When teenager Darius Knight enters the arena at the Royal Albert Hall tomorrow, he will be hailed as one of the rising stars of British sport.
et few of the 4,000-strong audience and countless television viewers will have any idea of the 18-year-old's extraordinary escape from the crime and poverty of a drug-ridden south London council estate.
As one of Britain's best table tennis players, Knight, who is taking part in the Dunlop Masters tournament, hopes to qualify for this year's Olympics in Beijing and win gold at the London Games in 2012.
But as he admits with alarming candour: "If it wasn't for table tennis, I might not be here now. I might be dead. I've seen what's happened to my friends and I know I'm lucky. I don't want sympathy and I know I have to be strong for myself. Table tennis has given me a life and I intend to make the most of it."
Knight has seen two friends murdered. One of them, James Andre Smartt-Ford, was 16 when he was shot during a disco at Streatham ice rink a year ago. Several members of the gang that Knight joined as a schoolboy are now in prison.
When he was born, his father, Sean, was in prison and throughout his childhood, in a fourth-floor council flat in Battersea, he witnessed people coming to his home — he believes to buy, sell and take drugs. Frequently his mother, Dionne, was the victim of violent attacks from his father.
"I saw drugs in the house every day of my life from the age of five. I remember one time when he was hitting her in the middle of the night. It was about two o'clock and she was bleeding everywhere and the police came. I was only six or seven and I used to see all this kind of thing and there was nothing I could do.
"I wanted to save my Mum but I couldn't. My Mum would tell me to go back to sleep and I'd wake in the middle of the night to hear her crying and them fighting.
"I used to dial 999, but I was so nervous I used to dial the nine five or six times instead of three. One time my father hit me with a Hoover because I had done it. The police came a few times. It was a very unhappy time."
Knight's account of his harrowing upbringing is confirmed by his mother. She said that his father, from whom she is separated, had a criminal record and was in prison for assault when Darius was born.
Of the night-time assault, she added: "That's what happened. In the end I took the Hoover piece and beat his dad with it."
Table tennis provided Knight with an escape route. He was 10 when his mother took him and his younger sister, Demetria, now 17, to dancing lessons at an adventure park. There he saw other boys playing table tennis and said he wanted to try.
Initially hopeless at his new hobby, Knight eventually persuaded a local coach, Gideon Ashison, to allow him to join a group that trained in a shed behind a house belonging to a friend of the coach in Wandsworth.
Every day after school Knight would make the 30-minute bus journey across London and play all evening before returning home after 10pm. When he misbehaved and was banned from 'The Shed', he would break in through a narrow window to carry on practising.
As his ability grew, so did his fame. His story reached the newspapers, cheques were sent in by well-wishers and a charity, Table Tennis for Kids (TTK), was set up to help children from poor backgrounds find a way out through sport.
The charity now covers more than 3,000 youngsters in London and the Rhondda Valley, employing more than 20 full-time coaches. Tomorrow's high-profile event hopes to raise £500,000 for TTK funds. At the age of 12, Knight earned a place at the National Training Centre in Nottingham, where his game blossomed.
But the temptations of the street were not over. When the national centre closed two years later through lack of funding, he returned to south London, where his boyhood gang of 15 had moved on from stealing from local shops into drug-taking and raids on West End stores.
"When I came back and started mixing with them again, my mum became really worried for me," he said.
"They were smoking and selling drugs and we'd go up to Oxford Street and have fights. I wasn't a saint and because I had a strong personality I was one of the leaders.
"But by that time I was playing for England and I said to myself: “Darius, you have to stay out of trouble”. In a strange way what I'd seen at home was a blessing for me. I had seen what drugs could do to people and I didn't want any part of it."
He moved away again, first to Bristol and then Sheffield — where he lives and trains at the Institute for Sport — while regularly travelling to France to play as a professional for Montpelier, where he can earn up to £30,000 a year. He is one of the top 10 juniors in the world and won the gold medal at last year's Youth Olympics in Australia.
Yet throughout his teenage years there were grisly reminders of the fate he had escaped.
Smartt-Ford was shot dead only weeks after Knight had spoken to him, while another friend was stabbed to death, although Knight never discovered why.
"Out of all of us, I'm one of only two who have done something positive with their lives," he said. "Three or four of them are in prison for drugs or possession of guns.
"But everyone has a choice whether to be good or bad. People say that their lives have gone wrong because their father wasn't around. But that's slow-minded and just an excuse."
"I'm successful and I'm free. I'd rather be that way than have to walk down the road watching my back. I don't look at anyone in a bad way or give them an evil look. I'm a happy boy, I'm not an evil person."