From behind line to online, that's our Steve

Gwen Knapp EXAMINER COLUMNIST Sunday, June 13, 1999

SANTA CLARA -- Between minicamp practice and taping a video for Sun Microsystems, Steve Young sat down this week and patiently explained the difference between a localized search engine and an Internet directory to a techno-challenged sportswriter. The conversation started with a simple "What did you do on your spring vacation?" and went off on a dozen tangents, like one of his out-of-the-pocket riffs on the football field.
A highlights reel:
He went to Israel for 10 days.
He continued work on expanding two hospitals so that young patients will have a place to play and learn.
He attended an inspiring speech by Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
He, like every third person in the Bay Area, made a move toward becoming CEO of an Internet start-up company.
He felt guilty about wasting time.
"Since I graduated from law school, it sounds like I'm doing a lot," he said. "But I'm not doing a lot. I probably should be going to medical school."

AT AGE 37, Steve Young can count on spending the rest of his football career answering questions about how long the rest of his football career will be. Conventional wisdom says he has one or two years left, at the most. But not too long ago, no one thought he could make it to 37. After a string of concussions, he was lucky he could count that high. So if we try to calculate how much time he has left in the game, we're bound to get a useless answer. It's far more interesting to try to figure out what he will do with the rest of his life. "I want to be quarterback/CEO of a quasi-legitimate start-up," he said, laughing at himself for a good 10 seconds afterward. A friend of Young's in the technology world came up with the idea for Found.com, a search engine placing geographic boundaries on the Internet, and the quarterback helped hook him up with the right folks in Silicon Valley. Young is an investor and a board member now. He and his friend are still deciding who will be in charge, the high-technology guy or the high-profile, high-risk-for-concussion guy. Young said he planned to combine Found.com and the 49ers. He's not waiting for retirement to get on with the rest of his life. He might even take the California bar exam next month. It's known as the toughest in the country, but Young said its reputation was partly myth. Test-takers from unaccredited law schools inflate the failure rate, he said. He went to law school at BYU. Besides, passing percentages tend to work in his favor.

WHEN HE first went to law school, Young said he wanted to become a public defender. Now, he is considering using his degree and his celebrity in tandem. Dees, founder of the law center that won a mulitimillion-dollar judgment against the Ku Klux Klan, has become something of a role model to Young. The quarterback read a book by Dees and heard him speak at the University of Utah this year. He started thinking of all the disgruntled lawyers he knew, making a lot of money but doing the kind of work that inspires no one, except maybe cynics cooking up another lawyer joke. "I thought maybe I can be the front man for raising enough money so these guys can draw a salary doing the things they want, child rights issues, (fighting child) abuse," he said. "You know, you can really bind society with the law. I think that's why it's so good, it can be so good." The words "front man" tripped right off his tongue, gracefully. He knows what his fame is worth. On his trip to Israel, he heard a young boy calling his name from a shop. The boy said he often woke up at 3 a.m., then went to a hotel lobby to watch 49er games by satellite. "But," Young said, "you'd be surprised at how anonymous I can be, even in the Bay Area ... If I go into a restaurant, put my name in the list, go outside and wait for my name to be called, "Young, party of two," nobody makes a big fuss. They look at me and say: "He's waiting, just like us. How important can he be?' If I went in with an entourage and they pushed us past everyone else and escorted us to a table, then I'd be creating a real drama. But you put your name on the list, and you go out and wait, and it makes all the difference."

WITHIN THE 49ers organization, though, his profile has never been higher. His presumptive heir, Jim Druckenmiller, has dissolved into a franchise embarrassment, and his role has expanded beyond that of mere player. Last year, without a discernible front office, the 49ers' locker room was missing a crucial element, the fear factor. The club had always operated like a ruthless and impossible parent, ready to turn out any youngster who dared to bring home a B on his report card. Tim McDonald and Young took over some of that job, prodding here and there, playing intramural politics as well as football. "I don't want to make too much out of it, but there were times when we thought: "Hey, maybe we do deserve an office upstairs,'." the quarterback said, smiling, relieved that Bill Walsh and John McVay are in place, that things have changed, that he can just be a quarter- back/CEO.

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