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Steve Young
Former Quarterback, San Francisco 49ers; Founder, The Forever Young Foundation
As you know, athletes aren't generally known for their intellect. Sometimes the stereotypes are true, and sometimes they're not. It actually helps when I speak, because if I put a couple of sentences together, everyone figures, "Hey, that's great!" Football is what I know and what I learned from, and I'm grateful for the men I played with when I was younger. There are characters from all walks of life, from every race, religion, socio-economic, geographic background. Football is the melting pot. We have to learn to play together and do things together. There are a lot of unique individuals.
One of my favorite stories come from people who have played for the Raiders. Mark Wilson, who was a sweet young guy playing quarterback for the Raiders many years ago, never swore on the field. You know the Raiders; they're a tough, ornery group of guys. They didn't like the fact that Wilson didn't swear, especially when he threw an interception or did something wrong that they felt necessitated a good swearing, not "golly gee" or "oh, heck." It made their skin crawl. So they assigned this young equipment kid, and when Wilson did something that they thought required a swearing, they would point to this kid, and he would swear, so that everyone could feel some catharsis.
I've been out of the game for over a year now, and it's been hard, because as I've said, that was my expertise, my art, my craft. In your mid-thirties, to leave that and actually try to become an expert in something else is very difficult. It's hard enough to be an expert in one thing, let alone two. I remember the low point of my retired year - it's not really a low point, but it's ironic and a great moment - when I was in a restaurant with my son. I got very good at changing diapers, even competitive about it, changing them standing up, on my own, and this restaurant didn't have a changing table. So I just leaned back against the wall in a sitting position with the baby on my lap and the diaper bag next to me, when a guy walks in. He kept looking over and finally said, "Are you Steve Young?" He walked out, bewildered by the whole scene. So I have had a wonderful year learning about the two greatest titles that I'll ever take on in my life, husband and father.
Football is the most wonderful game on earth, only because it's the greatest laboratory for understanding human behavior. The pressure, the number of people involved, the choreography, the huddle...wouldn't it be great if families and businesses huddled, every 30 seconds? We grab our knees and lean down, then one person talks. When I was young they asked which position I'd like to play, and I said, "Whatever position gets to get into the huddle and talk." That's how I got to be a quarterback. Next to prayer, it's a pretty good thing.
I started playing football when I was eight years old, down at the local elementary school. We'd play every Saturday afternoon. I was a running back. I went running in one time, when a kid from another neighborhood hit me and knocked the wind out of me. As I lay on the ground, writhing in pain and trying to get my air back, my dad came out on the field. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mom start out on the field. Moms don't go out on the field in football. The great part of the story is that she almost stepped on me as she headed after the kid who had tackled me. She grabbed him by both shoulders and said, "Don't you ever hit my son like that again." I learned a lot about moms; over the years, football's brought out the great things in our family. For many years, my mom was not allowed on the lower deck at Candlestick Park because - honestly - she might charge the field. The wonderful thing about becoming a parent is that you honor and respect your parents more than you ever did.
I learned at a very young age how great a game football was. Somebody said that character under pressure is not learned or taken in, it's revealed. Defensive football players generally are bigger, faster, and dumber. They decide whether you'll play offense or defense by lining you up as a boy and asking you which coast the Atlantic Ocean is on. If you say it's on the East Coast, you'll play offense, and if you say it's on the West Coast, you'll play defense. We'll be at Candlestick Park and I'll be throwing the perfect pass, and Jerry Rice will be running the perfect route, and it will be perfectly timed and spiraled, and in the middle of all that, some big defensive guy will hit my pass. I'll think to myself, "why did you get in the way of perfection?" He'll knock it up, and he won't even know why.
At Candlestick, you'll start to hear the murmuring, "If we only had Montana again, we'd be fine." I wanted to take the microphone and say, "Excuse me, that was not my fault," then start to blame someone. Under pressure you don't want to be in the spotlight. You want to have been perfect. We spend our whole lives trying to take control in an uncontrollable situation. Football taught me some great lessons about that. Ultimate accountability is the core of success in football, and as I've learned now, in our lives in general. As a 49er, I threw 202 interceptions, when the point of the whole process is to throw it to your own team. The whole team looks back and says, "What did you do that for?" Sometimes I'd think I couldn't see, you were in my way, you let that guy in, the sun, the moon, the stars, anything! It's natural to deflect, defer. As a young player, my teammates didn't want to hear that. What they wanted to hear was, "I messed up. I'm sorry about it. Let's go to the sidelines, get a drink and talk for a minute. Then we'll go back out there, score, and win the game."
One of the reasons the 49ers were so successful was the ultimate accountability fostered by our owner. Owners in professional football have anti-trust exemption - a wonderfully powerful tool. They can run a business and not worry about the results, because they share their money and there are no real people to be successful. An owner who is ultimately accountable will ask himself at the end of the year, if we don't win a championship, "What did I not do? This is my fault." He turns to the people below him and asks, "What did you not do?" There's an air of accountability throughout the entire organization. Even to the assistants, the people who answer the phone, the people who do the equipment. It creates a sense of wanting to know what you can do to help this organization. What can I do to make my family better? In the end, I am ultimately accountable. Football taught me that great concept, and now I try to spread that gospel.
