Biography
Phil Jackson Ford Jr. (born February 9, 1956 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina) is a retired American professional basketball player in the National Basketball Association. He graduated from Rocky Mount Senior High School in 1974. Ford played four years of basketball at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After his sophomore season, Ford started for the U.S. Olympic team that won the gold medal in 1976. While a senior, he averaged 20.8 points a game during that 1977-78 season. He is Carolina's number 2 all-time leading scorer with 2,290 points, and finished his career as the only player in Atlantic Coast Conference history to score over 2,000 points and register at least 600 assists (a record now shared with Travis Best of Georgia Tech). A consensus All-American in 1976, 1977, and 1978, he was named college player of the year by the U.S. Basketball Writers Association in 1978, when he also won the Eastman, USBWA College Player of the Year and John R. Wooden Awards. In 2002 Ford was named to the ACC 50th Anniversary men's basketball team honoring the fifty best players in ACC history. Ford was NBA Rookie of the Year with the Kansas City Kings in 1979. He retired in 1985. In 482 NBA games, Ford scored 5,594 points, an 11.6 average, and had 3,083 assists, an average of 6.4 per game. In 1988 he returned to North Carolina as an assistant coach, a job he held through the 1999-2000 season. Ford and the rest of Bill Guthridge's coaching staff were let go in 2000, when Matt Doherty took over as head coach with his own coaching staff. Ford was inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in May 1991. Phil Ford currently works for the Educational Foundation, the fund-raising arm of the University of North Carolina athletic department. After a brief stint as an assistant coach to Isiah Thomas for the New York Knicks, Ford was retained in the same position by the Charlotte Bobcats' new head coach Larry Brown in June 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Ford
