From Deseret News archives:

Steve Young: A new chapter

Published: Sunday, Aug. 13, 2006 12:08 a.m. MDT
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The update: He lives in Palo Alto, but he retains a small, old home in Provo (he's selling another house in Park City). He is building a new home next to his home in Provo and another new home in Palo Alto to replace the family's primary residence, which is really just an old bachelor pad. Young claims a life of normalcy — they don't live in a gated community, he notes — but the other day he went jogging in his neighborhood and ran past Steve Jobs, the CEO and founder of Apple Computer, and Larry Ellison, the CEO and founder of Oracle, which represented billions of dollars on the hoof.

Young is building a new home in Provo because he and his family spend more and more time in Utah to be with extended family. His parents, Grit and Sherry, moved from their longtime home in Connecticut to Utah about a year ago to be closer to their five children and 19 grandchildren. (Sherry is a part-time columnist for the Deseret Morning News.) Mike is an emergency room doctor at American Fork Hospital and serves as an LDS bishop. Melissa, a former Nu Skin employee, is a full-time mother living in Provo. Tom is an anesthesiologist in Phoenix and also a bishop. Jim, married, one child, attends medical school in Las Vegas.

Palo Alto seems a strange place to settle for a former 49er Hall of Fame quarterback who is seeking a normal life, but Young is unfazed by his celebrity/hero status in the Bay area.

"My life is Mayberry RFD," he says. "People recognize me. They say, 'Hey, Steve!' My life is a small town in a big place. It's not a negative. It's a positive."

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The 44-year-old Young, who earned a law degree at BYU between NFL seasons, is not exactly coasting on his celebrity and his millions. (When he retired from football, he said he hoped his tombstone would read, "He did this, this and this, and he played some football.") He has a day job as one of five managing partners in Sorensen Capital, a Utah venture-capital firm. The lead investor is Utah entrepreneur James Lee Sorenson, who put $75 million into the fund, and the firm's co-founder is Utah's Fraser Bullock, the former head of the Salt Lake Olympic Committee. The company buys out or invests in small or midsize companies in the West, including many in Utah, and keeps them there.

"So many get bought out and taken out of Utah," says Young. "It's a tremendous challenge. We're funding companies in that midmarket sweet spot."

On the side, Young does color commentary for NFL games on ESPN. On Sundays, he teaches a Sunday School class, also known in Latter-day Saint parlance as the teachers' quorum (for a time, he served in a bishopric in a student ward in Palo Alto).

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Steve Young carries his son, Braedon, while leaving LaVell Edwards Stadium after his jersey was retired in 2003.

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