Everything changed for Andre Ward when he found a needle.

As a child, he knew his mother wasn’t around anymore because of a crack addiction, and his father was a functioning heroin addict, but things seemed to be better as he grew up. His dad, Frank, got him into baseball and boxing at an early age, worked out with him daily and always ensured he and his siblings never went without.

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But one day, a preteen Ward walked into Frank’s room and discovered a syringe his dad used to inject heroin into his veins. His father came clean about having relapsed, while also revealing they were about to lose their home.

“Man, when you first start to get wind of it, it’s still kind of discombobulating and confusing,” Ward told The Athletic in a Zoom interview last month. “All I knew was that the drugs could take my parents away.”

This part of Ward’s story is one he used to think he didn’t want told. A world-champion boxer and Olympic gold medalist, Ward had no intentions of letting his guard down.

He wanted to focus on training, winning fights and moving on to the next opponent. The flash, boldness and transparency that so many before him used to help grow their recognition just wasn’t his style. The fighter dubbed “Son of God” appeared to be a clean-cut, buttoned-up, mild-mannered professional.

Napoleon Kaufman, Ward’s pastor and the former Raiders running back, helped convince him that his concealment was causing him to miss out on an opportunity to influence others.

“Dre, you got to kill the image,” Kaufman told Ward. “I’m not saying anything is pretentious. I’m saying who you are is real, but it’s not who you’ve always been. You can tell the story now.”

Ward is telling the story with Friday’s premiere of the Showtime documentary “S.O.G.: The Book of Ward.”

.@andreward wouldn’t have been the boxer he was without the guidance of the greats who came before him.

Watch the Hall of Famer’s journey in the #BookOfWard available June 2 on Paramount+ with @Showtime.

— SHOWTIME SPORTS (@SHOsports) May 30, 2023

The nearly two-hour film chronicles Ward’s athletic feats, but what sticks with you is what came before: His Oakland roots, his two-parent home fractured by drug abuse and his life as a teenage father that devolved into him running the streets, selling narcotics and losing his dad all before he fought a single professional bout.

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During his transition into a Hall of Fame boxer, that is what Ward was hiding from view. He opened up in an interview with Andscape late in his career in 2016 and, after spending years molding the narrative — worked hands-on to help shape every scene in the documentary to ensure accuracy — he’s ready to tell the full story.

“It took me a while before I was ready,” Ward said. “It’s not easy talking about personal struggles and failures, your parents’ struggles and failures, generational issues. I think it was really wise for me just to pause and say, ‘Man, I’m going to say some things, but one day we’re going to tell the story, and it’s going to be told our way.’

“That day is here.”

The project first started coming together in 2017 when Ward huddled with directors Rachel Neubeck and Diaunte Thompson to start conducting interviews.

As things began to materialize, Ward called Maverick Carter, who co-founded production company SpringHill alongside LeBron James in 2020, to ask if they would be interested in producing the film through their media platform Uninterrupted. Carter was on board and quickly set up a series of calls to pitch network executives. One of them was Showtime Sports president Stephen Espinoza.

“It’s not a sports doc; it’s a human-interest piece,” Espinoza told the contingency on the call. “It’s not a boxing doc. It’s bigger than that.”

Ward’s father relapsing brought about anger.

“I knew that I didn’t have a normal situation and certain stabilities because of the drugs, and I started to resent that,” Ward said. “And as you get older, you really start to resent that.”

Ward’s mother, Madeline Arvie Taylor, initially started using crack casually and said in the documentary she felt she was in control of her habit. Shortly after Ward was born, however, she became addicted. Ultimately, she and Frank separated, and Ward lived with his father. Considering the damage that drugs had already done to their family, Ward just couldn’t understand how his father would allow himself to fall victim to the same thing.

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That bitterness carried with Ward when Frank sent him and his brother Jonathan to live with their boxing trainer. Virgil Hunter and his wife, Millie, were their godparents and genuinely cared for them, but Ward couldn’t see that at the time.

