Earlier this year, a football agent confessed to Sports Illustrated that he’d once showered Washington State’s Ryan Leaf with money, girls and lavish trips in hopes the Cougar’s stud quarterback 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 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 (for real), 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 in the series will be about a time that the 34-year-old Leaf hasn’t even lived yet: his third act as a writer of multivolume autobiographies and motivational speaker.Mattingly says that he expects each volume to clock in at anywhere from 250-300 pages. Ridiculously long for a former athlete too young for a midlife crisis, especially considering that fellow humanitarians Mandela and Gandhi somehow managed to be more concise.All snark aside, though, 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 the local Kiwanis club? Egads, man, sounds like a bust.
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