RYAN LEAF

If you deny the fact that things are happening to you, that this is going on, whether it's negative or positive, you're just putting yourself behind the 8-ball because you're not facing it head on and dealing with it in a positive way that you've learned how to.

I was a talented egomaniac with a self-esteem problem.

If you look like a ghost, you feel like a ghost.

Life is life and there are always going to be struggles. But when you're doing the next right thing it seems to make everything a little easier, a little bit better and a lot happier.

I think that if I was only known for who I was as a football player and only that, it just would have been a tragedy.

I mean this country is all about second chances. Look at me.

I was good at two things, athletics and lying.

I lied all my life.

When I enjoyed football the most was when I wasn't getting paid.

I've made mistakes and made them bigger because of the way I have reacted to them.

I was an ego maniac with a self-esteem problem and that's what most addicts are like.

We're all flawed human beings trying to be a better person on a daily basis and I didn't figure that out for a long, long time.

You don't want to say the money changes you, but it definitely does.

There's freedom in being rigorously honest. I lied all my life.

When I came into the NFL, there were three things that were very important to me: money, power and prestige. I was powerful now because I was a famous athlete. I had prestige because I was doing what everybody wanted to do. And I had a lot of money.

I thought I was a god. I was more important than you, because I could do this thing where I played a silly sport that made me a better human being, in my eyes.

I had always been a quick healer.

About a year after I retired from playing, I decided that I wanted to getback to college, where I had the greatest time of my life, and to get involved with college football.

When you're talking to potential professional athletes, I really like to talk about the fact that even though you're a great athlete, that doesn't make you a good person. And if you can build that foundation first, everything else usually follows suit.

You grow from all those things you go through.

In college, my best friends were an offensive lineman, a wide receiver and defensive back. In the pros, when you leave the practice field, players go their separate ways because they are married.

How can I go from this poor college kid one day and the next day get a check for $7 million. How's that going to affect me?

I don't want anybody to know anything about me.

I don't make the right choices. I simply don't.

If you can't admit your faults how can you ever grow?