“I was grateful that there was somebody to take us in, but it wasn’t ideal. Like, we were supposed to be together as a family. And once again, drugs are causing us to split up,” Ward said. “We’re going to the gym every day, and sometimes — and I don’t believe Virg felt like this — but it kind of feels like a transaction, like, ‘Man, we’re only here because of this boxing thing. Like, if we didn’t box, I’m not sure they would take us in.’

“Now, I know that Virg’s love and Millie’s love was far beyond that, but these are things I’m wrestling with that I can’t really find words to describe. Those feelings and emotions unspoken just resort to anxiety and rebellion and frustration and anger — and you look for outlets, oftentimes in the wrong spaces.”

Ward’s anger only swelled. At around 13, he found himself drinking alcohol, smoking weed and becoming discontent with boxing. He wasn’t sympathetic toward his parents: He blamed them.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, this is still a thing,’ and you start to understand the why behind the what, like, ‘Oh, you guys can’t stop using that,’” Ward said. “You don’t have the empathy to understand that it’s an addiction; you just know that, ‘I’m tired of this happening, and it’s causing this type of friction in my house.’ It just birthed a lot of rebellion in me, man, and a lot of anger and frustration that I didn’t know how to deal with. Then I ended up giving in to those same generational curses — using drugs, drinking, not caring about boxing, totally neglecting my gift and thinking that I wanted to be on a street corner.”

GO DEEPER

While he misses boxing, Andre Ward is thriving in his busy (and emotional) post-retirement life

At 16, Ward found out his then-girlfriend (now wife), Tiffiney, was pregnant. He wasn’t anywhere close to being prepared to become a father — few are at that age — but running from it wasn’t an option. He found strength in Tiffiney, who never wavered despite getting kicked out of her home by her mother and teased incessantly at school.

“We were kids with kids,” Ward said. “Even at that age, it’s almost like she had been there before, and she hadn’t. She shouldered a lot, and it was just so impressive to me. It gave me encouragement. Like, I’m not a runner — I wasn’t going to run from my responsibilities even though I didn’t know what the heck I was doing and how we were going to make it — but seeing her stand strong just was a confirmation that, ‘Man, this is not the end. We’re going to be all right.’”

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In 2001, Ward took a major step toward solidifying his case to compete in the Olympics when he became the United States amateur middleweight champion. In August 2002, he won the Under 19 national championship. But later that month, Ward’s father died from a heart attack. Overcome with grief, he was ready to quit boxing for good.

But when Ward saw his father’s body for the first time, he realized he couldn’t give up. He leaned down, put his mouth close to his father’s ear and whispered a promise.

“Man, I’ma finish everything we started,” Ward said. “Everything.”

After making his pledge, Ward struggled to cope with the grief. He began to abuse substances more heavily and — feeling the pressure to provide after having his second child at 18 — started selling drugs. Frank’s death led to Ward leaning further into his self-destructive behavior. And although he allowed the actions to continue, he wasn’t oblivious to the fact that his habits were merely masking the pain he felt underneath.

“I knew that I was running from it,” Ward said. “I’d be doing things: I’d be smoking a Black & Mild, I’d be drinking, and I’d be ripping and running, and I would always know, ‘Man, I wasn’t raised like this. I shouldn’t be doing this.’”

Concerned about where Ward was headed, Hunter reached out to music promoter, executive and manager James Prince, who had built a reputation primarily for his work in music as the founder of record label Rap-A-Lot, but also managed and guided several prominent boxers, including Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Roy Jones Jr. After traveling from Houston to California, Prince hopped in a car with Hunter and tracked down Ward in the streets while he was selling drugs. Prince told Ward that he was going to “take care of all these misdemeanor problems,” in reference to the trials and tribulations that had consumed his life.

“I just remember his conversation was different,” Ward said. “And I’m like, ‘Dude, it’s the end of the world for me. Like, I might not go to the Olympics. And he’s saying it’s a misdemeanor problem?’ So, his poise in that moment jumped out at me.”

