Built Ford Tough

Make room, Wilt Chamberlain, we've also hit the century mark with 100 posts.*

To mark our 100th entry, we're saluting a slighted player who gave 100% effort, even if he was seldom 100% healthy. Five days after absorbing an errant elbow to the back, T.J. Ford decided he would not step back on the court again, abruptly announcing his retirement Monday. The Spurs backup point guard is 28. This season has already seen Ford's peer, Brandon Roy, retire at 27 in December rather than risk further harm to his body. During his rookie year, the collegiate Naismith Player of the Year was struck by scrub Mark Madsen; the play proved to more disastrous than Madsen dancing. In one of the scarier moments in the league in recent memory, an immobilized Ford was removed from the floor on a stretcher. He required spinal fusion surgery, which sidelined him for an entire season. Ford fully recovered and even regained his signature speed, enough to be voted by fellow players as the fastest in the NBA in a 2007 Sports Illustrated survey.

His retirement is overshadowed by Ricky Rubio's injury, another PG with a plethora of possibility and promise. That's appropriate, as Ford played in places where attention was absent, starting with small-market Milwaukee, before being traded to Toronto -aka the basketball Siberia - and then often-ignored Indiana. Ford was equitable in his self-evaluation: "I think I succeeded at beating the odds, of being the little guy (he was a slight 6-feet and a slender 160-pounds), making it to the NBA and lasting as long as I did. I think I achieved a lot. I know I didn't have the career I anticipated and everyone anticipated, me having been the player of the year (at Texas). But I think I still had a successful career."

If it wasn't for that fateful fall, Ford wouldn't have fallen short of his, or anyone else's, expectations. Although Ford is concerned about the strength of his spine, to make the difficult decision to call it a career, he showed that he clearly has a brawny backbone.

*On our 101st, Disney is giving us free dalmatians, which we'll swiftly send to Sarah McLachlan. That'll teach her for making us tear up during those SPCA ads. Adopt them all or you're a hypocrite, Sarah.