The Story Of Alphonso Ford, One Of Basketball’s Greatest-Ever Players

Alphonso Ford played only 11 games in the NBA. He was only the 32nd pick in the 1993 NBA Draft, having spent a four-year college career in only the Southwestern Athletic Conference with the Mississippi Valley State Delta Devils, and appearing in only one NCAA Tournament game in that time. In the pre-internet age, when mid-major basketball was even harder to follow than it is now, few other than the truly hardcore college fans and NBA scouts will have been able to see him before he came to the NBA.

There is therefore a strong chance that he is one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the sport that you have never heard of.

The fact that Ford only ever played in the SWAC does not mean that his play was SWAC-level. From day one in the mid-majors, Ford destroyed the competition, leading Division I in freshman scoring with a 29.9 points per game average and improving that to 32.7 points per game as a sophomore. By the end of his college career, Ford would become the first player in D1 history to average at least 25 points per game in four consecutive seasons, and his 3,165 career points total remains fifth all time, behind only Pete Maravich, Freeman Williams, Lionel Simmons and Chris Clemons.

Scoring like that never goes unnoticed, and Ford was taken in the 1993 Draft by the Philadelphia 76ers. Yet in an era before two-way contracts and the same degree of salary cap minutiae finagling that exists today, high-30s picks were not as certain to make the team as they now are, and the Sixers cut Ford in his first training camp. Ford’s first NBA experience was thus with the Seattle Supersonics, for whom he played six games on two ten-day contracts at the end of the 1993/94 season.

In between those two sets of ten-day contracts, Ford played in the Continental Basketball Association, which at the time was the premier minor league in America. The CBA then functioned akin to the G-League today; if a player was nearly in the big leagues, and really wanted to get there, he would sacrifice some money and go there for the exposure instead of going to Europe for the money. As Ford showed in his two seasons with the Tri-City Chinook, it could work; he scored 23 points per game in the first season, and 24 points per game in the second, becoming a CBA All-Star both times and continuing his story of scoring wherever he goes.

However, after two seasons of this CBA/NBA dichotomy, and an unsuccessful training camp stint with the Clippers in 1994, Ford soon abandoned America and went to Europe. He played five more games (and 98 minutes) on a ten-day contract from the Sixers in March 1995. And then he never played in the NBA again.

It was in the European market that the legend began to grow. It was not just what Ford – one of the world’s best scorers – was doing. Instead, it was the circumstances under which he did much of it.

In the 1995/96 season, Ford averaged 24.9 points, 3.9 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game for Huesca in Spain’s ACB. Nonetheless, Huesca were relegated, and so Ford moved on to Greece, where he spent a year with Papagou. Ford signed a two-year deal with the team and averaged 24.6 points per game in his first season, but in the 1997 offseason, everything changed. Ford was diagnosed with leukaemia, forcing him to miss the whole of the 1997-98 season while Papagou terminated his contract.

The following season, however, Ford returned to action. And he did not just return to action as a shell of his former self; instead, he came back and destroyed the competition, just as he had been doing.

Initially, Ford stayed in Greece; he spent a year with Sporting Athens, and then signed with Peristeri for two seasons in the 1999 offseason. Once there, he averaged 22.5 points, 4.1 rebounds and 2.8 assists per game in his first season, and followed it up with 23.7 points, 4.2 rebounds and 3.0 assists per game the following year. The 2000-01 season also saw Ford play in the EuroLeague for the first time, Europe’s premier intra-continental competition, where he averaged a colossal 26.0 points, 4.1 rebounds and 2.7 assists per game.

Anyone who understands European basketball – with its slower pace, greater physicality and more balanced minutes-per-game distributions – will understand how difficult that is to do. For context, only five other players scored more than 20 points per game that season, and only once in the competition’s history has it ever been surpassed. Last year’s scoring champion, Sasha Vezenkov, scored a relatively modest 17.7 points per game. Ford, then, had raised the game. And he did so with leukaemia still ravaging his body.

In the 2001-02 season, now a member of Olympiacos, Ford continued to pour it on. He averaged 24.8 points, 4.8 rebounds and 3.2 assists per game in the EuroLeague, again winning the scoring title, as well as 21.6 points, 4.4 rebounds and 3.6 assists in Greek league play. He left Greece after the 2002 season due to the team’s budget cuts, and signed with Siena in Italy; there, his numbers dropped slightly. Yet only slightly; Ford still averaged 19.1 points a contest in the Italian league, and 17.9 ppg in the EuroLeague, still good enough for third. And he also still had leukaemia.

The 2003-04 season was his last, as, by this time, Ford’s leukaemia was at an advanced stage. Yet despite being ravaged by the disease that would eventually kill him, Ford signed with Scavolini Pesaro and averaged 22.2 points per game in the Italian league. Because of him, Scavolini finished in fourth place in Serie A. Because of him, they were runners-up in the Italian Cup. And because of him, Scavolini qualified for the EuroLeague for only the second time in their history. They owed all that to a man playing with advanced leukaemia.

After making Scavolini’s season for them, Ford retired in late August 2004. He died just one week later.

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Ford’s legacy lives in on Europe, where his name is quite rightly spoken of in hallowed terms, and the trophy for the EuroLeague’s annual scoring champion is named after him. Yet in his homeland of America, his name is far less well known, just another minor league star and undersized scoring guard in a world full of them. Time to remedy that.