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Ward didn’t know much about the business side of boxing. He was impressed by Prince’s clientele, but he’d already been approached by other managers with the same pitch. What stood out to him was how in-tune Prince was with the trials of life.

“When I was talking to the other managers, it’s all boxing. It’s, ‘You got to win this tournament, man. We’re going to sign you. We’re going to give you a bunch of money,’” Ward said. “I got good instincts, even as a young man, and I just noticed that he was just different. I knew he knew about the street life; I know he wasn’t intimidated by it, and I could see that Virg formed an alliance with him, and they both were trying to get me that gold medal and get me out the streets.”

Even then, however, Ward remained in the streets. It wasn’t until he nearly died after swallowing multiple bags of crack rocks to hide them from police in 2003 that he finally decided to make a change. To help guide him along the way, he aimed to reconnect with the Christian faith his father had instilled in him at an early age.

“Between my father passing and God using those people to keep talking to me and life was happening, it all started to just mount up,” Ward said. “And I knew, like, ‘Man, you’re not going to make it out of this doing it your way. You’re going to have to do God’s way, or it ain’t going to work.’ I started to communicate with him again, and I threw my hands up. I just stopped running. I stopped pushing back. I stopped being rebellious.

“That’s when I started to feel like myself again. That’s when I started to sense God’s presence. That’s when I started to feel like, ‘Maybe I do want to do this. Maybe there is more to life than just being out here ripping and running with these guys and getting in trouble.’ The scale started to fall in front of my eyes, man, but it didn’t happen until I stopped fighting the wisdom and the truth that was coming at me and I surrendered.”

After he became the United States amateur light heavyweight champion that year, Ward qualified for the Olympics. In 2004, he won the light heavyweight gold medal in Athens, Greece.

“I feel like God let me get whipped up enough to realize that that’s not the road I wanted to go down,” Ward said. “And I haven’t looked back.”

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Ward went on to become one of the greatest boxers ever. He compiled a 32-0 record across the super middleweight and light heavyweight divisions. The success seemed to be never-ending, but he never lost sight of how close it came to never happening at all. As Ward said, “I knew I shouldn’t have been there.”

With that in mind, Ward also was acutely in tune with the fact that the ride did have to end eventually. He was adamant that he wanted to be the one to make that decision.

“I don’t want to go to one too many,” Ward thought to himself. “If anything, I’ll stop one or two before that happens.”

After defeating Sergey Kovalev for the second time, Ward retired in 2017 at just 33. It was shocking to the outside world, and retirement has still challenged him mightily.

“Next to my dad dying, this is one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do,” Ward said. “It’s more just like a nagging feeling. It’s that drive in you. That competitiveness, it doesn’t go away. It’s sitting ringside saying, ‘Man, I could deal with this dude in a certain kind of way.’ That kind of stuff doesn’t go away.

“I’m happy, but it’s like a gnat; you just got to keep the gnat at bay and say, ‘You got to do some other things now.’”

Now 39, Ward is certain he won’t make a return to the ring. He’s satisfied with his daily routine as an ESPN analyst, boxing mentor and, chiefly, husband and father of four. He’s also in the process of writing a book about his early retirement, wants to preach more frequently and is excited about exploring the creation of more multimedia projects.

The documentary will be his most personal expression to date, but it won’t be the last. The goal of it all isn’t to change his image; it’s to help others forge similar paths of perseverance.

“It’s less about viewing me one way or the other and more about just nuggets and lessons that people take away. I want people to be encouraged by it to see somebody who struggled and then overcame and got to a Hall of Fame career,” Ward said. “There’s people all over the world — they’re in business spaces, they’re in school, they’re young people — they have a vision for their life, and they’re trying to walk it out, but yet they’ve got people telling them they’re crazy. They got people telling them, ‘That’ll never happen.’

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“I want people to turn the doc off and say, ‘Man, I’ma get up and do something.’ Or maybe they need to resurrect a dream they had that they let die because they felt like they just couldn’t do it. If I can do it, man, anybody can do it. It’s nothing special about me that other people don’t have it within themselves.”

(Top photo: Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)