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:
“However others calculate the cost,
To us the final aggregate is one,
One with a name, one transferred to the blest;
And though another stoops and takes the gun,
We cannot add the second to the first.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)
“The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairyland. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry ... like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“if thou slip thy troth and do not come at all.
As minutes in the clock do strike so call for death I shall:
To please both thy false heart, and rid myself from woe,
That rather had to die in troth than live forsaken so.”
—Unknown. The Lady Prayeth the Return of Her Lover Abiding on the Seas (l. 19–22)