Glamour Job Takes a Beating

You Got To Be a Football Hero, an update:

Steve Young, most valuable player of the National Football League but losing quarterback in the last National Football Conference championship game, is “shopped” around the league by the San Francisco 49ers. Finding no takers, the 49ers sadly report that they appear to be stuck with Young for another year.

Joe Montana, Super Bowl legend and biggest San Francisco attraction not wearing a Rice-A-Roni sign, shops himself around the league because he is no longer guaranteed a starting job at 37.

Bobby Hebert, the winningest quarterback in New Orleans Saints history, turns free agent, steps outside for a minute and the Saints slam the door on him, installing a deadbolt, boxing up his shoulder pads and moving an Atlanta Falcon second-stringer into his old office.

Vinny Testaverde, former Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 NFL draft choice, turns 29 and, at the supposed peak of his athletic powers, is offered the backup quarterback job in Cleveland. He jumps at it.

Jeff Hostetler, 31 and two years removed from Super Bowl glory, is benched by the New York Giants’ new coach, who says he would rather play this 37-year-old geezer with a bad elbow. Hostetler becomes desperate, enough to give Al Davis a phone call, and he flees New York for the Raiders, the Ellis Island of NFL quarterbacks.

Steve Beuerlein, the acclaimed jewel of this season’s free-agent quarterback pool, watches the Viking job go to broken-down Jim McMahon, the Jet job go to beaten-down Boomer Esiason and the Saint job go to please-sit-down Wade Wilson--leaving Beuerlein to choose between the Seattle Seahawks, 2-14 last year, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 5-11, as career opportunities.

Elsewhere, Jim Kelly is the butt of Super Bowl jokes (“Kelly has a new area code--043”), Mark Rypien is the butt of Beltway insider jokes (“Clinton isn’t the only one who overthrew Bush last year”) and Jim Everett is the butt of radio call-in jokes (the new nickname is “Fred Astaire,” the man with the happy feet).

Another American myth is curling down the drain and, no, nothing is sacred anymore.

Professional quarterback was once the pie in every young boy’s eye, the reason you wasted valuable summer hours flinging footballs through inner tubes and went to sleep beneath a life-sized rendition of Roman Gabriel fading in the pocket.

Today, the inner tubes are used for river-rafting and Axl Rose gets all the playing time on the bedroom wall. Kids seeking fame, fortune and an exalted place in society now aspire to be VJs for MTV or animators for Nickelodeon. Become an NFL quarterback? Sorry, you must have mistaken me for someone who needs a life.

In the early 1990s, quarterbacks and sportswriters are finding themselves to have more in common than either would want to admit. Once, both occupations were glamorous. From a distance, both seemed like reasonable and respectable ways to make a living.

Then you grow up, sign on and begin to learn the facts about The Big Lie. Whether you’re facing a deadline or a safety blitz, you find there is no real difference. No matter what you do or how well you do it, in the end, your name is mud.

You write a book about the Mets, some jerk right fielder threatens to rewrite it in blood from your own nose . . . and the next time he bats at Shea Stadium, the fans greet him with a standing ovation.

You win a Super Bowl, or four, or keep your team in contention for years . . . and at the first slip of the hand or twinge of the elbow, you’re standing next to a freeway on-ramp, handing out videocassettes of your greatest audibles.

Look at it this way: If Montana and Young, the world’s best quarterbacks past and present, can’t get any personal satisfaction out of the deal, maybe it’s time to drive little Johnny past the Pop Warner tryout and drop him off at the nearest pee-wee hockey rink instead.

The 49ers are an embarrassment of quarterbacking riches--even third-stringer Steve Bono makes $2 million--and they are an embarrassment to their community. What to do with Super Joe? Well, maybe we start him. No, we can’t do that to Young; the guy completes 70% of his passes. OK, we start Young and make Joe the backup. What, bench the greatest quarterback in the history of quarterbacks? All right then, we release Joe and let him make his own deal. You kidding? Give away Joe Montana? For free?

The 49ers have handled the situation as awkwardly as humanly possible. First they tried to trade Young. They claimed there was no real interest. Most likely, there was no real interest in duplicating the Herschel Walker mistake--And who does have 23 spare draft picks lying around these days?--but Young’s ego gets a swift kick to the thorax regardless.

So the 49ers give Montana their blessing and tell him to go out, talk to the Chiefs and the Cardinals, see what he can find. So Joe makes a couple of on-site inspections, imagines life in Kansas City to be a wondrous thing and the Bay Area goes nuts.

Say You Won’t Go, Joe stories bump Barry Bonds and the Giants’ opener off the top of the front page. Radio Free Montana rules the airwaves. Team owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. is vilified as a graffiti-spraying punk run amok in the Louvre and, for art’s sake, this must be stopped.

DeBartolo responds to the tumult by waffling--he never wanted Joe to leave, he says, and he truly hopes Joe will stay and maybe George Seifert can work something out, like install a double-quarterback formation. How about it?

No, this vocation is no vacation. But if Johnny persists and insists upon pursuing a career behind bars, at least take the football out of his hands and teach him how to trap block.

True personal satisfaction can be achieved in the NFL as an offensive lineman. Just the other day, Kirk Lowdermilk signed for $6 million.