FROM darkness into the light. The familiar face in front of me is in the middle of reliving his moments of despair when a slither of light breaks through the rumbling clouds engulfing a drookit North Berwick café, illuminating the face of a man who knows the repeatedly-trodden path to hell and back.

The sentences coming from the modestly dressed Garry O’Connor mirror a man who at last seems comfortable with his life. Far away from £2000 trackies, smashed Ferrari cars, chandelier-adorned penthouses in Moscow and demons that blighted his reputation and threatened his whole being, a grin creeps over his face as every sombre recollection is finished on a positive note. It is a habit O’Connor is quickly turning into his life’s philosophy.

“My wee boy has been told ‘I’ve done this, you’ll no be!’,” he tells me of his footballing 14-year-old Josh, a pair of jeans, khaki top and flip flops a far cry from the bling once associated with Scottish football’s answer to Kim Kardashian. “I’ve been down so many dark lanes. I’ve had incredible highs and horrific lows in different place and different countries.

“I did everything I wanted to do. All I wanted to do was play for Hibs, my country and in England. But I know deep down I could have done more. The others I played with deserve every credit. Scotty [Brown] has been the ideal professional and look at him now. My mistakes have cost me and I’ve had to be big enough to stand up to them and move on. I feel a wee bit hard done by, but I’ll survive and move on.”

Being able to just survive is not something which has come easily to O’Connor. His life rap sheet makes for, err, pretty eye-opening reading. Caught in possession of cocaine during his second spell at Hibs, only in February he pleaded guilty at his home town’s Sheriff Court for shoplifting. “I know there’s bad press out there about me. I’ve made bad choices, so what? I’ve dealt with that,” he tells me. “People have always seen me as someone who can go off the rails and someone who has a normal life. All my skeletons are out of the closet, there’s a lot of people still hiding them! That doesn’t make me a bad person, I’m just a person who has learned from those mistakes.”

To describe O’Connor as a reformed character is perhaps doing him a disservice. The 34-year-old explains there’s always been a good side to him, but not one that he believes was portrayed during his playboy days that were triggered around the time he landed a £1.6million move to Lokomotiv Moscow in 2006 that came with a £16,000 a week salary. Few recall the £300,000 selling on fee which he gifted back to Hibs to build their training academy.

It would prove to be a golden period for him, sending him rocketing into a big league with even bigger money. Yet, it was upon his return to Russia in 2012 with the lesser-known Tom Tomsk after a frustrating and troublesome period at Birmingham City that provided the trigger for one of the hardest times of O’Connor’s past, but one that was the catalyst for what he hopes will be a bright future. The former Scotland striker has just launched Second Chance Football Academy by Garry O’Connor, an initiative borne out of a skint frustration inflicted upon him during his short spell in Siberia.

“I’ve been thinking about this for four years,” he said. “I came back from Russia and that was me, done, chucked football. I didn’t get paid by that mob over there, it absolutely destroyed me. I was banging all my money into staying over there with mortgages, etc. Boom.

“I turned my back on football but then I went to Morton to help Kenny [Shiels] out. It just wasn’t the right time for me, Russia just took the stuffing out of me. It was so hard being over there when I was going through a period of change in my life. I had all my off-field things, I had a lot of thinking to do over there. Then I was over there not getting paid, so I was having to transfer money back and forward.

“My misses [wife Lisa] was on the phone saying ‘Where’s the money?’ because I had to batter into our savings and it was just going down and down because you had say £30,000 to £40,000 of outgoings on mortgages, cars and things like that. And they’re not paying you.

“So when I came back I was so depressed I just thought football wasn’t worth it given everything it had put me through and my family through. That’s when I started to think what I could do to help kids. I had to ask what else I was good at, which was nothing really! It’s now obvious to me that it’s helping people in football and the community.

“It’s called second chance because everything that I’ve done in my life I’m seeing it as a second chance for me as well to go and establish something good. I’ve been put on a pedestal and you get knocked down, that’s natural. But you have to pick yourself back up, and who else is better to tell them? No matter what level, if these kids have a dream we’ll try and help them follow it.”

The sun has long since vanished in North Berwick Main Street but O’Connor’s eyes light up just as if he’d been sent through one-on-one with a knee-trembling keeper. Thankfully the dishevelled coupon sitting opposite isn’t quite as intimidating.

The passion coming from the former forward over his project is clear, he believes in it and himself. Aimed at kids from the age of 14 all the way up to adults, O’Connor has launched an academy to offer a sanctuary for those spat out of the club academy system that is set to be squeezed by the Scottish Football Association’s Project Brave. It’s in this environment he will aim to pick these players up and coach them not just on how to find the back of the net, but deal with the pitfalls and distractions that almost robbed him of everything.

“It’s so hard for these teenagers growing up. You just make one wrong choice and that’s your life away on a completely different path. I’ve been there and made the wrong choices. It’s about me trying to drill it into the kids and do the right thing. I can do that through football. I take a lot of boys clubs and they listen to me.

“There’s too many distractions. From my own experience, there were distractions there for me and I took to them which I shouldn’t have. I’ve learned from that, and I can now implement that with kids. It’s about teaching them to be better and stronger people as well as footballers. All I know is football. It took a lot of work to get to where I got to, and I don’t think a lot of people realise that. I maybe didn’t achieve what I should have because of my antics. I’ll hold my hands up, I know where I am in my life and I know I’ve done wrong. For me to get that second chance gives me stability in my life and something to focus on. I have to believe in what I’m going to do.

“We will discuss drinking, drugs, women. Through all my experiences, when you get a bit of success you get temptations and different people around you, everybody clings to you.

“I’ve spoken to psychologists that worked, doctors, I’ve been in rehab down in Birmingham. I’ve had the right advice and to have someone help the young generation about that kind of stuff is what I think I can help with. When I broke into the Hibs team and got my first Scotland call up, I’d go out like a normal player but there would be people who would just stick to you. That’s the part kids don’t get taught about. You need a figurehead, and I’m it.”

Do as I say not do as I did may well be the philosophy of O’Connor’s Second Chance Academy, but it needs no gimmicks. At the heart of his plans is a flagship programme based in Musselburgh that will give players at home and abroad the opportunity to come in for a 12-day block and train as a team while being pitted against development sides at the likes of Hearts and Hibs.

“The PFA do one but it’s for full players,” explains O’Connor, who holds a B Licence in coaching. “We are going to try and establish the academy into age groups. With my contacts and knowing the game at academy level, if I think a player has outgrown us I can try and put them into a club academy somewhere.

“The player will then go there on a trial but, with the experience of working with me, I’ll make sure he knows ‘I might get a knock back but it won’t affect me because I’ll get another opportunity’. You know with kids that when one thing is over for them that’s it. It can feel like your life is finished. If I can try and help fix that I’ll be doing something positive.”

For more information search for 2nd Chance Academy by Garry O’Connor on Facebook.