The Boy on the Shed:A remarkable sporting memoir with a foreword by Alan Shearer: Sports Book Awards Autobiography of the Year

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Paul Ferris carried out the medical when Alan Shearer signed for Newcastle United in 1996, and the pair have remain firm friends ever since He is also very candid about his early family life — how his dad loved a pint and how he feared elder brother Patsy’s mood swings when he was drunk, which on occasion led to domestic violence.

Whether that’s the right way for football to go, I’m not sure, but after five years of being a professional footballer to walk away with nothing… football was a very different game then. It wasn’t in the stratosphere then that it is now.” Ferris went further than most and was, fleetingly, a prodigy. In April 1982 he became the youngest ever Newcastle United player to play in a first division match since the foundation of the club in 1892. He was just 16 and the manager, Arthur Cox, and coaching staff were smitten. He came through with Chris Waddle – “a big, loping lazy-looking lad with a languid running style” – and was there when Tyneside went berserk with the arrival of Kevin Keegan. The mop-headed icon told him: “You can end up at Manchester United or Crewe United. It’s up to you.” Unique, interesting, extremely emotive and gives some insight that supporters have never heard before...His story is raw and will keep you engaged without using any exaggerations which try to win over readers...Ferris has pushed himself forward extremely well in his new book, so well that any Newcastle supporter's book collection will be incomplete without The Boy on the Shed in it. * Newcastle Chronicle *

Summary

While I still have some issues nearly 2 years later these are much less now than they were, I had an easier time while on holiday this year than last, I'm off the worst of the medications, and I remain in remission from the cancer.

I loved "The Boy In The Shed" which was poignant and beautifully written and this is a worthy successor although a totally different type of book. It’s not all sadness, there are some funny parts. I loved the writing style and the brutal honesty of exactly what he went through physically and emotionally.The stuff about my mother was painful to write. Painful to experience, but painful to write. My family reading that again will be tortured by that, but I had to write it. But this is no misery memoir. There are dark days, but also times when life soared to heights he could never imagine. It is also not a run-of-the-mill book about football, but a well-rounded, exceedingly candid account of his life on and off the pitch and of his family, warts and all. I tried to finish the book on a positive note, but I thought the cancer diagnosis might be coming so the last bit of it, I felt very emotional when I was writing it,” he admits. But then the 52-year-old former footballer from Northern Ireland is well used to life dealing him a difficult hand. Tonight he is on UTV Life withPamela Ballantine. Today and tomorrow at Eason and Waterstones in Belfast and Lisburn on a flying return visit to the land of his birth. There are various radio commitments too.

Today was his first climb to the top. He knew if he was there, watching, then she would never leave him. Her name was Bernadette and he climbed the shed every day.~ I had to radically change my lifestyle, which I have done, I had to radically change my diet, which I have done. I was doing quite well with that and then I got prostate cancer…” he says before bursting into laughter. Yet this autobiography is more than a tale of the vagaries of sporting fortune. It begins during ‘The Troubles’ in a working-class Catholic family in the Protestant town of Lisburn, near Belfast. After a childhood scarred by his mother’s illness and sectarian hatred, Paul meets the love of his life, his future wife Geraldine. This is a brave yet humorous book which will serve a valuable purpose by highlighting that this disease can be beaten and hopefully encouraging that every man goes and gets a PSA test regularly a prevention is far better than cure. Paul believes the trauma resulting from the various incidents in his childhood resulted in him failing his 11-plus. Indeed, it was an academic rather than a footballing career that he envisaged.Charlton was as good as his word and the following year, Ferris persuaded his childhood girlfriend Geraldine McCaugherty to move to England, where they were eventually married. They weathered the anxieties of the abrupt end of his football career and dragged themselves up through education – Geraldine qualified as a teacher, Paul as a barrister and physiotherapist. Ferris was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. In 1981, he signed for Newcastle United from Lisburn Youth in Northern Ireland and became the club's youngest ever debutant when he appeared aged just 16 years and 294 days. He scored his only senior goal against Bradford City in 1984. A medial ligament injury meant he played just 14 matches and moved to Barrow F.C., with whom he won the FA Trophy at Wembley before moving into local non-league football with Gateshead.

The mental challenges and psychological impact of living with this acute condition are explored in Paul's revealing and riveting narrative that represents rare male honesty, but this is never a 'poor me' book or not in any way self-pitying. Courageous, inspirational and beautifully written, The Magic in the Tin is a rare deeply moving yet rich in humour, written by a true sportsman in every sense of the word. In a genre too often mired in platitudes, former Newcastle and Northern Ireland winger Ferris's account of growing up Catholic in Protestant Lisburn - and the football career that promised him a way out - stands out for its honesty and humour. * i Paper * PAUL Ferris would have every reason not to be so chipper when the phone rings for the umpteenth time. A long haul of press interviews and media obligations have filled recent weeks, and they’re not over yet. Writing a book was always a pipe dream and, even when the manuscript was finished and sent off, he still wasn’t sure it would ever see the light of day. I’m laughing but those two things, they just shake your confidence in everything. Where you didn’t have fear before, you have it. If I get a chest pain now I think ‘oh, what’s that?’ I have three boys and up to that point they think their dad’s invincible.I wrote the book and sent the manuscript off in about November time, and I was having ongoing talks with the doctors. I’d had tests done, and then I got a diagnosis probably about three days after the manuscript was finished. Finally, the title "The Boy on the Shed" seemed a little too "The Woman who Walked into Doors" - it felt contrived and, again, trying too hard to not have a sport title.