Football also is the great metaphor. Businesses say, "You really dropped the ball." Well, you metaphorically drop the ball, but we actually drop it. I get sacked. You metaphorically get sacked. What does it feel like to get sacked? What does it feel like to drop the ball? That's what I love about football; there's an immediacy to the experience. I was on a plane once with Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. We were talking about group dynamics, and he said, "In any group bigger than seven, the dynamics of the group break down, and it becomes more chaotic. Seven or below is a manageable number where the dynamics really work." I said that no wonder this is so hard, no wonder I get paid so much. It really is a chaotic situation with eleven people. When I think about those metaphors and the chaos, I began to think about how we prepare for football. We prepare in a very closed environment. Nobody can watch, for fear there might be spies who will give our secrets away; we practice in our own little vacuum. In dark rooms with overheads, we'll get a play. We'll go out and practice it and run our lines, like choreography. I call that Newtonian, for a lack of a better expression. If we do it - Newton says that "A" plus "B" equals "C" - we will have a successful play. We practice over and over to the point where we could do it in our sleep. Then, we go play, and people are paid to kill us. I know stories where they put pictures of me up and smear things on them. I got a package once with a voodoo doll, with pins in it. So we have this Newtonian Nirvana that we practice in, and then there's chaos.
For example, we go to play the New Orleans Saints in the Superdome, where there's 80,000 rabid and drunk individuals who scream. In a domed area, the sound hits the Astroturf and the dome and comes back down. You literally cannot hear. We've got our plays, we've got our Newtonian play book where, if we run our lines, everything will be fine. All of a sudden, I'm trying to yell a play, and there are 11 ears pressed up at my mouth. I am screaming at the top of my lungs. I yell the play as many times as I possibly can in the time allotted, and then I yell break, knowing that not everyone's heard it. Everyone starts to run. Inevitably, three or four guys are looking back wondering what had happened. I try to use sign language, but on the other side there's one of the big linemen who's six-six, and his job is to fight the guy across from him. Finally, at the start of the play, I basically hit the center. I've got my hands on his behind and I push him. He says, "Oh, my gosh, it's the start of a play." Usually we have this advantage with the call: They have a fraction-second head start because they know my inflections. Here it is lost. Now it's everybody watching the ball. I push the center, and everybody starts to run. But I don't even know where I'm going.
There's this great moment, when we play in places like New Orleans, after the fans have gone home, and we've won those games. You're walking back across the field, and it's totally quiet, and you're headed for the bus, kind of beat up, but feeling the glow of victory. You think to yourself, how in the world did we do that? I don't think they heard me one time all day, but we won the game. The lesson there is that in chaos, in the time when we go out in the real world, you can't just run the lines. People are there to knock you down, to beat you up, to push you aside. It really is settling back to that time and vacuum where you learned and choreographed and spent all those hours playing together. Not necessarily just practicing, but living together and joking together, laughing. Whenever anyone asks me to speak to a business, I will say that if you get together in a conference, every minute is valuable, even if it's not talking about the business. Relating to each other, getting to know each other, spending time together - there's something in that process that helps when the chaos hits, when suddenly the play book is put away and you have to go perform in a group. That works for my family. If I could pass along something, it's to spend every minute I can with them, put every bit of knowledge and wisdom in my child, so that when they leave this Newtonian Nirvana, somehow, despite all the things pushing against them, something will ring true, and on they will go to great integrity, great character, all the things you hope you would pass along.
I believe that expertise in anything takes a tremendous amount of time and hard work, that there are no shortcuts, that there is dumb luck less than one percent of the time. Most of the time it is about the real fundamentals. Any time you want to be an expert at anything, there is a period of time where it is "fake it until you make it." That's what I did for a long time. Then, once you become competent, even though somebody has paid you to fake it until you make it, you become a professional. Football has taught me no shortcuts and the enjoyment of working with groups of people larger than seven, because that is one of the great lessons in life.
So many times I would drop back to throw the ball, but I wouldn't throw it because the guys in front of me were so big that I couldn't see. The coach, watching the films the next day - taken from the top of the stadium, so you see everything, that Jerry Rice is open - turns to me and says, "Steve, why didn't you throw it?" I'd say, "I couldn't see him." Finally the coach got fed up with me and said, "You'd better start seeing him." I really wasn't as good as I could be, because I was constantly being blocked by these guys that I couldn't see past. One of the greatest accomplishments in my career was the ability to start throwing it, even though I couldn't see. It was so nerve-wracking at first. In practice I would do it, and the ball would be behind or above, and Jerry Rice would somehow catch it. I'd want to explain to him that I was going through a real process of faith here. He would think that I was really nuts. Towards the end of my career, I got very good at it. I got very good at playing quarterback, mostly because I started to throw ten or twelve balls a game that were blind. I take that as a metaphor in my life now, for business, for my family. I have a gut feeling for something. If you hold on to it for too long, you'll get sacked. The ability to say sorry, to let it go and throw it blind is actually a wonderful feeling, and that's what I love about football. What's so hard is that you finally get good at it, then they throw you out. There's nothing easier than when you're really good at something, when you're really a professional. I'm grateful for those years.
