Phil Ford at McCallie School
Phil Ford was considered one of the best natural athletes ever to play basketball for the North Carolina Tar Heels in the 1970s era before Michael Jordan arrived, with skills like being able to miraculously save a basketball going out of bounds.
He went on to an NBA career that began with many stellar accomplishments, but he had trouble saving himself from going outside the boundary of expected behavior, due to the pitfalls of alcohol and drug abuse.
And in sharing all that with McCallie School students and others gathered Friday morning for the beginning of the Dr Pepper Classic prep basketball tournament festivities, he said he was aided by turning his life fully over to Jesus Christ about 10 years ago.
“I was always what they called religious, but I never had both feet in the circle,” he said. “I have not even thought about alcohol since then. Now it’s a non-issue. It’s like God has taken the taste away from me. It’s something I will always be grateful for.”
He said he tries to help others now and went so far as to pass along his cell number to the several hundred gathered in the McCallie main gym and said to call him if anyone is troubled with such life or substance abuse issues and has nowhere else to turn.
In the short talk before judging the dunking contest as part of the tournament and speaking at a luncheon and VIP question-and-answer session, Mr. Ford also shared his journey to becoming a basketball star under Dean Smith, whose son, Scott, graduated from McCallie in 1976.
He said that growing up in Rocky Mount, N.C., he was an energetic youngster who was always running through the house knocking over items, so his uncle recommended getting him a baseball bat and ball.
“From then on, I just loved sports,” said Mr. Ford, who is now involved in athletic department fundraising at UNC and gives motivational talks. “Football, basketball, and baseball, that’s all I wanted to do.”
This athlete whose parents were both schoolteachers had become so good as a basketball player by the time he was in 11th grade that he eventually received what his mother counted as over 325 letters from colleges. During that era in recruiting, the letters were basically questionnaires regarding in part a player’s interest in playing for a school, but Mr. Ford eventually narrowed his choice to six schools.
The coaches of several of them told him how much he was going to be a star from the start, but coach Smith was different.
“Coach Smith looks me right in the eye and tells me I might have to play JV first,” he recalled.
The coach’s honesty caught the ear of his mother, who was a French and English teacher and was more interested in academics than basketball and had not seen her son play a whole lot. In fact, as Mr. Ford jokingly remembered, she only sat in on that recruiting visit to their home because she thought Dean Smith was an academic dean and did not realize that was his first name.
“When he leaves, my mom says, ‘You can trust Dean Smith. Going into your senior year, you can be assured he won’t be out promising another high school star he can take your place.’ ”
So, Mr. Ford signed with the Tar Heels and starred as a point guard wearing No. 12. But as he admitted, that was his dream school anyway, because as a junior high student attending an all-black school, he had become enamored with pioneering UNC black player Charlie Scott and had become a Tar Heel fan.
At UNC beginning in the 1974-75 season, he became a star from the start – despite coach Smith’s conservative predictions the year before. In fact, he became coach Smith’s first freshman ever to start. He went on to win the coveted John Wooden Award as the best college player his senior year in 1977-78. His junior year, the Tar Heels also played in the national championship game before losing to Marquette.
He was the second NBA player drafted and was having a great early career with the Kansas City Kings when he injured his eye in a play with Lloyd B. Free during his breakout third season. Not only did he develop long-term vision issues, but he also lost sight of proper priorities or a moral compass in a figurative sense.
“I picked up drugs and alcohol and started doing them when I was 22 years old,” he said regrettably. “That followed me off and on the rest of my adult life.”
Fellow Tar Heel teammate and NBA star Walter Davis, the uncle of current UNC coach Hubert Davis, also struggled with substance abuse issues in the 1980s era when public stories about similar issues with NFL and major league baseball players were coming to the forefront. It was a tough revelation for a basketball program that, like several other college programs, has been historically known for producing generally solid citizens after their college playing days.
Mr. Ford said that he later became an assistant coach for Dean Smith at UNC and had some relapses, but that his life was turned around by his faith.
He also gave glowing praises of coach Smith, saying he was a man of strong spiritual faith, but more by example than talk.
“To me he’s the greatest to ever coach the sport and to me he’s one of the greatest people who ever lived,” he said of the man who coached UNC from 1961-97 and led the Tar Heels to two national titles and 11 Final Fours. “He was a second father to me.”
In a brief interview after his first talk, Mr. Ford said he knows well coach Smith’s son, McCallie grad Scott Smith.
“We are great friends,” he said. “He works at the University of North Carolina in the business department. I see him at every basketball game. I talk to him, go out to lunch with him.
“Yes, Scott and I are very good friends. We’ve been very good friends since even when I was being recruited at North Carolina. When coach Smith would come to Rocky Mount, sometimes Scott would come with him and my dad and coach Smith would talk, and Scott and I would go out and hang out and get a banana split or something.”
Mr. Ford also said he is well acquainted with former Baylor School star Jimmy Braddock, who arrived at UNC as a guard as well in 1979, one year after Mr. Ford had headed to the NBA.
“I know Jimmy extremely well,” he said. “I know he actually grew up in Tennessee.”
While Mr. Ford joked during the talk to students for them not to expect him to want to talk Tar Heel basketball right now after he gave them his cell number, he believes UNC can get going again after losing the last three games.
“They are going through a tough stretch, but I think things are going to straighten out for them,” he said of the team that sits at 15-9 overall and 7-6 in the ACC, one year after they rebounded from a similarly slow start to reach the national championship game.
Mr. Ford’s host during his McCallie visit was school Christian ethics and Bible teacher Jim Suddath, whose basketball career at rival Duke slightly overlapped the older Mr. Ford’s.
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