In the End, Young Had No Choice

When last we saw Steve Young on a football field, he might have been dead. He lay there, face down, turned on one shoulder, the way you’d curl around a pillow. Attended

by medics, he at last stirred. Then he did what we’ve seen him do too many times. He stood, thought to walk and did, sort of. He wobbled.

This was in September 1999 after another concussion. He wobbled off the field, his feet searching for the ground, medics at his side. His face belonged to a man in an open-eye coma. If he saw anything, chances are he saw Muhammad Ali’s “black lights.”

The young Ali said, “They say when you get hit and hurt bad you see black lights -- the black lights of unconsciousness. But I don’t know nothing about that. I’ve had 28 fights and 28 wins. I ain’t never been stopped.”

Whatever football is, it’s not attempted murder sanctioned by the state. And today’s rulesmakers frown on excesses once perfected by Doug Atkins, a defensive end famous for rearranging Johnny Unitas’ nostrils.

“When I saw John’s face,” Unitas’ teammate Alex Hawkins said, “I almost threw up.”

Progress in civility and a need to protect box-office stars have caused football’s ogres to lower their sights from a quarterback’s eyebrows. So the Lawrence Taylors, Warren Sapps and Jevon Kearses have settled for breaking the glamour boys into pieces, a knee here, a fibula there.

Still, things happen. They especially happen to quarterbacks who dare them to happen. Steve Young dared greatly. More than any quarterback ever, he put himself in harm’s way.

He did it in the pocket, where no one is ever safe, and he did it on the run, where every step brings nearer the danger of collision with a bad-breath behemoth.

The throwing action that made Young the highest-rated passer in NFL history was an elegant reflection of his intelligence, temperament and decorum. (He once answered a teammate’s kidding about his milk-drinking image by saying, “I’ve matured into soda.”)

Yet it’s his running that we may remember best. He ran like a man with his hair on fire.

Maybe 40 times a game, this quarterback with running back speed put his head within reach of men wishing him ill. We know the September 1999 concussion was Young’s fourth in three seasons. How many other times did he take blows to the head? A thousand? Five thousand? Hard hat notwithstanding, this can’t be good for your thought processes.

Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw once said to Young, “I tell you right here, brother, if you can play until they run you off, suit it up and you keep competing. ... I am so lucky that I was hurt. I had no choice.”

It’s odd. Young is in fact hurt. Four rapid-fire concussions is circumstantial proof of injury to the brain; things are being whacked around in there. But the injury is invisible, insidious, sometimes demanding payment in distress only years later. With no knee to be rebuilt, no rotator cuff to be repaired, it may have seemed Young came to this summer in such good physical condition that he had a choice to make: play or retire.

There was no choice. Bill Walsh knew it. The 49ers’ general manager made a decision based on cold salary-cap business and tough-love compassion. Walsh said Young wouldn’t play for the 49ers. Young might have suited up for Mike Shanahan and the Broncos. But Shanahan, the quarterback’s friend, told Young, “If you have any doubt at all, don’t play.”

Joe Montana left San Francisco for the Chiefs, ending his career in a uniform that never looked right on him. Young didn’t want to go out that way. It would be the 49ers, or he’d hang it up.

Maybe the 49ers’ dismissal moved him to a decision he otherwise could never have made. The last thing he wanted to do was quit. He had never quit, not as Montana’s backup, not when he had the second concussion or the third. Bradshaw’s word, “competing,” defines Young. Whatever the quarterback is and will be--philanthropist, lawyer, TV commentator, politician--he first defined himself as a competitor.

But there comes a time. The brain must tell the heart, “Enough already. If I smell Warren Sapp’s breath one more time ...”

Still, how do you say goodbye to work you’ve loved? Michael Jordan needed two tries to make it stick. Charles Barkley came back for five minutes. Eric Lindros’ second game back, bang, another concussion, and here came Muhammad Ali’s black lights.

Poor Ali, a walking advertisement for the abolition of boxing. It’s 20 years since his last fight, and the bills have come due. Tremors shake his body. His speech is a mumble, his face immobile, his gait unsteady. Apologists say the great man has Parkinson’s disease. He does not. He shows Parkinson-like symptoms because his brain has been injured.

Thousands of punches catapulted Ali’s brain against the skull with such force as to cause bleeding, bruising and swelling. Those injuries diminish a man’s senses, motor skills, memory and even the efficiency of involuntary acts such as breathing.

Steve Young now knows the heartache of leaving the game he loves.

Better that than a lifetime of black lights.