Backside Help

When T.J. Ford wondered if he'd ever play again, he went home to the only people who never doubted he would

You can't know what drove him until you listen to the bars that rip over the hard-core, dirty South track his brother has laid down. You'll think it was ego or money or desperation. Or you'll think pride and perseverance were all he could call on when John Lucas ran him mercilessly, when doctors offered disheartening prognoses, when his own doubts pounded like drumbeats and hollered like fright in his head. Let me give you the evolution of the Ford family tree/It started off with my daddy before it was me or L'il T. The bad times seem so long ago now. On this fall Friday afternoon in Milwaukee, no one in the Bucks' plush team lounge is thinking about feeling numb, getting hurt or being scared. Full-figured hotties gyrate in music videos on the big screen. There's chicken parmesan, pasta and chocolate cake for the taking. And more pressing matters to discuss.

"He blames it on the coaching staff," assistant Lester Conner says playfully, rubbing the point guard's shoulders.

"Y'all should've told me," T.J. Ford insists. "I can't believe y'all didn't tell me."

Player and coach are in mock debate over what could have been Ford's first career triple-double. Grabbing one more rebound is all Ford didn't do a few days earlier in a season-opening 117-108 OT win in Philly. In Allen Iverson's grill like Tyronn Lue with some offense, Ford went for 16 points and 14 assists to go with those nine boards. Most important, he split three defenders before hitting Michael Redd for a three with 1.6 seconds left that tied the game.

Later that week, Ford used his incomparable jets to outplay both Jason Kidd and the Heat's swaggering combo, Jason Williams and Gary Payton. When he was done, his 16.7 points, 10.3 assists and 5.7 rebounds had earned him Eastern Conference Player of the Week honors. Days later, Ford showed the Clippers he's got hops, too, skying over sevenfooter Chris Kaman and 6'6" Corey Maggette for a two-handed dunk follow of a teammate's miss.

Player of the Week? Too bad there's no Comeback Player of the Year Award anymore. "I don't want to take anything away from the rest of the guys," GM Larry Harris says. "But T.J. makes us go."

Two years ago, T.J. Ford didn't look as if he'd ever again go at all. That's because the last time he left the court, he did so on a stretcher. For most, that would've been end of story. For T.J. and his family, it was only the beginning.

FEB. 24, 2004. Rising high to take a layup in traffic, the six-foot, 165-pound Ford collides with the Wolves' 6'9", 236-pound forward, Mark Madsen. Ford lands hard on his tailbone-jarring his vertebrae, bruising his spinal cord. Instantly, he is numb all over. He lies motionless, waiting for the stretcher that will carry him off.

"I was just … thinking about my body," the 22-year-old says slowly now, fidgeting with the cap atop his head. "Will I feel normal again? How long will it take not to be numb? I was scared."

It wasn't the first time Ford had been in this spot.

A collision in his senior year of high school had caused numbness in his arms. At the time, doctors diagnosed spinal stenosis, a congenital narrowing of the canal that houses the spinal cord. It makes the sufferer more susceptible to spinal injuries.

T.J. and his family considered surgery at the time, but when the symptoms subsided, they opted against it. Then, after two problem-free seasons at Texas, Ford's feet got tangled with an opponent's in a pickup game shortly before he decided to enter the 2003 draft. The fall caused body-wide numbness that hadn't gone away by the time an ambulance arrived 45 minutes later. But after five hours in the hospital, he was back to normal, and the Bucks, aware of his condition, took him with the eighth pick of the draft.

It was all good. Ford quickly won the starting job and quarterbacked the Bucks to a 29—26 record. Then he collided with Madsen.

Once the initial panic was over, Ford figured the injury would be no different from his previous two and expected to be out for just a few weeks. That wasn't the case; in May, Robert G. Watkins, a spinal surgeon, fused two vertebrae in Ford's neck, and the timetable for a comeback got progressively cloudier. Ford would be out for four to six months. Then it was half the 2004-05 season, then all of it.

And then possibly forever.

CANDACE DIXON sits 20 rows off the floor at the Bradley Center. Five-month-old Terrance Jerod Ford Jr., wagging his miniature Air Jordans, is propped on her lap, and next to her are T.J.'s parents, Leo and Mary. Dixon can't stop smiling. Her man is killing the Heat and still has time to sneak peeks at her as he races up the court.

