Quarterback Steve Young selects the U.S.F.L. and $36 million
Steve Young, the great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, was 22 before he made his first $36 million. As amateur actuaries were trying to figure out how a team's outlay of roughly $9 million could multiply so extravagantly over 43 years, the country was reeling last week at the new going rate for a college quarterback. But nobody was more flabbergasted than Young. Suddenly he saw his whole life laid out to 65, and all of his annuities flashed before him.
In one melancholy burst, he told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, "I'm worrying about my values. Right now I'm a guy having a lot of trouble handling this. I've had times today when I wanted to give it all up. When I decided to sign with the [Los Angeles] Express, it was late. I had promised to give them an answer within a certain time frame. I'd been up for two days straight. It seemed the best thing to do under the circumstances. Then there I am at the press conference, and I'm sweating. I'm I thinking, 'What am I doing There?' I'm sure many people don't understand this money. I don't either. On the plane afterward, it was a private plane, just me and my girlfriend, I cried all the way home."
Endearingly, his mother Sherry said, "Right now I could kick him right between the eyeballs." Watching him sweating at the press conference, she thought, "I wanted this kid to enjoy it," but she understood. "He keeps seeing Roger Staubach in front of him." (At these prices, Young may be obliged to become Johnny Unitas.) "You have to remember, Steve has had a protected life. He doesn't even own a credit card." Until now, his concept of property has been a '65 Oldsmobile. "But he'll be fine, because he's a fighter, a doer. He's just realizing the responsibilities ahead, and he doesn't want to feel he has been purchased body and soul."
The purchasers are fascinating too. An international financier named Bill Oldenburg owns the Express, a U.S. Football League team thriving neither on the field nor at the box office. He claims to have passed up a chance to buy the prosperous Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League: "I could have bought and sold 400 Dallas Cowboys [asking price $62 million], but their personality and everything has already been established. I don't get off on that. I get off on building things from the ground up." At his Investment Mortgage International offices in San Francisco, a large Chinese gong is rung whenever a million-dollar deal is set.