Bucs' Derrick Ward escaped L.A.'s dead-end streets

Who wouldn't want this life? Derrick Ward, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' big offseason acquisition at running back, has a contract that's worth $17 million.

He has a big house in South Tampa with a big pool. He has been seen out on the town - well not this town - with reality TV star Khloe Kardashian.

"Khloe's a friend, a friend," Ward said.

He was a 1,000-yard rusher last season. He was the King of New York for one night last December. The 5-foot-11, 228-pound Ward powered the New York Giants past the Carolina Panthers in a crucial game on national TV. Ward was unstoppable, going for 215 yards on just 15 carries.

"It was our Michael Jordan moment," he said. "Everybody kept telling Coach [Tom] Coughlin to keep giving me the ball. I wasn't talking to nobody. I wasn't looking at nobody. I was just focused."

The next day, a New York tabloid featured a cartoon of superheroes Superman and Batman looking at Ward. Superman whispers to Batman, "Hey, who's the new guy?"

Derrick Ward, the Bucs' new guy, friendly, soft spoken, just celebrated his 29th birthday last Sunday.

"You know, growing up, I didn't even think I'd live to be 21," he said.

He'll tell young kids that when he talks to them, when he tries to reach them. He usually does. The at-risk youngsters, they start out seeing dollars and fame, but Ward will tell them what they've been through is nothing, nothing.

"I tell them I got a graduate degree. We originated all this. Where I came from, we invented the 'hood."

He comes from the killing fields of South Central Los Angeles, four words so linked gang with violence and utter hopelessness that the city of Los Angeles changed the name of the area to South Los Angeles. That didn't change South Central.

Derrick Ward is talking about the jingle of an ice-cream truck coming down his street when he was 12. He runs outside. His kid sister Shameka is in the house, but he runs out. He's getting his cone when he sees a man running toward him, then the car turning the corner to chase him. Then there's gunfire.

"The ice-cream guy pulls me out of the way," Ward said. "The guy who was running gets shot dead right in front of me, right on my front lawn. I got to get my sister, so I jump over the body, run inside and lock the doors."

He is talking about standing on a street corner in 1992. His dad had stopped to get gas. They watch from across the road as a white truck driver is pulled from his cab and beaten by a group of black men. The beating victim, Reginald Denny, became a lasting image of the riots that followed the Rodney King verdict.

Derrick Ward is talking about living in a foster home, about his mother, who he never really knew because the drugs ate up her life. He's talking about the fight he and his dad had when he was home from college, a fist fight. "My dad, he was strict, but he couldn't treat me like a man," Ward said. The two didn't talk for years after that, years.

Derrick Ward is talking about trying to belong growing up. He's talking about wearing the blue for his gang, the notorious Crips.

"You didn't really play outside growing up. That wasn't happening," he said. "The best thing for you to do was join a gang. You were a Blood or a Crip. My whole family, a lot of my friends, they were Crips.

"It protected you at school, gave you a sense of confidence, of being, because everybody was afraid of you because you belonged to something. It's easy to feel you don't belong in South Central, like the whole world forgot you. Then you see the gangs, guys in nice shoes and clothes, having things you didn't. There were days I didn't even eat."

Derrick Ward is talking about the .22 pistol he carried around growing up. He's talking about robbing people. He says he never got caught, at least at that. He made his share of trips to juvenile hall for fighting and stealing. He says he never fired a gun at another person, only in the air sometimes.

'When I was a kid, I was always angry," he said. "I was always yelling, always screaming and cussing, even in school."

He is talking about finding football. He is talking about his hero, his big brother almost. His name is Dupree Tave, and Derrick Ward has the name tattooed on his arm. Dupree showed Derrick the way. Dupree was a year older. Dupree was a football star, a runner like Derrick. Only Dupree didn't do the gangs. He had a 3.0 grade-point average and had already passed his SAT. Southern Cal was recruiting him.

Derrick Ward is talking about the night Dupree died in 1995. Dupree and a friend were sitting in a red Thunderbird with a flat tire on Crenshaw Boulevard. Two other kids in the car went to get the tools to fix the flat. A blue van pulled up. There was a burst of automatic weapons. Dupree Tave was hit in the head several times. "I think about him all the time," Ward said.

