Meeting Great Expectations Young Takes Long, Bumpy Road To Top
The downstairs at Steve Young’s home in Los Altos Hills, Calif., is one cavernous room with bare floors and exposed ceilings. There is an upright piano and stacks of bound scripts left over from its days as a private theater. The place was built in 1989 by the family that lives around the bend on this country road. When Young saw it two summers ago, it had no bathrooms, no kitchen, no bedroom, no heat, no nothing.
He, of course, thought it would make a perfect home. It had the one quality he seems to seek out in everything in his life: grand potential for failure.
He has lived the past two seasons like a college senior in the renovated upstairs loft with a bed, a couch, a desk, a bookcase (crammed with hardbacks from Herman Wouk to Richard Preston), a table, a bathroom, a TV and stereo, a microwave and a mini-refrigerator. A cloudy plastic sheet covers a large opening in a wall overlooking the theater.
Young walks through the downstairs, pointing out where the kitchen and living room will go. He says he wants huge windows in every wall so he can see the sloping lawns and canopied trees that cover the property. But for now the place looks like a drafty barn.
This can mean only one thing: Someday it will be a palace.
That is the pattern of Young’s life, on and off the field. The 33-year-old 49ers quarterback seems guided by the theory that he cannot enjoy success unless he has first paid sufficient penance, as if struggles yield rewards according to some divine mathematical equation. Perhaps the theory seeped down through four generations from Provo, Utah, and his great-great-great-great-grandfather, Brigham Young. But more likely it stretches back only as far as Greenwich, Conn., to a two-story house on Split Timber Road, where whatever triumph might await Young at the end of this month can find its beginning.
In the heart of Greenwich, elaborate estates with low stone walls and grand lawns stretch along narrow roads with names like Chelton Lane. Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford live here. So do Diana Ross, Bobby Bonilla and Pat Riley. It’s a bedroom community for New York City, 30 miles away.
As you head south across town, the houses shrink. The stone walls become picket fences, and the long driveways shorten and lead into two-car garages with basketball hoops bolted to their eaves. Celebrity Greenwich fades into a neighborhood called Riverside, where down the street from North Mianus Elementary School sits the modest home of LeGrande and Sherry Young.
Inside, family pictures line the walls.
One shows LeGrande as a fullback for Brigham Young in the 1950s, his grim face staring unblinking at the camera. More than 30 years later, the face hasn’t changed. And from all accounts he looked that way even as a child, earning him the nickname Grit when he was just 6 years old. He has answered to the name - and lived up to it - ever since.
“When Mr. Young told you to do something, you didn’t question it,” said Frank Arnone, who grew up in the neighborhood. “He was like Mr. Cleaver on steroids.”
Steve, the oldest of five, took the lion’s share of his father’s discipline and felt most acutely his father’s expectations. Grit Young knew early on his son had special talent.
By junior high, Grit and Sherry were receiving letters from teachers and principals commending their son. In his senior year at Greenwich High, he was captain of the football, basketball and baseball teams and took the posts to heart.Allen pushed open the door and there stood Young nose to nose with the center, barking the same stern speech Allen had planned to deliver. With nothing left to say, he clapped his hands. “OK. Ready?”
Young seemed too good to be true. New Yorker Ron Saggese arrived as an assistant football coach Young’s senior year. He phoned his cynical city friends: “If I were to tell you the story of this kid, it would make you puke.” Young didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t swear. He pitched a no-hitter the day after the prom because he was the only player who wasn’t hung over. He dated the prettiest girl in school, Christy Fichtner, who would later become Miss U.S.A. “I never had to give her a curfew,” Christy’s mother says, “because Steve’s father took care of that.”
Because Young was an option quarterback in Greenwich High, only colleges that played the option recruited him.
A Mormon friend encouraged LaVell Edwards at BYU to look at Young, and Edwards offered him a scholarship and Young accepted.
But in a pattern that would repeat itself several times over the next decade, Young adjusted poorly to his new surroundings. He was a nester who, as a child, never wanted to sleep over at friends’ houses. He was so miserable his freshman year in Provo he didn’t unpack his bags for an entire semester and called home almost every day.
