Although he was never proselytizing about it, Steve Young was and is a devout Mormon. The San Francisco 49ers' daredevil quarterback, who was hastened into premature retirement this week following multiple concussions incurred in the line of duty, not only played his college football for the church-sponsored Brigham Young University in Utah, but could directly trace his ancestry to the Mormon patriarch himself. It was a fact duly recorded each year in the pages of the San Francisco team's media guide.

I often jokingly reminded Young that since old Brigham's 20 wives had borne him 57 children, being one of his great-great grandchildren did not exactly make one a member of one of the world's more exclusive clubs.

Witty and charming, Young studied for and earned a law degree during the football off-seasons. He could be urbane and sophisticated in conversation, yet he dressed like a cross between Huckleberry Finn and Howdy Doody.

He played with the abandon of a linebacker, running into and diving over tacklers, defying the wisdom of his coaches, who for the better part of a decade had been urging him to run safely out of bounds or slide his way to safety.

Although he understood the 49ers playbook as well or better than his coaches, for Young it was always a mere guideline. He was at his best when things broke down and he had to improvise. He had privately maintained on several occasions that he was probably in more danger when he stayed in the pocket, and indeed, it was a bone-jarring sack behind the line of scrimmage in a game against the Arizona Cardinals last year which proved to be the final play of his career.

In the days since he formally announced his retirement earlier this week, the condensed version of Steve Young's Greatest Hits has been playing itself out across the airwaves and newspapers.

Anyone's list would have to begin with Super Bowl XXIX in Miami five Januarys ago, when Young threw a record six touchdown passes in a 49-26 pasting of the San Diego Chargers.

There was also the spectacular run against the Minnesota Vikings in a 1988 play-off game, when Young, apparently trapped behind the line of scrimmage, wriggled loose and eventually made his way into the end zone after a 49-yard scamper in which all 11 Minnesota players had clean shots at him. Someone later estimated that, despite the official distance, Young had actually covered 120 yards in the zig-zag game of multiple tag before he flopped into the end zone for what proved to be the go-ahead touchdown.

I found myself thinking back to an afternoon at Santa Clara a decade or so ago. The 49ers had just completed the day's preparation for an upcoming play-off game and, as the team's three quarterbacks filed off the field together, Joe Montana and third-stringer Steve Bono were engaged in some arcane little game of their own invention (it involved rolled up balls of adhesive tape and the goal posts) in which Young, who stood off to the side, had plainly not been invited to participate.

To me, that moment seemed to crystallise the middle period of Steve Young's career. Although he would eventually prove himself one of the best quarterbacks ever to play the game, he spent what would normally have been the prime of his football life in a back-up role behind the legendary Montana.

And for all his greatness, it should be noted that Montana didn't make it any easier. At practise sessions and in the locker room he all but ignored Young, and off the field he absolutely shunned him in a manner that bordered on cruelty. Toward the end of Montana's career, to be pro-Joe by definition labelled a 49er fan anti-Steve, and the issue so polarised the fan base and, ultimately, the team, that Montana was eventually packed off to Kansas City to finish out his career. To have kept him around as Young's back-up would have split the team. A running back dressed in a quarterback's livery, Young's football instincts were so gracefully-exhibited that it produced a widespread assumption that it had all come easily, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

When he arrived at Brigham Young, his ancestry notwithstanding, he was buried so deep among a talented crop of quarterbacks that his name wasn't even listed among the top six on the roster, and when he was told he would start for the Junior Varsity he regarded it as a promotion.

Eventually he succeeded Jim McMahon as BYU's quarterback, and, coming out of college, signed a much-ballyhooed contract, allegedly for $42 million, with the Los Angeles Express of the short-lived USFL. (Much of the money was in annuities and deferred payments, and Young in fact collected very little of it.) From there he made his way to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he played a couple of undistinguished seasons for notably bad teams, before the 49ers traded for him four days before the 1987 season.

The young Young, who did not exactly come from poverty, felt almost guilty about being paid to play a game he so enjoyed. His first two bonus checks from the Express, which totalled $2.5 million, went uncashed for months, and turned up crumpled in the pocket of his dungarees. When he arrived in San Francisco in his back-up role, Young felt so guilty about collecting a salary when he wasn't even playing that he simply tossed his paychecks into his sock drawer, where they were allowed to accumulate until his mother discovered them.

He was 11 years into his professional career before he was given his chance onstage with a team worthy of his talents, and he clearly made the most of it: a seven-time Pro Bowler and two-time Most Valuable Player, he eventually overtook Montana in most important offensive statistical categories. He will go down in history as the best running quarterback in the annals of the game, but he also compiled the highest-ever career passing rating (96.8), and in 15 NFL seasons threw for 33,124 yards and 232 touchdowns, while running for another 43 himself.

He and his wife Barbara are expecting their first child later this year, and a comfortable position in the broadcast booth surely beckons, but in his next career, Young's most immediate task may be nearly as daunting as was succeeding Joe Montana: he has been placed in charge of co-ordinating the efforts of the 30,000 volunteers for the scandal-plagued 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

"In many ways," Young said bravely this week, "what lies ahead for me is more important than what I leave behind."