Grit(63)

As a corporate attorney, Grit Young seldom missed a day of work. About twenty-five years ago, Grit was working out at his local YMCA when a fellow gym-goer challenged him to an ongoing sit-up competition. After a year, each man could do about a thousand sit-ups each, at which point the challenger bowed out. By then, Grit was competing against himself. He kept on, for years, until he could do ten thousand sit-ups in a row.

When I called to talk to Steve’s parents about their famous son and the way they’d raised him, I expected sternness and formality. The first thing Sherry said was “We’re delighted to talk to you! Our Steve is a great kid!” Grit then joked that, given my chosen field of study, he was surprised it had taken me so long to get to them.

My shoulders softened a bit, and I sat back as each told me how they’d learned to work hard early in life. “We were one generation off the farm,” Sherry explained. “There were expectations.” Sherry was picking cherries by age ten. Grit did the same, and to earn money for baseball mitts and clothes, he mowed lawns, delivered newspapers on his bike to houses miles apart, and picked up whatever farm work he could.

When it came time to raise their children, both Sherry and Grit very deliberately set out to provide the same challenges. “My goal was to teach them discipline,” Grit said, “and to go at things hard like I learned to do. You have to learn those things. They don’t just happen. It was important to me to teach the kids to finish what you begin.”

In no uncertain terms, Steve and his siblings were made to understand that, whatever they signed up for, they had to see it through to the end. “We told them, you’ve got to go to all the practices. You can’t say, ‘Oh, I’m tired of this.’ Once you commit, you discipline yourself to do it. There’s going to be times you don’t want to go, but you’ve got to go.”

Sounds strict, right? It was. But if you listen closely, you’ll discover that the Youngs were also tremendously supportive.

Steve tells the story of getting tackled playing Pop Warner football as a nine-year-old and looking up to see his mom, still carrying her purse, striding right past him to grab a boy on the opposing team by the shoulder pads to tell him that he would not be illegally neck tackling Steve again. As Steve and his siblings got older, their home became a favorite hangout. “Our basement was always filled with kids,” Sherry says.

As a corporate attorney, Grit traveled often. “Most guys I knew would stay for the weekend, wherever we were, because you wouldn’t be finished with your business on Friday, and you had to start again on Monday. Not me. I always, always did everything I could to get home for the weekend.” Occasionally, weekend trips home were also demonstrations of the character that had earned Grit his nickname: “Once I was in Montana negotiating with an aluminum plant. Friday night, I take a taxi down to the airport, and it’s all fogged in. All the flights were canceled.”

I considered what I might do in the same situation, and then blushed a bit as I listened to the rest of the story. Grit rented a car, drove to Spokane, took a flight to Seattle, then a second flight to San Francisco, and finally a third flight—a red-eye that arrived at JFK the next morning at dawn. He then got in another rental car and drove back to Greenwich, Connecticut. “I’m not patting myself on the back,” Grit said. “It’s just that I thought it was important to be with the kids, to support them, whether it was athletic activities or anything else.”

Sherry and Grit were also attuned to their children’s emotional needs. Steve, for example, was especially anxious. “We noticed there were things he wouldn’t do,” Grit said. “When he was in second grade, he refused to go to school. When he was twelve, he wouldn’t go to Boy Scout camp. He never slept over at another kid’s house. He just wouldn’t do it.”

It was hard for me to square the image of Steve Young, fearless all-star quarterback, with the timid boy Sherry and Grit were describing. Likewise, neither Sherry nor Grit had any idea what to make of their oldest son’s fearfulness. One time, Grit says, he went to pick up Steve from school to take him to his uncle and aunt’s house for the day, and Steve simply couldn’t stop sobbing. He was petrified to be away from his own home. Grit was flabbergasted. I waited to hear how he and Sherry reacted. Did they tell their son to man up? Did they remove some of his privileges?

No and no. Grit’s description of the talk he had with his son when Steve refused to go to school makes it clear Grit did more questioning and listening than lecturing and criticizing: “I said, ‘Well, is somebody picking on you?’ He says, ‘No.’ Do you like your teacher? ‘I love my teacher.’ Well, why don’t you go to school? ‘I don’t know. I just don’t want to go to school.’?”

Sherry ended up sitting in Steve’s second-grade classroom for weeks until, at long last, Steve felt comfortable going to school by himself.

“It was separation anxiety,” Sherry told me. “At the time, we didn’t know what to call it. But we could tell he was all tight inside, and we knew that he needed to work through all that.”

Later, when I asked Steve to elaborate on his first troubled semester at BYU, I pointed out that, if someone heard only that anecdote and nothing else, they might conclude that his father, Grit, was a tyrant. What kind of parent could refuse a son his plea to return home?

“Okay,” Steve said. “All right. Everything is contextual, right?”