“I told my dad I wanted to come home,” Young says, “and he said, ‘You can quit but you can’t come home.”’
To make matters worse, the varsity quarterback coach decided he would switch Young to defensive back. But in the spring, that coach left and Ted Tollner came in, a move that would turn around Young’s career. Tollner held an open competition for the backup job to starter Jim McMahon. Young won it, and by the end of his senior year was a runner-up for the Heisman and the projected No. 1 pick in the NFL draft.
Though he grew up surrounded by his town’s wealth, Young didn’t care about money because his family never seemed to have much of it. His father was a corporate lawyer but was always worried about making ends meet for his wife and children.
When the time came, even Grit advised his son to sign with the upstart USFL over the NFL. The Cincinnati Bengals, who owned the No.1 pick in the NFL draft, couldn’t come close to the financial deal the Los Angeles Express was offering.”He woke up the next day,” says Sherry, “and he had given away his dream.”
Soon after he signed the contract that would make him the richest athlete in American sports, Young began to understand what he had lost. He had been raised to believe that money was the root of evil, and suddenly he was labeled “The $40 Million Man” and ridiculed as a symbol of what was wrong with America. He wanted to be what was right with America.
When it was time for Young to leave BYU to join the L.A. Express, he was so reluctant that his father flew to Provo to accompany him. Those first few months with the Express were the lowest of Young’s career.
“I felt my life was never going to be the same, and I liked my life,” he says now. “I felt in some way like my life was going down the tubes. You’re in crisis and the whole world gets to watch.”
Over the next six years, he found himself in one seemingly hopeless situation after another. No matter what he did, he could never live up to his extravagant salary at the Express - and then the team went bankrupt. He went to the inept Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where no quarterback has ever shined. Then he moved on to the tense battleground of the San Francisco 49ers, where he set himself for his toughest battle and his greatest potential for failure: replacing Joe Montana.
Montana’s is the only name that elicits a grimace from the diplomatic Youngs. “I always like to see people who are in tough situations act with class,” Grit says, referring to Montana’s cold shoulder toward Young.
So Grit joined Young’s agent, Leigh Steinberg, in encouraging Steve to leave the 49ers when his contract was up several years ago.
For Young’s part, there was never any question he would stay with the 49ers. He knew if he left he would end up on a hopeless team, and he had been there already. So he signed up for another tour of duty in Montana’s shadow, biding his time, keeping his mouth closed when fans and even the 49ers talked of trading him after he had won the league’s MVP award for the 1992 season while Montana was injured. Not until Montana left for Kansas City in 1993 was Young officially anointed the starting quarterback.
“It’s tough. It’s hard. But you get used to it,” Young says.
“I’ve been able to put everything in perspective the last couple years.”
It helps that he has won four NFL passing titles in his four years as a starter. And that he eclipsed Montana’s record for touchdowns in a season. And that he won his second MVP award in three years. And that he set league records for passing efficiency and completion percentage.
Even so, he still had to hear the comparisons when the 49ers faced Montana’s Chiefs this season and lost.
Sometime after the game, after Young had graciously told reporters, “Maybe the student still has something to learn from the master,” he left a message on his parents’ machine.
“Joe’s a hero,” he said, only half joking, “and I’m a schmuck.”
Later, though, Young called the game a relief. “It seems like a lot of people moved on,” he says.
Maybe now Young has paid enough penance. Maybe now he can be allowed the greatest reward in football, the Super Bowl. Yet because he is, as one friend called him, “such a common stick,” he still doesn’t cause a panic when he goes out in public.
One day this week after practice, Young walked into a Los Altos sandwich shop, ordered his lunch at the counter and went in search of a table. Seeing none clean, he bused one himself, carrying the dirty dishes to a bin atop the garbage can. He wiped the crumbs off the table with a napkin and sat down, waiting for the cashier to call his number.
He had barely finished half his lunch when a 7-year-old boy wearing a 49ers jersey marched up to the table to ask Young to sign a paper napkin.
“I have Joe Montana’s picture on my wall already,” the child volunteered.
“Are you going to put this up there with it?” Young asked, smiling.
“I might.”
“Well,” said the quarterback, “give it some thought.”