Ryan's Hope -- Former WSU Star Ryan Leaf Intends To Make Chargers His, And They Intend To Let Him

SAN DIEGO - There came a time when the psychological exams, the stopwatch measurements and clean-and-jerk recordings no longer had a place in the ongoing probe into Ryan Leaf's state of NFL quarterbacking readiness. Testosterone is the real litmus in a sport in which coaches scream, "No high heels!" at players deemed wavering amid the savage butting of heads. The true tests come man-to-man, in the thick of it.

Leaf's reckoning came not long after he signed a $31.25 million contract, donned a San Diego Charger uniform for the first time and tried to take possession of a franchise that had been Junior Seau's for years. It was enough to prompt Seau, the veteran linebacker, to read the red on Leaf's practice jersey as a bullfighter's cape and not the stoplight it's intended to be.

So when Leaf's training-camp pass fluttered to the turf, Seau didn't cease his charge, pummeling the heralded rookie onto his back. Not hesitating to collect his wits, Leaf ran at Seau and started an indelicate explanation of the spirit and intent behind the red jersey. The two had to be separated by coaches.

The incident was observed by teammates, not the least of which was Mikhael Ricks, who at 6 feet 5 can see eye-to-eye with Leaf. The rookie receiver was drafted out of Stephen F. Austin to play Jerry Rice to Leaf's Joe Montana well into the next millennium. There already is a hookup.

"He's not scared," Ricks says of Leaf. "What surprised

everybody is that Ryan just hopped up and got into Junior's face. He didn't back up at all. Being a rookie, nobody expects you to do something like that. A lot of the guys noticed."

Webster Slaughter says the way Leaf handled the incident "showed he's going to be a player for you." Slaughter is a veteran wide receiver who has been around long enough to have snared slingshots from some of the best, including Warren Moon. He also has seen enough busted young quarterbacks to discount the hype.

"I think he has an opportunity to be a very good quarterback in this league," Slaughter says. "No one can get into Ryan's head, but I just look at practices and see he has something. I see it myself, and I'm critical of players who get drafted in the first round and are supposed to be this or that. He has a nice, strong arm, is competitive and accurate and doesn't want to do bad. I don't think he will."

It's probably no surprise to anyone who has followed him for a while that Ryan Leaf kicked open the swinging doors and strutted inside the joint with hands poised over holsters, daring anyone to take him out. What nobody knew for certain is how the act would fly in a league fraught with territorial gunslingers.

So far, Leaf has pretty much conquered the Southern California portion of the NFL. That might seem less daunting with Los Angeles lacking its own NFL stimulation, sure. But it's actually quite a feat to capture the imagination of a region that seems preoccupied with little more than getting somewhere, then leaving it as soon as possible.

While slaloming around their freeways, many San Diegans debate on sports-talk radio the merits of making Leaf the No. 1 quarterback over Craig Whelihan so soon. The place has been abuzz since Leaf was taken second overall, after Peyton Manning, in the 1998 NFL draft. Fans jammed the Chargers' training camp at UC-San Diego when Leaf made a dramatically late entrance to his first practice.

The town nearly came undone when Leaf started the Chargers' exhibition opener and coolly completed 14 of 20 passes for 116 yards and a touchdown during the first half against the San Francisco 49ers. At halftime, fan George Delgado raced to a souvenir stand, asked the price of a Leaf jersey and peeled off three $20 bills for one. "I have no doubts now," he said, tossing the keepsake over his shoulder.

A big headline in the next day's local paper dubbed him "Ryan's hope." Charger Coach Kevin Gilbride called Leaf "special." Even 49er safety Tim McDonald chimed in, saying, "Looks like he's going to be a good one. I see him with a whole lot of potential."

During another half of play the next week against the St. Louis Rams, Leaf completed 13 of 22 passes for 200 yards and a touchdown, plus scored his first rushing touchdown on a bootleg.

The greased start didn't prompt the San Diego braintrust to exhale just yet, but there have been a lot of relieved smiles. The Chargers traded the kitchen sink (the No. 3 and 32nd picks in 1998, their first-rounder in 1999, Eric Metcalf and linebacker Patrick Sapp) just to move up a spot to draft Leaf. Then they cracked open the freezer for a lot of cold cash ($11.25 million signing bonus) to get him into camp.

Fingers will be kept crossed because of the usual crapshoot with young quarterbacks. There's also the specter of Rick Mirer, the last quarterback to be taken second overall behind another quarterback, in that case Drew Bledsoe.

"The Seahawks were reaching on that one," one NFL scout says. "A lot of us thought there was something missing with Mirer."

Bobby Beathard, the Chargers' general manager, says, "I don't think there's anybody who didn't think both of these guys (Leaf and Manning) were the real deal."

Eyes will remain trained on the two. Manning has bloodlines, his father, Archie, having been a very good NFL quarterback, that initially made him more desirable (Beathard says "comfortable with") to the Chargers. Manning was taken ahead of Leaf, by Indianapolis, in part because he was considered more mature and therefore will be expected to deliver more immediate returns.

As much as Beathard and his Colt counterpart, Bill Polian, compared the two quarterbacks even in their dreams before the draft, the media have linked Leaf and Manning even more inseparably. Manning's polish and background inevitably played better than Leaf's junk-talking act at a school where the time between big-bowl appearances is measured B.C. and A.D.

