Source: Daily_Mail
The player, the drugs and the evil life that sent him to prison
If there was one record former West Ham and Everton favourite Mark Ward never wanted, it is the Premier League player who has spent the longest time in prison.
The Everton No 7 at the start of the Premier League in 1992 became prisoner NM6982 while serving eight years for possessing cocaine with intent to supply.
'I know that what I was involved in was evil,' Ward tells Sportsmail. 'It is something I have to live with for the rest of my life.'
He was a guest on Victoria Derbyshire's phone-in programme on BBC Radio 5 Live when a Devon woman called to say her daughter died a drug addict, leaving her to bring up her damaged three-year-old grandchild.
She told him in no uncertain terms that as a drug offender Ward should have served every day of the eight years and not four years, which ended in the spring.
'All I could do was keep repeating that I was very sorry,' he says. 'That has been the most difficult thing I've had to cope with since getting out.
'I'm not proud of the fact I was involved in the distribution of drugs. I've seen the devastation it does to people. People have lost family and close ones to drugs.'
A combination of drink and despair, a lack of focus and a lack of money dragged Ward down to his lowest ebb when he agreed to rent a house in his name on behalf of a criminal acquaintance.
He received £400 a week for allowing an unspecified 'stash' to be stored there. Ward knew the illegality of what he was doing but insisted he had remained ignorant of the contents of the stash.
A police raid in May 2005 uncovered cocaine with a street value of £645,000. He was put away for eight years after declining a reduced sentence in return for naming names.
'As a Huyton boy, I was brought up not to grass on others. I held my hands up. To go further would have been to put my daughter and grandchildren and others close to me in trouble. I was never going to do that. These people can be very nasty.'
So much for the drug barons. At the other end of the scale, the incarcerated addicts could be just as dangerous.
'Some prisoners will take the eyes out of your head for a deal of smack,' Ward was told on his first day in the notorious Walton jail in Liverpool. There are few grimmer places in the penal system. Three people committed suicide in the space of 17 days while Ward was on remand.
The gritty story of Ward's imprisonment and his colourful life as a harddrinking, heavy- gambling footballer is told graphically in From Right Wing to B-Wing: Premier League to Prison. He wrote the book himself while inside, more than 100,000 words penned by hand and sent to a publisher in batches of around 5,000 words at a time.
Ward writes with no holds barred about the barbarism, the brutality, the gang violence and the erratic behaviour of the junkies in the hostile, drug-dominated environment.
He relates how he was eventually moved to the best cell on the wing with the best television and how, after going through all the required classes and keeping his nose clean, he earned a transfer to an open prison. They nicknamed him 'Forrest Gump' at Kirkham prison in Lancashire because he ran and ran and ran, stopwatch in his hand.
'Even there, prisoners tended to stick together according to their crime,' he says. 'The murderers all hung about as a group. You might find yourself, as I did, banging on the door of a murderer telling him to turn down his TV.
'Nothing can prepare you for life behind bars. It does not matter how tough you think you are. I had some dark days at Walton. People said I was getting bullied and that I was put on suicide watch. But that's not true. I can honestly say I was never genuinely frightened. But what I did not like was some of the bullying.
'Prison has certainly changed me. I'm more mellow, not so impatient. You have to be patient in prison. You have to wait for everything: for opening up in the morning, for your breakfast, for getting into the gym, for your visits. You have to wait to get out.'
The majority of his autobiography covers his playing days, from the disappointment of leaving Everton as a youngster to his return to Goodison as a £2,000-a-week Premier League player.
There followed a spell as player-coach at Birmingham.
Ward was at his best - and mentioned as a possible England international - in the 1985-86 West Ham team who finished third in the top flight.
Ward was always getting into what he calls 'scrapes'. Like shooting Everton team-mate Barry Horne, who was dressed as the Pope, in the chest. Ward had pinched the gun from someone dressed up as John Wayne in that accident-waiting-to-happen world of the footballers' Christmas party.
He mistook it for a toy gun. 'It turned out to be real. There had been a bullet in the chamber. The saving mercy was that the bullet was a blank, designed to crumple and ignite on impact.'
Horne's papal robes were extinguished by a well-directed pint of lager. He remembers one trip to Cheltenham Festival with former Everton striker Maurice Johnston, 'who had £2,000 in his left trouser pocket for champagne and £1,000 in his right for gambling'.
That kind of lifestyle is a thing of the past for Ward. He is running around in an £800 Vauxhall Corsa paid for by Tony Gale and other former team-mates from his West Ham days. 'It's bloody red,' the Everton blue joked.
'And the MOT is due!' He hopes to make a go of the after-dinner speaking circuit and would love someone to offer him a coaching job. A four-year supervision order means he would return to prison if he got into trouble.
'I have to make sure that something positive comes out of the past four years,' he says. 'I have direction now that I never had before. I plan to do some charity work and maybe something through the PFA. I doubt if there is anyone more qualified than me to go round young footballers and make sure they don't repeat my mistakes.
'Of course, I have regrets. Many. But I'm not going to lie down and die.'