Derrick Ward is talking about his own close call, the one that set him straight. He and some friends were cruising Crenshaw when their car ran out of gas.

"Me and a couple of my other boys walked to get gas," Ward said. "One of my best friends and another friend stayed in the car. We came back with the gas and there was police cars all around it and it was all yellow taped. Guys in the car got killed, a drive-by."

He concentrated on getting out, with football his ticket. He received a football scholarship to Fresno State, but it didn't work out there - academics, an injury, other issues. He returned to L.A. Here's where it gets nutty. He goes to see a former girlfriend. She's working at Warner Bros., and while he's there, he impresses her boss. Next thing, Ward is working as a production assistant on the set of "Friends."

"I got to know the cast members," he said. "Jennifer Anniston, she quiet, but she was so cool. It was an amazing experience."

Longing for football, he returned to the game by enrolling at Ottawa University, an NAIA school in East Central ... Kansas.

"I'm in the middle of Kansas, right in the middle of America. That was an eye-opener. It helped make me the man I am now. It was like a thousand people at the school, and 20 of them were black. But there was no racism, no nothing. We all got along. It taught me a lot. I made friend there for life. There was no crime. We didn't even locks our doors. You do that in South Central, you come home to not a home. They'd find a way to take the house off the foundation."

He set an NAIA record with 2,061 yards rushing and 28 touchdowns in 2003. That got him drafted in the seventh round by the New York Jets in 2004. But he never played in a game, and the Giants signed him off the Jets' practice squad in 2004.

There were problems at first. He went on injured reserve his second year with the Giants. Before his third season, he slipped going up some steps at training camp while wearing his cleats. But there was something about Ward that coaches and teammates kept coming back to - that drive, that heart.

When Tiki Barber left the Giants after the 2006 season, Ward became a true fixture in the Giants' backfield, and he put himself to work. He was having a great season, more than 600 yards, when it all ended late in the year when Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher fell on Ward's leg, snapping it. Ward missed the history that followed, the Giants' improbable run to and over the undefeated New England Patriots at the Super Bowl in Arizona.

"I went through some depression," Ward said. "That could have been one of those signature moments, and I was in a cast. I didn't even go to the Super Bowl. I just couldn't. I watched it back home in New Jersey."

In 2008, Ward and teammate and friend Brandon Jacobs turned their private and punishing offseason workouts into a pair of 1,000-yard seasons, only the fourth 1,000-yard tandem in NFL history. The Giants rolled through the regular season. A Super Bowl repeat seemed in the offing. "It was going to be my chance," Ward said. The Giants lost their first playoff game, at home, to Philadelphia.

Derrick Ward is talking about his free agent visit to the Bucs.

"I got met downstairs by this young guy who said he'd take me up to see the general manager, Mark Dominik," Ward said. "I thought, man, they got players bringing you up to see the GM. ... But when we got up there, somebody called out 'Coach Morris,' and my guy looks at them. It was Raheem who took me up. Guy was the head coach.

"Then there was the way he talked to you. Like a man. He told me I wasn't going to any other teams. I was signing here, we're going to win a Super Bowl here, so sign the contract, get your butt up and let's go. Man, I like this dude."

Derrick Ward is talking about this Bucs team reminding him of those 2007 champion Giants who everyone counted out during the season. He says all the pieces are here. He is talking about unfinished business.

He is taking care of other stuff, too.

In March, not long after he signed with the Bucs, he reconciled with his father, and just in time, because Derrick Ward Sr. was dying. Derrick called him.

"My dad was always strict and I just had wanted to be treated like a man. He was trying to be a father, but in his own way. Well, we talked on the phone, and he told me how proud he was of me. He wasn't asking me for money, not for anything. He realized I was a man. I'm glad we talked. I was going to fly him out here."

He has worn his Giants Super Bowl ring only three times - the night he received it, one day last January when he was in Tampa for the Super Bowl, and a few months ago, at the funeral of Derrick Ward Sr.

Derrick Ward is talking about his kid sister. Shameka is 26 and attending Long Beach State. Derrick is paying her school bills and bought her a car.

Derrick Ward is talking about his daughter. He became a father for the first time in July. Jaida lives with her mom in Boston. They come down all the time.

"She won't have to worry about a thing. I got it all done before she was even born. She'll be set her whole life," Ward said. "She can to be anything she wants to be."

Like her father before her.