By Lee Strawther
The Sporting Tribune
The John R. Wooden Award will celebrate it’s 50th anniversary this season. Leading up to the award ceremony on April 10, 2026, The Sporting Tribune in partnership with the Wooden Award and the Los Angeles Athletic Club will highlight past winners of the Wooden Award and the Legends of Coaching Award.
It’s a well-known fact that all successful college basketball teams have had one key thing in common… the presence of a fearless and dependable point guard. During the mid-to-late 70s the North Carolina Tar Heels had that in elite floor general Phil Ford.
He was born Phil Jackson Ford, Jr on February 9, 1956, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He crafted a stellar prep career at Rocky Mount High School where he set the highest individual scoring average in North Carolina high school basketball history and was named a First Team Parade All-American.
Recruited by over 320 colleges, Ford opted to stay in his home state and went on to become the first freshman under legendary head basketball coach Dean Smith to start in his first collegiate game at the University of North Carolina.
Known for his enthusiastic nature, Ford led teams composed of some of the early greats to ever don Carolina blue, including the likes of Walter Davis, Mitch Kupchak, Dudley Bradley and Tom LaGarde, to name a few.
On a side note, Ford (1977), Antwan Jamison (1998) and Michael Jordan (1984) are the only Tar Heel players to win the John Wooden Award as the nation’s top player, and UNC is the only program to have three different players claim the honor.
If you thought that Ford’s decision to attend UNC had as much to do with the fact that he grew up not very far from Chapel Hill, N.C. you’re probably right. But with a deeper dive you’ll find that his decision had just as much to do with the man he’d be playing for, as where he’d be playing.
“I can’t put his impact on me into words,” Ford said of Smith in a 2015 piece Remembering the true moments by Adam Lucas at goheels.com. “I don’t know where I’d be without him in my life. He’s been such an influence on me, and a friend and a brother and a father figure…Before I chose North Carolina, I felt that Coach Smith would be there for me my entire life. I was right.”
At 6-2,175 Ford was also known as an excellent ball handler who could dissect defenses with ease, and who possessed a very efficient mid-range jump shot. He was also a dependable free throw shooter, especially in crunch time. Those skills were particularly useful as he was at his best when orchestrating North Carolina’s renowned Four Corners offense.
By his senior year Ford was averaging 20.8 points and 5.7 assists per game and posted a career-high 34 points in his final home game, a win over arch-rival Duke, securing another first-place finish in the Atlantic Coast Conference standings for the Heels. At season’s end, Ford, for a third time, was named a consensus First-Team All-American. He finished his career as North Carolina’s all-time leading scorer with 2,290 points, a record which would stand for more than 30 years. UNC went 99-24 during his tenure and his No. 12 jersey is one of only eight retired by the men’s program.
Named one of the ACC’s Top 10 Male Athletes of all time, Ford is also third all-time in assists with 753 and led the Tar Heels to three straight first-place ACC regular-season finishes, earning ACC Tournament titles in 1975 and 1977, and making an NCAA championship game appearance in 1977.
Ultimately, he was named National Player of the Year in 1978 by the Wooden Award and went on to be drafted as the 2nd overall pick by the Kansas City Kings were earned NBA Rookie of the Year. Following his retirement in 1985 he spent 12 years (1988-2000) as a Tar Heel assistant coach under both Smith and Bill Guthridge, helping lead UNC to six Final Fours. He was inducted into the NABC College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2012.
“Phil was sensational with the ball, smart, dedicated and great in the clutch…almost impossible to stop one-on-one,” Smith penned years earlier in his memoir A Coach’s Life: My 40 Years in College Basketball, written in 2002 with Sally Jenkins and John Kilgo.
A true tribute from one great man to another.