Keeping Paul Smith on the straight and narrow is hard enough in conversation, let alone cricket or life. Thoughts merge, time blends seamlessly into one never-ending year, sentences duck and weave, punctuation is arbitrary. His autobiography must have been a nightmare to edit, but the mere writing of it, the fact he had to chart the rise and fall of one of cricket’s golden boys, has been central to the redemption. Paul Smith would like you to know that he is alive and well, on the verge of becoming a father for the fourth time and turning his life right around again. Even better if you could help to fund his Cricket Without Boundaries project which is working to transform the lives of the homeless and young kids in Los Angeles and Birmingham.

If Smith was a boxer or a rock star, the descent into drug addiction and homelessness would have been comfortable, even inevitable. But Smith was a county cricketer, a pivotal, highly talented allrounder in the Warwickshire team that created history by winning the treble in 1994 and having three players — Smith, Dermot Reeve and Keith Piper — suspended for drug abuse either during their time at the club or after their retirement. If one image captures the sheer verve of Smith’s cricket, it was his celebration as he and Reeve, the Warwickshire captain, completed a six-wicket victory over Worcestershire in the final of the Benson and Hedges Cup during that historic 1994 season. With three wickets, including Graeme Hick, and an unbeaten 42, Smith was the man of the match, his high was utterly natural.

Smith’s career was effectively over by the age of 31 and his subsequent revelations about the drugs culture in the Warwickshire dressing-room earned him a 22-month ban and pitched him into outer darkness, unable to earn a living from the one skill he had mastered.

In his book, Smith questions the attitude of the management at Warwickshire at the time and highlights the hypocrisy of cricket’s stance on the issue of drugs. His book has been banned from the shop at Edgbaston, which hardly suggests the dawning of a new age of enlightenment at Warwickshire or any new willingness on the part of his former employers to acknowledge its responsibilities to a talented but volatile generation of cricketers.

Smith does not want pity, but a bit of tea and sympathy would not go amiss. It irks him more than he cares to admit. The deeds of his treble-winning side defined him as a person and as a cricketer, yet they seem to have been airbrushed from the county’s history. So a vital part of his own soul, the part by which his spectacular fall can be measured, has been erased too.

Smith would not be the first athlete to have his head turned by success. Had Warwickshire not won the treble, had he not been organising a benefit year at the same time and therefore spending a lot of time away from home, he would not have drifted into the drug and alcohol-fuelled haze that hastened the decline in his cricketing fortunes. You have to push hard to find a definitive reason for the downward spiral.

“I had a community of people I would drink with and a community of people that I played cricket with; what I lacked was a home,” he says.

“I didn’t have a place to go where I could shut the door, put my feet up, watch the television and enjoy the silence. Sometimes I couldn’t go home, sometimes I just didn’t go home. Winning the treble and having a benefit year did me no favours.”

As an allrounder, Smith was an explosive hitter — until his record was beaten by Ian Bell, he was the youngest centurion for Warwickshire after scoring 114 against Oxford in 1983 — and a quick enough strike bowler to have Carl Hooper, the West Indies Test batsman, hopping about in a NatWest semi-final at Edgbaston in 1994. Anybody daring enough to wear burgundy leather trousers had to be a decent player.

Smith’s average of 26.4 with the bat and 35.7 with the ball does not tell the whole story, according to the man himself. Statistics? “Cricket to me was an expression of joy,” he explains. “My job as a bowler was to get wickets quicker than anybody else, as a batsman to make fast runs. If you’re employed to entertain and you turn out to be a selfish bastard, what have you brought to the table? If we’d had four players getting 1,500 runs we wouldn’t have done the treble, simple as that.”

Smith, it can be assumed, was not one to play for a draw or a pointless not out.

Life has proved to be equally technicolour, conditioned by the short attention span and lust for action that characterises many good allrounders. He rejected a coaching job in Rwanda once, but Smith’s early experiences coaching at St Augustine’s in Cape Town and in townships around Johannesburg provide a direct link to the sort of work that he is doing now on the mean streets of Compton in Los Angeles, and with the Prince’s Trust in the UK.

