Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I defy anybody to be of service to another human being and not have the most peaceful night of sleep you've had in a long, long time.
The NFL Legends Community is the epitome of service. This isn't about promoting you anymore. It's about promoting something bigger than you.
I'm not the type of guy who goes to members of my team or the other team and says, 'Hey, I'm awesome,' because I can improve in so many ways.
I didn't know how to deal with real life issues the right way as a humble human being until I was humbled to the point of being put in a jail cell.
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.
When do you realize when you're a kid that you're going to be great and everybody else doesn't understand that? I don't know. I just felt I could beat everybody.
The third game of my career, we played Kansas City and I played as poorly as I've ever played in my life. I completed one of 15 passes and had two interceptions.
When I retired, I took my money from the financial planner and proceeded to present the front that everything was fine. I had to pretend I still made $5 million a year.
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.
Every time I stepped on the practice field when I was in San Diego, I dreaded going to work. It wasn't any fun. I didn't like the people I was playing with. They didn't like me.
People don't understand that if I would have stayed in Tampa, I might have disappeared and people would have forgotten about me. That may be good in some ways, but not in others.
I don't believe I was meant to be a professional quarterback. I was meant to have these life experiences and be an impact on others who've struggled. That's what I'm meant to do.
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.
There was a joke going around campus when I was at Washington State. It went, 'What's the difference between God and Ryan Leaf?' The punchline was, 'God doesn't think he's Ryan Leaf.'
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.
When I bought my first house I had all these red flags on my credit report because I bounced a bunch of checks to places like Pizza Hut and stuff like that for $13 or $15 because I was trying to feed my O-linemen.
I'm pretty darn happy. I really wanted to go to San Diego and play for those offensive masterminds. I'm looking forward to a 15-year career, a couple of trips to the Super Bowl and a parade through downtown San Diego.
I have a very small sample size: 2-0 to start my NFL career. Talking a lot of smack. And then I walk into Kansas City and put up the worst football game of my existence. And I've always been this brash, arrogant kind of guy.
I was fighting a war on two fronts. I was fighting the best defenses in professional football and I was fighting the media. At that level you just cannot do that. You just cannot do it. I couldn't stop it, and I didn't try to stop it.
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 wanted to be a professional athlete. Young men and women from Montana don't make it to the professional level that often. And I always believed that because I was a great football player that made me better than you. And that's not the case at all.
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.
If you think I'm a loser, that I'm a bust, that's fine, but you don't know me. I don't have a problem with people thinking I was a bad football player. I wasn't a particularly good pro football player. But I was a great college player, and that's something.
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.
It's hard to transition out of football. Even when you're super successful, guys who have played 18 or 20 years and have won four Super Bowls, they still have difficulty with that transition. They believe they're not ever going to do anything that important again.