What being sacked by Reggie White taught Steve Young about love

Reggie White was the “biggest, best athlete” Steve Young ever faced, the quarterback said Monday at BYU Education Week in Provo, Utah.

White sacked an NFL quarterback 198 times during his career. Like Young, he is a member of both the college and pro football halls of fame. Young said White was “bigger than you can imagine, lightning fast and scary strong.”

“When we were going to play against his team, we’d say, ‘How do we block Reggie?’” Young said. The answer was simple: “Impossible.”

White was also loud when he charged the quarterback.

“He was a screamer,” Young said. “I’d drop back to pass and I could hear him getting closer.”

Yet when White arrived, he would pick up Young, turn and fall backward to the ground with Young on top of him.

“As if to protect me,” Young said. “Then he wouldn’t let go.” And he’d start talking.

“Steve, how are you doing?”

“Not too good, Reggie.”

“Are your parents here?”

“No, not today, Reggie.”

You see, White and Young had become good friends at the Japan Bowl, an all-star game after their college careers.

“I felt like he was trying to get to me so he could chat,” Young said. “I’d say, Reggie, let’s meet after the game!”

The Education Week crowd laughed with one of the university’s favorite sons — he is a third great-grandson of Brigham Young, after all, and is a member of BYU’s Hall of Fame, too.

Young’s message about loving the way God loves

Young’s message was that White, who became a Baptist minister while playing college football, and others have helped him learn a better way to view the world. He asked those listening to follow White’s example and become a spiritual athlete, which he defined as someone capable of existing in a competitive, transactional world while being able to love others the way God loves.

Young said White, who died in 2004, displayed remarkable spiritual athleticism when he completed the competitive transaction of sacking Young and a split second later transitioned back into being the quarterback’s friend.

Young said when he started to really dig into the way God loves in scripture, it began to change him and all of his relationships.

“Every relationship started to become a state of being instead of transactional,” he said. “I intend to breathe the Atonement of Jesus Christ into every relationship I have. I intend to breathe peace and healing and love into every relationship, small and great.”

Trying to live God’s law of love in recent years has enlightened how he sees the world, Young told the Deseret News

“My faith has always been such a substantive part of myself, and this is ennobling in a way,” he said. “It tastes sweet to me. It feels familiar. It has a power that won’t let me down. There’s a lot of things that have let me down. This won’t let me down. I have more than confidence in it; it’s like I know it.

“I think there’s a peace there. To me it’s the peace that Christ promises.”

Transfigured eyesight

Young declined to use the podium and instead sat on a tall chair on the floor of the Marriott Center, BYU’s basketball arena. He gestured with his hands throughout, waving large manila note cards bearing alphabetical tabs. He asked everyone to consider his presentation a talk with them on their living room couch.

“The law of love is loving as God loves, seeking another’s healing, asking nothing in return,” Young said.

He asked listeners to seek “transfigured eyesight,” which he defined as changing their view of others to see them as God does. He suggested three key ingredients to do seeing others differently, doctrines taught by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

• Every human being is divine.
• We lived with God. We’ve been taught at his feet. We’ve learned and grown. Every human has.
• We chose to take a body, a raw, unfettered leap into the void, a true, faithful act.

“Through the restored gospel, that is the lens through which we should see every human,” he said.

Young noted that the world is full of pain and suffering due to the law of entropy. He joked that at 62, he notices entropy every time he looks in the mirror — “It’s not going well, and it’s not going to get better ... We’re all going to die.”

The spirit inside a mortal body, though, is durable, he said. And that eternal spirit can embrace a higher and holier eyesight, one that replaces transactional relationships with loving ones.

Latter-day Saints are doers, a people who can crush a to-do list, he said. While that is commendable, he said, it also can be transactional.

Transitioning from self interest to selflessness

He said the law of transaction is self-focused and can lead to judgment where one feels slightly above others and sees others as more dangerous and less interesting. It can lead to fundamentalism and perfectionism.

“Laws of transactions can’t be perpetual,” Young said. “But the law of love is perpetual. It’s selfless, and in the selflessness it can last forever.”

In the Lord’s law of love, one does things on a list of transactions, Young said.

“We’re great at that, and that’s good as far as it goes, but I would ask you to be things.”

Young wrote two books, “ The Law of Love ” and “ The Law of Love in Action ,” detailing what he’s learned and wants to share. He said people have told him they love the book but ask him how to put on the new lenses to see others they way he suggests.

“You don’t do it, you be it,” he tells them.

He suggested that one way to start is to see one’s own work of salvation in other people’s glory. One can best be glorified by helping others heal and reach their own glory.

Young said it’s possible to intentionally build relationships around that idea.

“You’ll know you’re in the law of love if you’re being catapulted out toward other humans, selflessly interested in their healing, their health, their growth, their learning because you know through the restored gospel that they’re on a journey as well,” he said. “I breathe the Atonement and use all of my language and my intent and spirit that says, ‘I’m about your glory and healing and bounty and abundance.’”

Young apologized, fearful he’d been “super serious,” but the audience enjoyed the hour-long presentation and one woman approached him afterward and told him that she hadn’t had as many belly laughs in a month.

Young told the Deseret News that now that he is not working in media he continues his full time job with his private equity firm, HGGC , and coaching his daughters’ flag football team.