from her favorite South African Christian musician, is the stuff of local legend.)
Their new daughter isn’t yet sleeping well, but it hasn’t stopped Demi from completing back-to-back speaking arrangements in the prior week. “It has been the sweetest 13 weeks, and some of the hardest,” she says. “Nobody warned me about the baby laundry! Nobody warned me how terrifying it is to cut an infant’s nails!” Tim conducts his interview from the road. He’s reacting to fatherhood in the most QB way imaginable. “We got back from the hospital and we set Daphne down in her bassinet,” he says. “I look at Demi, I’m like, ‘OK, so what do we do now? What’s next? Where’s the game plan? Where’s the manual? Where’s the process for it?’”
Tim, who appeared in a controversial 2010 Focus on the Family Super Bowl commercial that many considered too political for the event, and who is still very vocally pro-life, has directed more of his attention to the bipartisan issue of trafficking in recent years. In 2024, he spoke before the House Judiciary Committee about the Renewed Hope Act, which is sponsored by legislators from both sides of the aisle and would expand Homeland Security’s capacity for tracking down victims of online child exploitation.
When asked if the MVPs for whom he advocates include the migrants who have been swept up in raids and imprisoned without due process, Tebow punts. “All of human life has infinite value and worth and we need to treat it that way,” he says. “At the same time, there is a reason why you put rules and regulations in place.” When asked if more Christians should be outraged that the lives of those with profound medical needs overseas have been made more difficult by the drastic cuts to U.S. foreign aid, he says he doesn’t know enough about it and points to Christians who are helping.
For her part, Demi said during her Miss Universe days that the biggest problem facing women in the workforce is the gender wage gap, and she has spoken out against sexual harassment, saying that “men should know that their actions have consequences.” But she doesn’t like to call herself a feminist. “I’m for the safety of all people. I’m for the love of all people. I think sometimes the term feminism can get skewed where feminism comes across as being against men and I don’t see myself as that,” she says. “We need strong men to be able to advocate alongside us and with us and for us.” Much of the #Unbreakable work has been subsumed into her anti-trafficking activities.
To many, including Tim’s former coach and longtime friend Urban Meyer, this both-sidesism seems like understandable pragmatism. “Tim and Demi are from a biblical perspective, so they’re for common sense,” he says. “But they’re also smart enough not to alienate people and cause friction.” To others, it lacks moral courage. “I’ve tried very carefully not to paint with a broad brush,” says Tebow of his political stances. “I really try very hard not to say, ‘This is all good or this is all bad,’ when there’s a lot of people that are striving and working to enhance and make [a situation] better.”
This appeal to nuance is perhaps a vestige of Tebow’s years visiting the Philippines, his birthplace, with his parents. As missionaries, they had to work with whatever regime was in power at the time. It has also allowed the duo to escape the culture wars that have afflicted many in the evangelical community. “I can’t think of another couple that can handle the scrutiny that these two are under because they are who they are,” says Meyer. “They’re real.”
There are other vestiges of Tim’s childhood as a missionary kid. He addresses all older women using “Miss” before their first name, even reporters. He rarely misses an opportunity to talk about God, even though he no longer wears the eye black in which he used to write John 3:16. And there’s always a hint of the preacher in his speaking appearances. His eloquence builds the longer he talks, and he has a way of drawing on his environment to illustrate his points. He talks about having a “white-belt mentality” toward feedback, for example, referring to the garment worn by students who have just started learning martial arts. He can’t help promoting random products he loves, from Ice Cream For Bears (only three ingredients!) to sticky notes you can write on while you shower.
Their union isn’t perfect, of course. Tim is still teaching Demi the finer points of football, especially the downs. She initially preferred rugby, where there are no TV timeouts during a game and far less equipment. Demi would love it if Tim didn’t leave quite so many empty zero-sugar soda cans around the home. Tim would love it if South Africa weren’t so far away. The Clean Juice franchise they opened locally didn’t make it. (The couple also has a for-profit investment company, the Tebow Group.) And in news that is partly sad and partly welcome, people don’t Tebow so much anymore. But it’s hard to argue with Meyer’s assessment, which he intends to be taken literally, that theirs “is a match made in heaven.”
Both of the Tebows’ books have another theme in common, one that again seems like it might be apt for America at this moment: where are you when you’re not on top anymore? And the answer they’re proposing, and which they seem to be trying to live out, is that you are somewhere that you can more clearly see the folks at the bottom.
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