Final Season and Death
Despite his leukemia being in an advanced stage, Ford played the 2003-04 season with Scavolini Pesaro. Averaging 22.2 points per game, Ford, in his final season, helped Scavolini finish in fourth place in the Italian League, which meant the team qualified to the next season's Euroleague, and to the Italian Cup's runner-up position, despite being near death. That accomplishment still speaks for itself today.
Shortly after announcing his retirement from Euroleague Basketball, Ford died from leukemia, at age 32. He is survived by his wife Paula, their daughter Quekenshia, and their sons Karlderek and Alphonso, Jr. In Ford's honor, the Euroleague named its trophy for the leading scorer of the year, the Alphonso Ford Top Scorer Trophy. The player who replaced Ford on Scavolini Pesaro, following his death, Charles Smith, would win the award the very next season.
Read more about this topic: Alphonso Ford
Famous quotes containing the words final, season and/or death:
“The final event to himself has been, that as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning “When” are much more numerous than those beginning “Where” of “If.” As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.”
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)