Richard Ford grew up in Washington, D.C., in the shadow of one of the richest basketball cultures in America. The District's Catholic league — Mackin, DeMatha, Archbishop Carroll, St. John's — had produced Austin Carr, Adrian Dantley, and a generation of players who learned the game on the playgrounds at Fort Stevens, Jelleff, and Turkey Thicket before taking it indoors. By the time Ford was playing high school ball in the late 1970s, a young Duke coach named Mike Krzyzewski had identified the D.C. metropolitan area as a pipeline. "We thought D.C. would be really important for us," Krzyzewski told the Washington Post in 1986, explaining why he'd targeted the region from his earliest days in Durham. "It was a talent-rich area, which had basketball all year round. Organized basketball. And that's critical."
Ford was not Johnny Dawkins. He was not Tommy Amaker. He was not one of the blue-chip recruits from the D.C. Catholic league who would reshape Duke basketball in the 1980s. He was a guard who loved the game, earned his way into Duke University on his academic merits, and decided he wanted to play for the basketball team. So he walked on.
That decision — showing up uninvited to compete for a roster spot under a coach who was still building something from the ground floor — tells you everything you need to know about Richard Ford. He arrived at Duke around 1980 and joined a program that was losing. Coach K's first three seasons produced a combined record of 38-47. The Cameron Indoor crowds were sparse. The ACC was punishing. There was no guarantee that any of this was going to work.