Ryan Leaf's Longest Yarn

Earlier this year, a football agent confessed to Sports Illustrated that he'd once showered former Washington State University quarterback Ryan Leaf with money, girls, and lavish trips in the hope that the star Cougar would return the favor by picking him as his representative. Now, with the news that Leaf has signed a deal to write a three-part autobiography for tiny Pullman-based publishing house Crimson Oak, it seems that the man known primarily as the NFL's most spectacular flameout will finally get a chance to tell his side of the story, at length.

Crimson Oak's Stephen Mattingly, author of the motivational book Don't Miss Your Candy Necklace, says that the first part of the Leaf trilogy will be released next October and will focus on the Heisman Trophy finalist's three years on campus. The second book, says Mattingly, will be about Leaf's "inspirational battle and victory over prescription painkillers." And the third and final tome will be about a time that the 34-year-old Leaf hasn't even lived yet: his third act as a multivolume autobiographer and motivational speaker.

Mattingly says he expects each volume to clock in between 250 and 300 pages. That's rather ambitious for a former athlete too young for a midlife crisis, especially considering that fellow humanitarians Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi somehow managed to be more concise.

All snark aside, an honest retelling of Leaf's time in Pullman, where he led the perennially beshatted program to its first Pac-10 title, could be fascinating. As could the pill-popping volume, assuming you're a junkie-memoir junkie like I am. But 300 pages about speeches to local schools and Kiwanis clubs? Sounds like a bust.