The Littlest Wildcat Grew Up This Year

Poor little guy. He wanted so much to grow. But the notches his Kentucky kinfolk carved on the kitchen doorjamb to chart his growth never got very high. They never would. By his 23rd birthday, Travis Ford still was no taller than the refrigerator.

They gave him a basketball to bounce when he was 4 simply to keep Travis occupied so he wouldn’t bother his father. His mother begged her husband: “Why don’t you go out there and shoot with that boy?” But no, neither father nor Father Time seemed terribly eager for Travis to grow up.

He was nearly 7 by the time he entered kindergarten. Later, he had to repeat seventh grade. Travis was limping from a bone disorder, and doctors were drilling holes into his kneecaps to ease the pain. The little guy was beginning to wonder if somebody up there didn’t like him.

Look at him now, though: playing college basketball. Three years older than Shaquille O’Neal and 15 inches shorter, but still playing college basketball. And doing something Shaquille never did--playing among the Final Four. OK, so Shaq has the big shoe contracts. OK, so Shaq’s shoes are size-20, and his are size-9. So what? Travis Ford, starting guard for the University of Kentucky, suddenly feels gigantic.

Not many players in this NCAA tournament stand 5 feet 9.

Not many are children of the ‘60s, either.

“He’s an old little sucker,” Kentucky Coach Rick Pitino kids.

Travis Ford was born four days after Christmas, 1969, to Eddie and Pat Ford of Murray, Ky., where Eddie had once been an intense little basketball player for Murray State. The boy’s first day of school didn’t come until the September before his seventh birthday, and afterward he would hang around the high school in Webster County where his father coached with the same single-mindedness that distinguished him as a player.

“I ran into one of Dad’s managers from back then recently,” Travis says. “And he said all I wanted to do was dribble a ball around all day. He said Dad used to turn me over to him and say: ‘Let him do whatever he wants. Just keep him out of my hair.’ ”

There is a difference between being treated like a baby and being accused of acting like one. By the time Travis was a seventh-grader, he was such a good basketball player that Eddie Ford stood accused of blocking his son’s promotion to eighth grade simply to ensure that Travis would remain the best in his class. Travis disputes that his father was too pushy and thanks him profusely for everything he has done.

Trouble is, Travis began acting like a spoiled brat.

“He’s been a pain in the . . . ,” Pitino says.

The coach is asked why.

“Oh, I’m only kidding,” Pitino says.

“No, he’s not,” says Travis Ford, sitting beside him. “I really was a pain.”

They say no player at Kentucky complained more about calls or made more childish faces than Travis Ford did his first season there. He led the league in pained expressions. Everybody, again, was against him. Having transferred from Missouri, he had spent an entire season watching from the sidelines. Then, at his first Kentucky practice, he cracked that same left kneecap that had pained him as a kid.

By the time he was able to play, the Wildcats already had a set lineup that would come within one second--a 104-103 overtime loss to Duke--of reaching the Final Four. The frustrations mounted. Ford was playing only a few minutes each night, and nobody was appreciating how wonderful he was.

He wouldn’t grow and he wouldn’t grow up.

Pitino thought him a chubby little prodigy who needed some discipline. He wanted Ford to drop some weight. He also instructed him to do three things: One, to continue taking the open jumper from any distance, something Ford didn’t have to be told twice. Two, to penetrate to the basket more often. And three, Pitino recalls with a chuckle, “I told him, ‘See if you can get any taller.’ ”

No, he couldn’t. But he could get slimmer. That was the first thing his coach noticed when Ford returned for his junior season.

“Hey! He’s down to one chin!” Pitino announced.

He had his starting guard. Back when Ford was racking up 2,676 points for the North Hopkins Maroons, a high school team that would retire his jersey, the state university hadn’t come around because Kentucky’s coach, Eddie Sutton, already had a starting guard in mind--Sean Sutton, his son.

Missouri had a fine guard named Anthony Peeler, but made room for Ford, who even made the Big Eight’s all-freshman first five. When NCAA probation loomed, however, Ford decided to move on. And by now the Suttons were gone from Kentucky.

The transfer and subsequent knee injury delayed his homecoming, and Ford says: “You’ll never know what that was like, not being able to play. The only person in more pain than me was my Dad. He said there were games he’d leave early, just because he couldn’t stand to watch me suffer.”

In pain, Ford played. He appeared in all but three of last season’s games, starting none. About all he could do was shoot--26 of his 32 baskets last season were three-pointers.

And in the end, when the wild Duke game was over and the Wildcats stood in shock over Christian Laettner’s shot, the one person who decided then and there that some changes were necessary in his life was Travis Ford. He changed his attitude. He changed his waistline. “I just said, ‘Enough of this,’ ” he says. “No more.”

No more coming up short.

Kentucky is playing Michigan for the right to play for college basketball’s national championship. Travis Ford will be easy for the audience to pick out. He is the one who will be so much smaller than the others, even though he is the one who actually has grown so much.