Troubled Trojans' star finally airs it out

Marinovich says it's cathartic to tell his story of a career famously crafted by a domineering father and derailed by addiction in a decades-in-the-making memoir

- BY RYAN KARTJE

TODD MARINOVICH scores against Michigan in the 1990 Rose Bowl. He left USC the following season after a fallout with then-coach Larry Smith in the Sun Bowl.

Todd Marinovich has heard the story of his life told so many times over the years. The quarterback prodigy. The overbearing father. The sudden rise to stardom. The drug-induced downfall. Each retelling framed in the fashion of a Greek tragedy.

His story has been chronicled in painful detail over decades, by everyone it seems but Marinovich. But writing it, reconciling with his past, would prove pretty agonizing in its own right. It wasn't always easy to hear back old stories, filtered through his co-writer, Lizzy Wright.

"It was cathartic," Marinovich, 47, told The Times. "But I had to really try not to be defiant. To just kind of let go. That was not easy for me.

The result was a memoir — "Marinovich: Outside the Lines in Football, Art and Addiction" — that's packed with details of the quarterback's wild rise and harrowing fall. Marinovich, who now lives in Hawaii, talked with The Times about his experience writing the book.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write in the first few pages of your book that writing it was "an act of self-love after decades of defiance." What did you mean when you wrote that?

Most of my life, if you told me to go right, I would go left. I think it has something to do with age that changes that and time and life experience, to where that defiance - I guess it doesn't always change in some cases, but for me, I've let go of the fighting everything. Because that's exhausting to live that way.