Gwen Knapp
EXAMINER SPORTS COLUMNIST

SANTA CLARA -- A tissue box started traveling down the front row of guests about five minutes into Steve Young's retirement ceremony. Head coach Steve Mariucci leaned forward to make sure the box reached Barb Young, the quarterback's wife of three months, a woman with exquisitely delicate features and a raucous case of morning sickness. Surely, as she watched her new husband give up the game he loved, Barb would need the tissues.

But when the box got to her, she set it on the floor. She was fine, smiling even. So were Young's parents, seated next to her.

Eventually, the sentiment of the day would catch up to them, and their eyes would water. But the overwhelming emotions on Monday, the first tears out of the gate, belonged to Jerry Rice. The greatest receiver in football history, the cool and haughty superstar, the man who runs up mountains -- he went weepy before the pregnant newlywed.

It was easy to see why. Rice had to say goodbye to a football soulmate, a partner in glory. He became a part of Steve Young's past. Barb and the baby are his future.

It wasn't so easy to explain the reactions of Barb and her new in-laws. The simple assumption -- that they all had begged the 38-year-old quarterback to retire and protect his brain from another devastating concussion -- didn't hold up.

His mother, Sherry, fell into the pro-retirement camp. In fact, she pitched the tents.

His father, the aptly nicknamed "Grit," didn't want him to leave the game too soon. If the decision had been up to his dad, Young said, "He'd tell me to go to my locker, put on my uniform and be a man." The son said this with a smile. He has always thought it funny that people consider him reckless, too eager to prove his toughness. He knows that his instincts come from his father,and that they are probably a watered-down version -- diluted Grit.

As for Barb, she was neutral. She said so many times on Monday, until finally you had to believe her, "Whatever he wanted, I was behind him 100 percent."

She saw him knocked unconscious last September in Arizona. But unlike most of the national audience watching that night, she was not haunted by the scene. "To me, he's Superman," she said, every bit the newlywed. "So I knew that he would be all right."

Just when she was starting to sound like a mock Stepford wife -- "a happy husband makes a happy home" -- Barb made it clear that she had another role model in mind. "I love Steve's father," she said. "I just love him. We are so much alike."

One obvious similarity: They both take the violence of football for granted, Grit because he knows the game so well, Barb because she doesn't. Until she started dating Young in January 1999, the former Barb Graham never saw him play. She went to college football games as a student at the University of Arizona and Arizona State, but she wouldn't watch on television "unless there was some bean dip involved."

During the second game of last season, when New Orleans pummeled her boyfriend repeatedly, when Fox ran special graphics on the number of hits Young was absorbing, Barb thought she was seeing a typical football game. She attended the press conference after the game and, from the line of questioning, began to realize that this wasn't another day on the job.

"Afterward," she said, he told me, "No, that's not what it's usually like.' "

A week later, she saw him play his last game. She had just started enjoying football, and now she was out of that world, and into one of neurologists and MRIs. She accompanied him to specialists, heard positive reports and then left the decision to Steve. As she tells it, her health has been the household obsession lately.

"We went for an ultrasound the other day, and you should have seen him," she said. "He was like a kid in a candy store."

In the middle of the night, if the mom-to-be craves a sandwich, the future Hall-of-Famer fetches one as if he were a veteran waterboy. If her feet need to be rubbed, he does it. A back scratch? He's there.

Barb Young has talked to her friends with children. They tell her how lucky she is, that Young is the best expectant father they've ever heard of. The best. There is no Joe Montana in this arena.

The baby is due in December, right before the playoffs. Sherry Young, who has wanted her eldest boy to start a family forever, can't wait. This may be the happiest autumn of her life.

"It will be so nice on Saturdays, not to have that cloud hanging over you, because Sunday is coming," she said. She worried terribly about her son, for his safety. She'd go jogging during games to relieve the tension. She is the fittest grandmother of 10 I've ever seen.

Grit, on the other hand, could never pull himself away from a game. He is as fit as Sherry, though, because of his daily trips to the YMCA. You can see some of both of them in Steve -- Grit's perfectionism and Sherry's emotions. The couple held hands several times during the retirement ceremony, and when Steve mentioned Barb, they both leaned over to grab her hand.

Barb, a former model, never knew that a football player could bring her into a family like this. Friends tried to fix her up with Young 10 years ago, but she refused. She was suspicious of the fame and money in professional sports.

"I get so much grief about that," she said. "He says: "We could have four children by now.' "

When she agreed to a blind date, she was shocked. They talked for hours. They met for another date and gabbed in the parking lot of a restaurant. "We showed up at 7:30, and the next thing we knew it was 10 o'clock, and the restaurant was closing," she said.

The courtship sounds like one of those frantic, exuberant runs that Young took on the field. He won't take another one, ever again. If he lives the rest of his life with the same fervor, we won't be able to watch. That was what football and the Bay Area lost on Monday, and it was enough to make grown men cry.