She and T.J. met in Texas while he was recovering from his latest injury. They live now with Little T.J. in a four-bedroom house on two acres in the woods of suburban Milwaukee. Dixon was there when T.J. didn't know if he'd play again. She was there throughout the endless rehab. And she was there this preseason, when everyone wondered how T.J. would play nearly two years after being carried off the court in a neck brace. Dixon has waited for this night for a long time. Now that it's here, she wants to pinch herself. She knows as well as anyone that the weight of the ordeal nearly broke T.J. 10 months ago.

Dixon was in Houston one night last January when he called her after meeting in Milwaukee with the coaches. There was some small talk, and then silence, 10 minutes' worth. Somewhere in there, she heard sniffling. For the next hour and a half, they cried, she trying to console, he trying to be strong. "He was just like, Without basketball, nothing around me is good,' " Dixon says. "He was saying, `What am I going to do if I can't play?' "

Ford is usually a playful sort, cracking on teammates, always down to provoke a laugh. But there was none of that last season. He hung with his teammates when they were in Milwaukee from October to January while he rehabbed, but he was a shell of himself. A PlayStation NBA Live fanatic, he hardly wanted to play, no matter how much trash his boy and backup, Maurice Williams, talked. He wouldn't join Mo at their favorite haunts, Swank and Ja'Stacy's. And watching basketball on TV hurt so badly, he almost completely stopped tuning in. Whenever Williams called and asked, "Yo, did you see that game?" Ford would reply, "Nope," as if trying to make a point: I'm done with this stuff. Ford had become a hermit, staying in to play pool or dominoes and to watch gangsta joints like Belly, Juice or The Sopranos.

"It was like he woke up on Christmas morning and there were no presents under the tree," says Williams, a close friend since ninth grade. "He felt like that every day." When Ford was unable to stomach any more games or practices, he realized he had to get away. He had to get back to where it all started.

He had to go home.

LEO HAD once been nearly as promising a prospect as his younger son, a shoot-first point guard with a wicked J. Leo opted to stay local -playing at Lee College, a two-year school in Baytown, Texas-because Mary, his high school sweetheart, was pregnant with their first son, Tim. Pop, as he soon began to be called, says he had a chance to join Houston's famed Phi Slamma Jamma. But before that ever got off the ground, he tore up his knee in a pickup game. With a stronger support system, Leo believes things might have been different. So when T.J. went down, he knew what his boy needed. "It was the mental part he had to get over first," Leo says.

Being back in Houston worked some good on T.J.'s psyche. He still had trouble sitting through games, but hanging at home reminded him just why he fell in love with basketball in the first place. He thought about how, as a toddler, he'd dazzled relatives with his handle, and how he leaped off the coffee table to dunk on the family's cardboard hoop. How he wore Jordan NBA warmups (Magic for Tim), and how he bounced the ball incessantly on the sideline at his dad's rec games.

How, as he got a little older, he played against grown men when Pop's Baytown Hoyas were a few bodies short. T.J. wore No. 11 because that's what Tim, an all-district point guard, wore in high school.

He remembered that the family's daily conversations back then almost always centered around ball, and that on drives home from Leo's games, T.J. and Tim would offer critiques of his performance. Pop returned the favor-harshly-once they began playing; T.J. quickly learned that scoring 20 was nothing if you had eight turnovers or the guy you were guarding dropped 16. And he remembered the knockdown, drag-out games in the driveway, he and Tim hosting crews of neighborhood kids every day, even after football practice. The runs became so competitive that a crowd of people set up shop on the lawn to watch. Eventually, Mary and Leo tore the backboard off the garage. The crowds were destroying the grass.

When the conversation wasn't about basketball, it was about faith. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" was drilled into T.J.'s head from a young age, and he took it to the court with him. That's why, he says now, every team he touches turns to gold; why he won his last 62 games, including two state titles, at Houston's Willowridge High; why, as a sophomore at Texas, he led the Longhorns to their first Final Four since 1947; why the Bucks are 34—29 with him, including a surprising 5—3 start this year, and 42—67 without. "I treat people on the court the way I want to be treated," Ford says. "If they're open, I give them the ball. And I try to put them in positions where they can be successful."