Galled by the impending blizzard of short-stick comparisons, Leaf made a preemptive move, phoning Manning to negotiate a truce against being drawn into the fray themselves. The call led to a still-blossoming friendship.

"I'm not buying into it," Manning says of the ballyhooed contrast between them. So now if the two live up to their advance billing, theirs will be a mannerly rivalry (read, boring) along the nature of, say, the U.S. and Canada.

"Ever since the season got over, it's been good cop/bad cop - Peyton good, Ryan bad," Leaf says. "That's the angle people want to go with. They say that up front, then in the article they never back it up.

"You've got to have two angles. You can't say, `Here's two quarterbacks, they're both good guys.' There's no story in it. If you can pit them against each other, there's a story to it.

"Peyton and I laugh about it. We have more similarities than we have differences. We're both good quarterbacks. We both have good families, good roots. We both love the game of football. Those are all similarities no one ever writes about."

Leaf majored in broadcasting at Washington State and knows the public-perception game well enough to realize that, even though neither has thrown his first official NFL pass, he is trailing in Manning's wake. Already, he has been knocked around for disavowing his home state of Montana, supposedly blowing off the Colts during the NFL combine and being fined $10,000 for missing the final session of a mandatory seminar for NFL rookies.

There was a flip side to the latter two incidents: He was receiving an MRI exam during the combine and had promised an appearance at a youth football camp during the rookie seminar. But neither explanation was promulgated as prominently as the initial, suspected transgressions.

Leaf tries to downplay his negative press, first by denying it exists, then by saying it doesn't concern him. "What the public thinks of me, what the media thinks of me, I don't really care about," he says. "They're going to judge me on how well I play. The public that I know likes me. If that's two of my friends, that's fine, you know? That's all that matters."

Maybe Leaf is too media-friendly for his own good. He deals off the field the same way he does on it - straightforwardly, with verve and his heart on his sleeve. "I give them stories," he says of sportswriters, "something to write about."

Leaf's oozing attitude stamps him, on one level, as an athlete with personality. It should serve him well on Madison Avenue, maybe even better on the road to Canton. Leaf prefers not to be portrayed as cocky or arrogant, though he is some degree of both. Taking a line from Joe Gibbs, Beathard says Leaf possesses "athletic arrogance." It is an obvious certitude that the best of them - from Namath to Montana to Favre - possess. One of life's toughest tasks, after all, is being great when you are not convinced of your greatness.

"You've got to have that as a quarterback," Leaf says. "If you look out on the field and you think the guy you're looking at is better than you, you're never going to be a success. You can respect that player, but if you think he's going to beat you every time, it's not going to work."

That kind of chutzpah could be Leaf's safety net this season. He will walk the tightrope between confidence boosts and confidence bumps. Sometimes against their better judgment ("We have no choice," Beathard says), the Chargers essentially have asked Leaf, in his rookie year, not only to take over the team but to convince the rest of it to allow him to do so.

The wisdom of the Chargers' tack has been hotly debated. They were 4- 12 last season, so Leaf is not the final piece of a championship puzzle. Rather, he is the first piece in a major reconstruction. During the past 15 years, of rookie quarterbacks with at least nine starts, only two - Dan Marino (7-2) and Kerry Collins (7-6) - produced winning records. Leaf almost certainly won't join them.

"If it's the right kind of kid, it's ideal," says June Jones, the Chargers' quarterback coach. "I think Ryan is the right kind of kid to put into this situation."

Leaf is even more undaunted.

"It's easy," he says of taking over teams. "I've always done that. I've always been the quarterback, since I was in the seventh grade. It's my second nature now. It's just the way I go about it."

Early on, Leaf has backed up this self-assessment. Beathard observes that Leaf has been gripped by excitement, and not fear, over his status as franchise gatekeeper. The Chargers are so impressed with his coachability and work ethic that both almost appear to have been fabricated knocks. Leaf also has won rave reviews for the accuracy of his passes - Slaughter calling him as accurate as any quarterback in the game, and Jones pointing out Leaf's accuracy from awkward throwing positions.

Jones himself provides a source of optimism for Leaf's eventual success, for he is an offensive pioneer who has tutored the likes of Moon, Jim Kelly, Chris Miller and Bobby Hebert. Leaf also will have the explosive Natrone Means in the backfield and an improved offensive line blocking for him. The linemen have been impressed with Leaf's composure on the field, as well as his penchant during postgame interviews to praise them for keeping him in one piece.

"He's sharp that way," says Raleigh McKenzie, the best of the Charger linemen. "He's making the guys up front feel appreciated. That's smart. We have to be the steady rock. We can't be up and down, then ask the young quarterback to make plays. He's got to know we're going to be there."

Make no mistake, Ryan Leaf wants the reverse to be known, too. Before Gilbride announced him as such, Leaf volunteered that the city, team and, yes, even he wanted him to be the Chargers' No. 1 quarterback. But he isn't just stopping at the best quarterback in San Diego.

If things go according to plan, eventually Junior Seau, Peyton Manning, the media - they all should become fallen obstacles to where Leaf wants to go. He wants to be the best in the game.

"Who wouldn't want to be?" Leaf asks. "Would you go up there and go, `No, I want to be the fifth-best quarterback in the NFL'? Why would you do that? If you talk to any starting quarterback, are they going to say that?" Leaf says this as if it were as obvious as the desire to take your next breath. A lot of quarterbacks might be satisfied with some level of mediocrity. But this stubble-faced 22-year-old isn't one of them.