This article originally appeared in the October issue of NCGA Golf Magazine
Steve Young threw a football lefty during his days with the San Francisco 49ers but these days you’re more likely to see him playing golf righty.
By Ron Kroichick
More than 30 years later, Steve Young finally came clean: He routinely slipped away from San Francisco 49ers training camp in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, to indulge his passion for golf.
Young, Joe Montana and Steve Bono waited until special-teams practices on sweltering afternoons in Rocklin. Their quarterback services weren’t needed then, so they hustled to a nearby course – Sierra View Country Club in Roseville, by Young’s uncertain recollection – and knocked it around, laughing and joking the whole time.
“Everyone else was practicing in 600-degree heat, so it was like we were skipping school,” Young recalled, chuckling. “Lots of fun banter.”
Fast forward to Young’s post-football life, as an avid recreational golfer. He once confessed the game is so embedded in his mind, he often visualizes playing the opening holes at Pebble Beach Golf Links while trying to fall asleep, picturing birdie after birdie after birdie …
And then he’s snoozing before he reaches No. 7, the famously picturesque par-3.
Amid this enduring romance with golf, Young made another confession: He took his first “real lesson” only last year. He relied on his athleticism for most of his life, while occasionally absorbing tips from notable friends in the game – pros such as Johnny Miller, Keith Clearwater and Peter Jacobsen or amateurs like Tim Brown, Jerry Rice and Alfonso Ribeiro.
Phil Mickelson also gave Young some ideas in 2020, when they played together in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (and nearly won). After that exhilarating if unnerving experience, competing on a grand stage in his second sport, Young vowed he would not wing it anymore.
So he began taking instructions from PGA pro Josh Zander at Stanford, and started to see the game in an entirely new way.
“It’s been fun unraveling (his swing) and building it up. It’s been a revelation,” Young, 64, said in an interview with NCGA Golf Magazine. “I love golf even more. I liken it to my freshman year in college, when I didn’t really understand how to throw a football. It’s not intuitive. Once I saw (BYU teammate) Jim McMahon throw, it was like ‘Oh, you throw like that.’ I’ve gotten that feeling recently with golf. …
“It’s humbling. As much as I think I have a natural way of moving with a club in hand, it’s fascinating to see it wasn’t actually true. Even in recent years, my passion has kind of grown. It continues to amaze me: I enjoy it and dream of being in competition in the near-term, hitting butter-cut drives and doing things you actually mean to do.”
Any football fan seeing Young play golf for the first time will be struck by the way he stands over the ball. Namely, he plays right-handed – even though he’s one of the most accomplished left-handed quarterbacks in NFL history, a Hall of Famer and three-time Super Bowl champion.
Young does pretty much everything left-handed. But he seldom played golf as a kid, not enough to order left-handed clubs. His dad had righty clubs, so Young used them.
By the time he started to play more regularly in college, he was accustomed to smacking the ball right-handed. He stuck with it, even if it baffled his playing partners.
“I remember the first time we played golf together,” said former 49ers tight end Brent Jones, Young’s longtime teammate and friend. “He started to take a practice swing, and I thought he was messing with me. I tested him – he took a left-handed swing and it was not good.”
Jones and Young usually get together on the course for one or more of Young’s three annual charity tournaments. They count as the lifeblood of fund-raising for the Forever Young Foundation, an organization seeking to “pass on hope and resources for the development, strength and education of children,” according to its website.
Young holds one event in Northern California in the spring (at Pebble Beach the past few years), which he co-hosted with Rice in April; one in June in Park City, Utah; and one in the fall in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Young also frequently takes his game onto higher-profile stages, whether it’s the AT&T or the American Century Championship, the celebrity tournament near Lake Tahoe. He’s gathered some stories over the years, starting with Charles Schulz.
This traces to the 1990s, during Young’s NFL career, when he played in the Pro-Am a few times as Miller’s amateur partner. The other amateur in the group was Schulz, creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip.
They ran into a delay one year at Poppy Hills and sat together on a bench. Schulz, in his 70s at the time, turned to Young (then in his early 30s) and said of his uninspiring golf game, “You’re a great athlete. You must really be embarrassed.” Young chuckled as he told the story.
He brings the ideal personality for the AT&T, a mix of competitiveness and good-natured interaction with the gallery. One example: As he walked off the No. 5 tee at Pebble Beach during the 2020 event, a spectator shouted, “Come out of retirement, Steve!”
Young, without hesitation, took a three-stop drop and feigned a football throw. The crowd roared.
On the next hole, Young hooked his tee shot into the gallery along the cart path. He took relief on his second shot, so he wouldn’t have to stand on the path to hit the ball. Young turned to the crowd, smiled and said, “There’s no relief in football.”
Mickelson contended for the AT&T title that year, and he and Young tied for second in the pro-am competition. Young was a wide-eyed spectator in some respects, marveling as Mickelson (at age 49) dipped into his deep bag of tricks to surge into the hunt.
“It was fun, like watching someone do magic,” Young said. “I thought that when I watched Michael Jordan play basketball: ‘Whoa, do that again!’ Phil did that with his wedge 10 times in four days, where you’re like, ‘What just happened?’ I loved that feeling, asking him to show me a shot again.”
Now Young chases a similar feeling himself, trying to satisfy his competitive thirst on the course. He’s making progress – he carried a 14-handicap for that AT&T Pro-Am in 2020, and now he said his index is down to 9 or 10.
No matter how much more improvement he makes, though, Young appreciates golf more than ever.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s getting away and getting out. When it comes together, it’s just a feeling you can’t describe.”
Ron Kroichick covers golf for the San Francisco Chronicle.