In those months he spent back in Houston, Ford came to understand what had been obvious to so many: Pop can hoop, Tim can hoop, Karen, his 21-year-old sister, can hoop. But he's the only one who made it. He's the one representing the family and its passion for the game.

He was the one destined to play.

WE'RE LIVING our dream through him Leo once said that in an interview, and Tim samples it throughout "The Evolution of the Ford Family," the song he wrote that serves as the soundtrack for his brother's career. When doctors finally cleared T.J. for noncontact drills in April, they did so with one warning: that he is still at slightly more risk of spinal injury than the average player. According to Harris, though, doctors told Ford that if he gets injured, the result needn't be "catastrophic." Not exactly comforting, but it's enough for Ford. "If I get hurt, I get hurt," he says. "If it's meant to be, it's meant to be. I'm going to play as long as I can."

But coming back is never as easy as stepping on the court. T.J. had barely touched a ball for a full calendar year. Rusty isn't the word for what he was. So when he asked John Lucas, the former NBA star, coach and rehab guru, to run his workouts, the longtime family friend tried to break him, knowing that's what it would take to get him back in playing shape. "I was a jerk most of the time," Lucas admits. "His dad was really tough on him too. It wasn't pleasant."

He put Ford through two-a-days, three hours per session. He took him back to square one, working on posture and how to fall safely. He ran Ford in the scorching Houston sun, quarter-mile laps, backward, in under two minutes 20 seconds. But the physical demands weren't the toughest part.

Imagine the downer of no longer being able to handle the ball on a string, or when it feels awkward to use your left hand, or when you can't muster the pinpoint timing that once characterized your passes. Now, imagine all that occurring with people in the gym, watching, whispering, wondering if you'll ever be the same. Ford was dejected early on, and Lucas noticed he wasn't always focused. Then, Pop entered the gym one morning and called T.J. over. He told him he understood how tough the road back was, but that he had to push himself as he'd never pushed before. You have a gift, he said, and if you are focused, that gift will shine brighter than ever. From that moment, he was dialed in.

Besides meeting Dixon, the one blessing of the injury was that Ford got time to fix his jumper. He'd never really needed a good one before, because he could blow by anyone. But Lucas told him that an outside shot is an insurance policy against all those hits in the paint or losing a step later on. Lucas says Ford made-made-50,000 jumpers over the summer. He also developed a runner in the lane and a fadeaway, and while the J may still not be the best in the league, it's certainly much improved.

The handle and timing returned in one-on-one sessions against John Lucas III, Sam Cassell and Nick Van Exel, then in heated two-on-two, threeon-three and, finally, five-on-five competitions with Cassell, Van Exel, Steve Francis and some other NBA players. Lucas says most wouldn't have survived the gauntlet he laid out for Ford. But with friends and family in his corner, T.J. was unconquerable. "This is a about a kid who came home and got love," Lucas says. "He'd heard a lot of negative stuff, but down here it was nothing but encouragement.''

Midway through the summer, Ford slipped on a wet spot as he ran pick-and-roll drills. It was his first fall since The Fall, and he was terrified. His scream made the walls shake. But when players and trainers began to hustle over, Lucas ordered them to stay put. "Get up, T.J.," Lucas ordered, like a heartless drill sergeant. After about 10 seconds, Ford rose, pain free. He was back.

KAREEM, THE BIG O and Sidney Moncrief stare down at their descendants from action posters on the wall of the Bucks' lounge. The cleaning crew is hard at work. One of them bumps into Ford's chair, and T.J., lacking even a hint of pro arrogance, apologizes and moves to the other side of the table. From there he begins to talk about hip-hop and movies, the two pastimes that occupied most of his nonplaying time during his hiatus. Asked if he raps, he shakes his head. "Every player got to have a record label, though," he says with a smile.

Turns out, he and Tim started a little one a while back. The name? Faith N Family Entertainment, of course. The first release, a mix tape called Back to Ballin', features "Evolution." Tim, who goes by Chali T (a name his friends gave him growing up), wrote the song in July, shortly after T.J. was cleared for contact.

Done eating, done reminiscing, done fretting over the triple-double that got away, Ford heads for the exit of the Bucks' facility and to his white Cadillac CTS. Before leaving, he offers to send a copy of the tape and grins. He thinks it's hot.

It wasn't no secret who was the realest guard on the map.

And no secret how he got there.

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