Steve Young's new autobiography, QB: My Life Behind the Spiral, will be released Tuesday.
The 1992 NFL Most Valuable Player and Super Bowl champion quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers in 1994 was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005.
In his book, Young details his life and career. In an excerpt from the book, Young discusses the attention he received from an unlikely source in his early NFL days with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers:
"Even on the field, I can't escape the craziness," Young wrote. "We play the Colts at home. Partway through the second quarter I'm in the huddle when the head referee taps me on the shoulder. 'Can I talk to you for a second?' he says. I step away from the huddle. 'Hey, listen, my daughter's going to BYU,' he whispers. Next thing I know he starts trying to convince me that I should meet his daughter. 'I'd like you to take her out,' he says.
"I cannot believe this. We're in the middle of a game! 'Oh, okay,' I said. 'What's her name?' He tells me and I return to the huddle ... Late in the game we're down 31-23 and I'm trying to mount a comeback. I scramble out of the pocket and take a brutal hit. It causes me to fumble just before the whistle blows to stop the play. I am lying on the ground when the defense recovers the loose ball, all but sealing our defeat. Suddenly out of nowhere a yellow flag lands next to me. The referee whose daughter is headed to BYU calls a personal foul on the defense. First down, Tampa Bay. I get up and brush myself off. Then the ref walks past me and whispers she likes Italian food."
Young, 54, is now an NFL analyst on ESPN.
In memoriam
The woman who helped put the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders on the map has died.
Suzanne Mitchell, the director of the Cowboys cheerleaders in the late 1970s and 1980s, died Sept. 27 at her home in Fredericksburg, Texas, according to the Washington Post. She was 73.
The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer, her brother and sole immediate survivor, W.W. Mitchell, said.
Mitchell had no cheerleading experience herself, her brother said. Yet from 1976 to 1989, she presided over what the New York Times once called "perhaps the most exclusive sorority in the world": a group of more than 30 women who were spotlighted in TV specials, ferried around the world for goodwill events at U.S. military bases and lionized as sex symbols on the covers of Esquire and Playboy magazines.
Originally formed in 1972, the Cowboys Cheerleaders "set a standard to be imitated by nearly every NFL team," historian Mary Ellen Hanson wrote in Go! Fight! Win!, a 1995 study of cheerleading's place in American culture.
Mitchell left the Cowboys in 1989 along with general manager and team president Tex Schramm to join the now-defunct World League of American Football.
Reflecting on her legacy, she noted in a 1999 interview with Newsweek that the Cowboys Cheerleaders did more than perform at football games or promotional events. The organization says it has made more international tours with the United Service Organizations than any other entertainment group.
"The Bible Belters used to write me all the time saying that I was a purveyor of women, that I was misusing the youth," she told Newsweek. "And I would usually write them back, and say, OK, what were you doing last Christmas Eve? My girls were sitting, at midnight, in a flight shack on the DMZ in Korea after having entertained more than 5,000 troops, done four shows, visited eight bases. They were asleep at midnight in minus 20 degrees."
"They would write back," she added, "and say, 'I'm sorry. I didn't know.' "
SPORTS QUIZ
What USFL team did Steve Young play for?
ANSWER
The Los Angeles Express (1984-1985).
Sports on 10/05/2016