Andre Ward opens up old wounds in hopes of breaking boxing stigmas

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The Andre Ward that boxing fans saw was not the Andre Ward that shaped his Hall of Fame career. 

Ward, the former pound-for-pound No. 1 in the world, unified super middleweight and light heavyweight champion and the last American to win Olympic gold, now wants to let everyone in. 

Largely stoic and guarded throughout his career, Ward revisits his turbulent upbringing in his new memoir, “Killing the Image,” just a few months after similarly partaking in a Showtime documentary titled “S.O.G: the Book of Ward” in June about his life story. 

“I’m as vulnerable as I have been at any point in time of my life,” Ward told The Post. “Some days I’m like ‘dude, what are you doing? You’re sharing everything.’ But this is the season for this. This is the time for this. It’s been good for me. I’ve had to open up some old wounds, and then heal again. 

“I’ve had some things that you bury that you think you’ve overcome, you realize that ‘maybe I haven’t overcome that. Maybe I need to take this to prayer. Maybe I need some counseling about this.’ It’s been very therapeutic. Tough process, great process, but very therapeutic. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.” 

Boxing was far from the biggest fight of Ward’s life. 

From his parent’s drug addiction to his own detour into selling and abusing drugs, to his life-saving devotion to Christianity, Ward’s path to one of boxing’s greatest champions was certainly not linear. 

He finished his career undefeated with a 32-0 record, retiring when many believed he was still in his prime.

Ward has since starred in “Creed” and “Creed II,” as well as joining ESPN as a boxing analyst until earlier this year. 

During his career, though, Ward was hesitant to let others into his personal life, protecting himself from breaking a stigma cast upon most fighters. 

He’s finally ready to kill that image. 

“I think my pastor put it best,” Ward said. “He was saying ‘Dre, you can tell your story now. You’ve got to kill the image. Who you are is real.’ I think that’s important to say, because people can take this as if ‘he’s been living a lie.’ No, what you see is what you get, it’s real with me. But you just didn’t know what I came from to get to this point. We show up to work, and everyone is polished and clean, and sometimes everything isn’t for everybody. I think that’s important to state, too. But there’s times when we should share. There’s times when we should talk about things. That in fact is what this ‘Killing the Image’ means. 

“And it also is twofold. Boxing tried to put an image on me, and it tried to put an image on fighters, and in a lot of cases young African American fighters.” 

Forgiveness — with his family, with trainers, with business partners, with friends — is central to Ward’s story. 

It’s shaped this new chapter of his life. 

“I think [forgiveness] is at the very heart of it. No. 1, I needed forgiveness because I was acting a fool for many points of my life,” Ward said. “And even today, people make mistakes. We say things we shouldn’t say, we do things we shouldn’t do. We need it constantly, but we also don’t want to be inlets to forgiveness. ‘Just give me forgiveness, but I don’t want to give it to you.’ You want to be conduits of it. It comes to me that I freely release it. It’s easier said than done. 

“There’s some real things that happen to us. People step on our toes in a way that hurts, it runs deep, those wounds run deep. But the world would be better off, I think we would have less depression, less heaviness, less anger and frustration if we all just learned the power of releasing somebody. 

“What’s happening is, if I don’t forgive you, it’s not bothering you. It’s bothering me. It’s a weight that I’m carrying every day. Even if I think I’m trudging through it and getting through it, the reality is that I’m suffering. I just don’t know to what degree. You gotta choose your hard. You either choose the hard of going through the process of forgiveness, or you choose the hard of withholding forgiveness and dealing with everything that comes with that.”

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