| Ryan Leaf Says His Arrest Last Year Probably Saved His Life | | |
Ryan Leaf is addicted to drugs, the former Washington State quarterback admits it today as easily as he owns up to his golf handicap and knows it because he has done the hard work it takes to understand dependency. He believes his arrest on drug and burglary charges in 2009 was one of the best things that happened to him, it might have saved his life. "When it happens to you it's a shock to your system," Leaf said. "You know, 'No way. How did this happen?' That's how an addict's mind thinks. I was shocked and completely embarrassed. When you're in your addiction, you're constantly lying and constantly dishonest. It was a small enough town that there were people there who knew I had a problem with painkillers, but I was in such denial, I thought that no one else knew." Leaf, who was the quarterbacks and golf coach at Division II West Texas A&M, went from doctor to doctor, giving them incomplete drug histories so he could obtain more and more Vicodin. "I told myself this was OK," he said. "It wasn't like I was going to somebody on the corner to get this stuff." After leading WSU to the Rose Bowl, Leaf was the second pick in the 1998 NFL draft, a can't-miss quarterback San Diego traded three draft picks to acquire and he signed a four-year contract that included an $11.25 Million signing bonus, but his career went up in flames and won only four of the 18 games he started for the Chargers, and the pain from that disappointment nagged at him for a decade. "I never got over it," he said. "I tried to make people think it didn't matter, but I think all that did was make people think I didn't care. To not make it in a sport I'd loved since I was 4 years old, it was very hard, very disappointing. I was 21, 22 years old, but emotionally, I was probably like 16. The way I look at it now, I was always so intense and competitive that people would always say that I would get mine some day. That I will come up against somebody who is bigger, badder, better. But from 6 years old until 21, I never did." The Chargers won the first two games Leaf started, but after spending several days in the hospital with a staph infection, Leaf played his third game in Kansas City and was horrible. "I'd always succeeded and I didn't know how to deal with that (failure) at all," he said. "I didn't know how to deal with failure at that level, in front of everybody and to be criticized like I was. My answer to everything had always been to throw a football and make everybody ooh and aah. And now I wasn't doing that."
Source: Seattle Times
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(Atlanta)
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