The tragic tale of Paul Hayward
The story of former Newtown player Paul Hayward is often brought up when modern-day league players get in trouble off the field.
Four decades after he was arrested for possessing heroin in Thailand, his story is more than a cautionary tale for NRL players. It is one of sadness, regret, unfulfilled potential and, ultimately, tragedy.
Here is the original story from 1985 of Hayward’s fall from grace, written by experienced league journalist Neil Cadigan, who these days is a reporter for NRL.com after a lengthy career at various publications including
Rugby League Week and Big League magazines.
Paul Hayward was a tough, pugnacious five-eighth from Newtown, a scrapper in the old Bluebag tradition who mixed professional boxing with his league career.
In teeming Bangkok, in October, 1978, he was arrested on a charge of possessing 8.4kg of heroin, charged and subsequently sentenced to 20 years in jail.
He remained in Bangkok’s notorious prisons since the day he was arrested. Inside the walls of Bang Kwang, Cadigan and Hayward sat for hours and talked of family . . . of football . . . of regrets.
So this was notorious Bang Kwang prison — Bangkok’s top-security jail, “home” for 6000 inmates.
It was a 45-minute drive from the city. The heat was stifling as I walked nervously through the big iron gate on the outside perimeter — the grand entrance to Thailand’s hell hole.
The guards, dressed in sandy, very military uniforms, searched my bag. They spoke no English but their sign language assured me no cameras, strictly no cameras. I must leave it with them.
Through another iron gate and you confront a driveway, about 100 metres long, flanked on both sides by beautifully manicured gardens, which led to the inner wall. On the right were the visitors’ cages. There, separated by thick mesh on either side of a metre’s void, hundreds of Thais crowded on to wooden stools to visit prisoners who stood in a dingy, dark alleyway on the other side. As the many Thais gabbled away, shouting to be heard through the mesh and above each other, it seemed more like a chook pen — and about as inviting.
I walked into the office — well, there were a couple of old desks on a cement floor — and handed over my letter of introduction from the Australian Embassy. It was my passport to Bang Kwang, and a sitting with Paul Hayward.
A young guard signalled to me to wait in a room on the other side of the giant gate, beneath the main watch tower that separated the free from the interned.
Embassy officials told me to expect all three Australians in Bang Kwang — Hayward, associate Warren Fellows and Melbourne man Bruce Allen — to rush out. A messenger would go to the cells and simply say: “Paul Hayward — embassy here.”
It was a nerve-racking wait. What to say to the once athletic, tough little footballer I had last seen in a Newtown game at Henson in ’78? “How are you? How ya going?” What a stupid way to greet him. How would you be in this stinking place, where 25-35 men are jammed into a cell eight metres by four metres, sleeping on straw mats atop a cement floor, shoulder to shoulder with each other and a can of water which is their toilet. A place where your days are shared with vermin, mosquitoes, stinking heat, the crazy, the heroin addicts.
The waiting went on and on. Half an hour and still no Paul Hayward. The embassy officials had said when they last went out there a week earlier, Hayward refused to leave his cell. Oh no, I thought, what’s happening?
Sitting there, I could see through to the inner area. Surprisingly the scene was dominated by pretty gardens, trees and lawns. Was this sad place better than legend had it? Or were the Thais careful to make the only area that outsiders could see look much more attractive than the rest of the prison?
What I could see was a panorama of prisoners wandering aimlessly . . . sweating on getting a call to the visiting area. Other than the guards, there were the “trustees“— trusted prisoners who were identified by blue uniforms and who carry batons. They were the “middle class” of the prison system, the civilian overseers of Bang Kwang’s criminals.
Still I waited. A Frenchman came out and informed me in broken English that Paul could not be found. He was not in building No 5 — his home.
It was over an hour before a suntanned but pathetically thin man with almost crew-cut length hair ran urgently into the cage.
“Are you from Rugby League
Week?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Paul’s coming, hold on.”
“Are you Warren?”
There was a nod of the head — and he was gone.
Seconds later, I saw a man marching down the pathway past the gardens. Ginger beard and longish sandy-reddish hair, dressed in a light blue Indian shirt and red shorts. “Gee, he looks well.”
That was my first impression of Paul Hayward. He entered the cage in a rush, nervous, the adrenalin obviously pumping at the thought of seeing someone from home. I later found out I was only the third visitor, other than the embassy guys and the missionary groups, for three years.
I sat at a long table in a room put aside for special visitors. There was no one-metre gap and only a wall of mesh. We could almost touch.
“Neil Cadigan?” he inquired. “You look just like your photo.”
The embassy had passed on some copies of RLW we had posted during the weeks before when organising the visit.
Fellows, so thin, so sad-looking, sat beside him. But Hayward, freshlygrown beard suiting him, looked quite well . . . and so happy to see someone.
“Yeah, I’m the same weight as when I first made grade at Newtown,” he went on. “Yeah, 65kg. Two years and six months ago, I was up to 79kg when I was really doing the weights. We haven’t been eating much lately, you need money in here.”