“I was living and coaching in Buenos Aires not long after the Falklands War, which was interesting,” he says. “Fascinating people, fascinating place, could have had bowls full of cocaine then but I didn’t. I wanted to be up 24 hours, wanted to see as much as I could.

“How much architecture have I seen at five in the morning when it’s only the milkman and me? Seeing cities without the hustle and bustle.

“It’s the same now. People say, ‘You must be nuts trying to teach cricket to kids in Compton’, but I don’t think that I’m nuts. That’s the place where I can do the best work. I’m still here.”

Only just. Many times, Smith’s instinct for self-preservation has been tested by the gangland culture of Los Angeles, where his only protection has been the Rastafarian organiser of the Homies and Popz Cricket XI and a reputation for being a pro “ball player” in some far-off place called England. It helped that Smith neither judged his young charges nor patronised them and that he did a passable imitation of a fading rock legend.

He could still hit the ball a country mile, too, which was the most impressive feat of all. Without knowing it, the kids of LA and Birmingham have been drawn into learning the skills of life, communication and teamwork, through a rudimentary understanding of the complex game of cricket. “We’re not trying to find a Ted Dexter, we’re just looking for a kid who’s got a better future,” he says.

Consistent funding for the project is the problem, not the concept or the commitment. And in their way, the kids have drawn Smith out of his despair, teaching him just as much as he taught them. At times, life became so complicated, he just kept moving, living under a freeway in LA, going without food for three days, waiting for money from home that never came. His life was contained inside three suitcases, in one of which he kept an old Gray-Nicolls bat.

Ask him where the low point was and his reply is honest to the point of brutality. “Man, the low point lasted two years. LA, here, LA, here, come back, live in my jeep in a lockup owned by UB40 and they don’t know I’m there. Six weeks, then stay with a mate on a farm, three weeks, go somewhere else. The Professional Cricketers Association put a roof over my head for two months because they realised I was in a mess, I did anything to find a roof.”

So what has made the difference? “Meeting a woman has turned it around. The kids help me when I’m in the classroom and the penny drops with them. They help because I know that I’m doing some good work. As long as I’m doing that, I don’t give a monkey’s what anybody thinks of me. The best tutors for me were the people who were passionate about what they believed in.

“In America, these kids carry guns like kids here carry mobile phones, but you can turn their lives around, provide a community for them, find them jobs. I don’t try to teach them the game, I just join in. If you can demonstrate that you can hit the ball serious distances with a cricket bat, you’ll get a line of kids wanting to have a go.”

Perhaps, too, the spirit of the Homies and Popz can be traced back to the staid old dressing-room in Warwickshire and the benign and enlightened coaching of Bob Woolmer, who encouraged Smith to explore the extent of his ability.

In Smith, Woolmer found a cricketer who was ready to experiment, to turn weaknesses into strengths and foster the hound-dog mentality that made Warwickshire one of the most unpopular and successful teams in the game. Under Reeve’s inventive and irritating leadership, Warwickshire never gave up. And, of course, they had Brian Lara, whose sheer genius with the bat still makes Smith smile.

But there’s a sadness in the story, too, a perpetual tension that doesn’t make Smith the easiest interviewee or the most relaxing company.

Wasted? The only surprise is the question mark. The birth ofa fourth child, a second daughter, will mark a new beginning in the most obvious sense. The last time he saw his oldest daughter was two years ago. He hasn’t seen her since and doesn’t even know where she is. It took Smith 12 months to write 300 words about her in the book. He keeps in touch with his two sons, aged 14 and 20, but would like to see them more often.

“I can’t change anything that happened on the sporting field and I wouldn’t want to change the amount of fun we had or the trophies we won,” he says. “In my home life, I would have made different decisions from the age of 20. Wiser after the event, I suppose. I’d appreciate certain things in life that I took for granted.”

His visits to Edgbaston these days are more likely to involve his work for the Prince’s Trust than a reunion dinner. He was there last week handing out certificates at an awards ceremony for drifters and the young unemployed. Then they banned the book.

“I seemed to be the Antichrist as I walked through the gates,” he says. “But I’ve got fantastic memories of the place. More good than bad has come out of here.”

Much the same might be said of Paul Smith.

- Wasted? Paul Smith, Know the Score Books, hb, £16.99