Rachel Bird is a college-bound senior who played basketball and was a cheerleader at Kingsley-Pierson High School in Iowa. Since Bird didn’t have a date for her prom, she Tweeted at Tim Tebow to ask if he would escort her. Tebow never responded, so Bird settled for the next best thing – a homemade Tim Tebow cutout. From the Des Moines Register:

Friends laughed and encouraged her. Everybody thought it would be funny. Her mom blanched a bit, though.

“We didn’t want her to be embarrassed,” Carol Bird said.

Rachel Bird abandoned the plan. Then prom Saturday arrived. She decided Tebow was going to be her date — even if he was only a quarter-inch thick.

*cough* Anyway, Cardboard Tebow was about as cheap as a corsage. A Sioux City office suppy store was having a sale on poster printing and it only cost $20 for a life-sized Tebow. Bird’s father helped put the post on some cardboard, but he needed some cologne.

“The piece of cardboard we found smelled strongly of wood glue,” Rachel Bird said. “We sprayed a little on him to kind of hide that.”

Covered in her father’s musk, Rachel and Cardboard Tebow were ready for the big dance.

Flat Tebow might have been made of paper and cardboard, but he was anything but a stiff at the prom. Girls wanted to dance with him. Boys got their picture taken with him.

Somehow, I think Cardboard Tebow was as big a hit as the real Tebow would have been. And at a quarter-inch thick, what girl wouldn’t have had an evening to remember? [Des Moines Register]

Previously: Alabama’s Trent Richardson Took a 17-Year-Old Cancer Survivor to Her Senior Prom