Steve Young: A new chapter

PARK CITY — On a sparkling, summer day at the Promontory golf course, "The Gimmick" is playing the back nine, without a club. He is shaking hands, greeting wealthy businessmen, renewing acquaintances and making new ones.

It's the ninth annual Steve Young Mountain Classic charity golf tournament, where people pay big bucks to play golf and mingle with The Gimmick, which is what Steve Young calls himself. He's the gimmick that attracts those willing to plunk down cash to meet Hall of Fame quarterbacks and, it is hoped, make future donations to his Forever Young Foundation.

"I'm just The Gimmick," he likes to say. If trading on his celebrity and playing The Gimmick means donations for charity, he'll do it. "I'd feel guilty if I didn't," he says. Young greets participants in his tournament warmly, exchanging small talk, posing for photographs, signing autographs. Many return year after year.

"They're like family now," he says. "We've been doing this so many years. We've become friends. We've got a good thing going here."

The Gimmick was actually supposed to fly in from his home in Palo Alto, Calif., the previous night; instead, he was in a Palo Alto hospital with his 5-year-old son, Braedon, who had cut his head while roughhousing with his little brother, Jackson. Now Young is trying to make up for lost time. He wants to get out on the course and greet the tournament participants he was supposed to mingle with last night, but first there is another domestic problem.

One of his boys — he brought Braedon and Jackson with him and reluctantly left his wife, Barbara, with their infant daughter, Summer Ann, for a night — has tossed a toy onto the roof of the clubhouse. Young reaches up onto the roof with a borrowed golf club to knock the toy onto the ground. After sending his boys off with an assistant, Young climbs into a golf cart and drives in search of the friends of Forever Young.

Usually The Gimmick plays golf, too, but not today. Because he missed the previous night's event, he's got to make up for lost time — "There are just a lot of people I want to see," he says. He parks his cart near one of the tee boxes and greets the foursomes as they come along.

Welcome to Steve Young's latest incarnation.

If Chapter 1 was his youth, and Chapter 2 was his rise to football stardom at Brigham Young University, and Chapter 3 was his NFL career, this is Chapter 4, with Barbara and their three children and the world of high finance and his fund raising.