We spoke for two-and-a-half hours this day. The visit was interrupted by a 90-minute break for lunch. It was a worldly experience for us both. P aul Hayward, a footballer with the heart of a lion, has now spent more than one fifth of his life in this foreign, disgusting place.
Busted for heroin trafficking, now busting to get home and start again. For six-and-a-half years, he has been behind bars, cut off from the simplest Western luxuries.
“How could you keep sane?” — the thought came to me time and again as we talked.
Hayward explained it that day. He bowed his head, brought his fingers to his temples and said: “I often think I’m going mad. But when I get really depressed, I tell myself ‘don’t crack up, you can do it, there’s others worse off than you’. I think ‘God, at least I’m still healthy’. The thing that keeps me going is the hope that one day, I’ll get out and see my wife and kids again, and be able to start all over. I really believe something is going to happen eventually.”
His hope is a King’s pardon or of Australia joining a prisoners exchange scheme which would enable him to serve his time back home.
I brought from home a press clipping. Incredibly, the day I left Sydney, a story appeared in The Sun telling of how his de facto wife Gail had again asked the King for a pardon. Hayward’s last request, in 1983, was turned down and you must wait two years for another request.
Hayward spoke of many things. How he got into this mess, his family — mostly his family — religion, life in Bang Kwang, football, the past, the present, the future. He wanted no sympathy.
“If this attempt fails, I’ll wait another two years and try again. On the Thai calendar, it’s the year 2528. In three years, the King will have been on the throne for, I think, 40 years. There will be a big celebration and there’s going to be a big amnesty. That’s my other big hope of getting out.”
There have been five Australians freed through pardons since Hayward and Fellows’ arrival. It gives Hayward and Fellows the element of hope they need. But their most immediate hope is of getting a transfer to the lighter-security Kom Prem prison. The embassy has told them they have a “reasonable” chance. They’ll know the answer to their application within eight weeks.
“They’ve got a foreigners’ building in Kom Prem and there’s only about eight to 10 guys in a room. Here, the foreigners must mix with the Thais and there are 27 in our cell — it’s smaller than this room,” he added, pointing to the room in which I sat, no bigger than 40 square metres.
“Twelve sleep along one wall, 13 on another and two guys in the middle. And then there’s the can of water — it’s the toilet. You wake up at 5am busting for a leak and you can’t go because the bloody thing’s full. Man, it’s pretty bad.”
Hayward spoke of many things. How he got into this mess, his family — mostly his family — religion, life in Bang Kwang, football, the past, the present, the future. He wanted no sympathy. After the initial small talk about football and mutual acquaintances, his face became solemn and he said: “I blame myself, I got myself into this. And I’ve got to keep fighting through it.”
The only sympathy was for Gail and his three children. Bradley, 12, Kellie, nine, and Belinda, the daughter he has never seen, born months after his arrest.
“Most of all, I feel sorry for my wife and kids — what they have to go through. Gail has stuck by me, she’s been great. She still writes and sends photos. I miss my family so much — and the football.
“It hurts not being able to see the kids grow up. Bradley’s been playing a lot of sport, football on the weekends and Aussie Rules at school. Aussie Rules? I don’t even know how to play the game. “I reckon I could have still been playing football, first grade, until I was 30. It’s good to get the Rugby League Weeks but I get a little depressed, you know, thinking I might have still been playing like some of these guys.”
But he knew it was the penalty he must pay for his sins. If he gets no pardon, or is not exchanged back to Australia, he will be paying until January, 2001. Then it would be 22 years and three months since the day a police officer burst into his hotel room in Bangkok and pointed a .38 calibre pistol at his head. A suitcase containing 8.4kg of heroin was sitting neatly on the floor nearby. M oney talks loudly in Bang Kwang. “You know, there’s one American here who has a video set up and gets all these movies. There’s another guy, a Canadian, he’s got a hut built and has Thais who carry water for him, act as servants. These guys must be spending $20,000 a month.”
“Mate, thanks for coming,” Paul said as visiting hours ended. “Really, it’s given me a lift.”
All I could say in parting was that there were many league fans back home who still remember Paul Hayward. He may be exiled in this incredible faraway place but some hadn’t locked him out of their memories and thrown away the key.
OK, he is branded a drug runner, a criminal. Some may say “let him rot in hell”. But he is paying dearly. He is repentant. He knows he did wrong. And for Christ’s sake, he’s a human being and was once a good, gutsy footballer.
“I hope we can have a beer one day,” he said. “How I’d love a nice cold beer.”
The dream that keeps him alive. Freedom . . . some day.
NRL.com footnote: In April 1989, Hayward received a pardon for his good behaviour by the King of Thailand as part of his 60th birthday celebrations. Earlier it had been reported Hayward had tested HIV positive due to using a contaminated heroin syringe while in jail.
In May 1992, Gail’s fears had come true. Struggling emotionally and unable to assimilate back into Sydney life and reconnect with friends, Paul had overdosed from heroin in the family bathroom and was dead at age 38.