If you've been following the Rugby World Cup on TV lately, you will have seen a fair bit of Ashwin Willemse of late.
The former South Africa winger is the star of a Guinness Rugby advert which has featured prominently during coverage of the tournament and encapsulates a difficult start to life on the road to representing the Springboks en route to being part of the squad which won the World Cup in 2007.
Tonight he joined us on Off The Ball to tell us his story from the hard times to the present day, why it is important and why he considers himself to be "lucky".
The Guinness Rugby advert featuring Willemse:
In his younger years he was in one of the most notorious gangs in South Africa amid difficult circumstances after his father left when he was two. And although there appeared to be "no escape", he did find a route away.
"I look back to the one specific moment where Breyton Paulse - who is a Springbok rugby legend - he was in 1999 one of the hottest rugby commodities on the planet and he came to our school and I was one out of a 1,000 children and I couldn't afford to go through the provincial school league. Our school didn't have the necessary means," he said.
"He came around and he assisted. He made a speech and I was highly motivated and inspired by this speech. He came around and was willing to assist. Four years later I was running out in Ireland at the Old Landsdowne Road stadium in Dublin in 2004 - the last game ever to be played in the old stadium before it was reconstructed - but on that game I played on the left wing for the Springboks."
Paulse started on the other wing and Willemse said: "if you had asked me when I was back home as a 16, 17, 18 year-old kid whether or not that's possible, I undoubtedly would have said no. It would have been a distant dream."
Using that experience, he spoke about the idea of paying it forward through his Foundation as he admitted that "rugby had changed his world".
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