It’s not often that an NFL quarterback, especially one as famous as Steve Young, manages to incur the wrath of the IRS. Nevertheless, the Bay Area legend managed to land the San Francisco 49ers and their accounting department in some hot water after he decided that he wasn’t going to accept payment for a job that he didn’t do.
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“When I wasn’t playing,” Young explained, “the one thing I didn’t want to do was sit around. I’d rather go to law school than sit and watch.”
For many, that may sound like an otherworldly sense of drive and motivation, but according to the three-time Super Bowl champion, that attitude was more indicative of his “immaturity” and “stupidity” more so than anything else.
As a result, he decided that he was going to stop cashing his game checks. “I’m just going to let them sit in the drawer,” he noted. “I’m not playing, so it doesn’t matter.”
Unfortunately for him, those checks very much mattered to the IRS. Suffice to say, it didn’t take long for Young to find that out.
“I was renting a little room from Harris Barton, my teammate, and I went back to law school in the off-season… Carmen Policy called me, the GM, and said ‘Hey. Look, you’re screwing up the taxes. Where are the checks, man? It’s the end of April. We’ve got to file.”
After he had remembered that the checks were left sitting in a nightstand drawer at Barton’s residence, he promptly called him to ask if they were in fact still there. Of course, the former offensive tackle made sure to make the most of the opportunity.
“He tells a funny story,” Young noted. “He goes in there and he’s like, ’16 checks? What are you doing, man?'” The total value of all 16 checks? A casual $4 million.
Young asked Barton if he’d be willing to gather them and send them over to him, which he did, and the NFL Hall of Famer “reluctantly” cashed them, but only because of the fact that his actions directly resulted in his team being audited. To this day, Young still doesn’t believe that he rightfully earned the money.
Just a few months prior to that, the 49ers had throttled the Denver Broncos at Super Bowl XXIV. The team’s starting quarterback, Joe Montana, did the majority of the work and received a Super Bowl MVP award for doing so.
Young, however, didn’t come onto the field until the final four minutes of the game. In his own words, “I felt like I wasn’t doing anything valuable because I was being paid to play.”
Nowadays, it seems as if most players will gladly sit on the sidelines and collect a free check, but according to the two-time regular-season MVP, you shouldn’t take credit, nor payment, for something that you didn’t do. It may seem old-fashioned, and perhaps even ignorant to some, but according to Young, honor and integrity are of the utmost priority.
So long as you adhere to those principles first and foremost, you won’t ever have to worry about a paycheck, as those will certainly come on their own in due time.
