SAN DIEGO — *Skeptics alert*Skeptics alert*Skeptics alert*

Call it calculated, call it insincere, and after a year of shifting blame, call it unbelievable.

But for the first time, San Diego Charger quarterback Ryan Leaf has taken responsibility for making a shambles of his young NFL career.

"I know I have screwed up," Leaf says. "In the past year I have handled everything wrong. Everything--just all wrong, and now it's time to make it right."

Lunch with Leaf, now isn't that a scream, after all the insults that have been hurled his way. But here he was for more than two hours along with his fiancee, Niki Lucia, in a nice La Jolla setting, munching on a plain grilled chicken sandwich while being deposed for his boorish behavior, and not a single table overturned.

"The hole I've dug for myself is very big," says Leaf, recovering from shoulder surgery but still on the Chargers' 53-man active roster. "A lot of times people say they want a fresh start, but you can't really have a fresh start because it doesn't happen that way. But I want to take that step to move forward."

Face to face, holding the hand of his fiancee, he was both vulnerable and charming--nothing like the lout who appears so unapproachable on the job. Would the real Ryan Leaf please stand up?

"I've made mistakes and made them bigger because of the way I have reacted to them. No, there has been no repentance until now--no legitimate repentance. I'm stubborn. It's tough to say I screwed up, but I have messed things up."

It's one thing to be stubborn, quite another to be so consistently stupid. Billed as "boy wonder" after being selected as the second player in the 1998 NFL draft, some of the San Diego media now refer to him as "boy blunder."

It took much less to spark a Leaf tantrum caught on videotape in the Charger locker room a year, the sound bite replayed daily on radio talk shows everywhere, but now he sits docile, absorbing the rehash of abuse without so much as scrunched eyebrows.

"This is not about my performance on the field," Leaf says, his self-esteem apparently unscathed. "I am a very talented quarterback. I proved that in college and I will prove that in the pros. This is about how I acted to different situations, and when brought to a head publicly, how I acted wrong once again.

"But things just kept piling up, and I kept getting pounded and I never thought clearly through what was happening."