MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – One of West Virginia University’s pioneering athletes, coaches and administrators has died.
Garrett Ford Sr., Mountaineer football’s first 1,000-yard rusher in 1966, passed away Sunday night in Charlotte, North Carolina, Ford’s son, Garrett Jr., confirmed today.
He is considered one of the school’s all-time great running backs and was part of the initial wave of Black football players to attend West Virginia University in the mid-1960s when integration was taking over major college football.
Dick Leftridge and Roger Alford were the first two Black players to appear in football games for WVU in 1963, a year before Ford signed to play for the Mountaineers.
Ford was considered one of the top prep running back prospects in the Washington, D.C., area performing at DeMatha High for famed boy’s basketball coach Morgan Wootten, who also coached DeMatha’s football team at the time.
“I grew up in predominantly a Black area, and there were very few whites around,” Ford recalled in 2006. “The only white guy in our neighborhood was an insurance guy who would come and get insurance money from my mother. A lot of the guys from my neighborhood who went to college went to predominantly Black schools like Morgan State, Howard and schools like that.
“I never understood the impact of DeMatha,” he admitted. “DeMatha was in Hyattsville, about 20 miles from where I lived, and there were no Blacks living in Hyattsville at the time. It was the first time in my life I ever interacted with white kids, and Morgan would arrange for me to get a ride to high school every morning. There were guys who lived in Georgetown who would come up to my neighborhood and pick me up on the corner every day.”
When Ford arrived at WVU in 1964, there were fewer than 20 Black students on campus. He was well versed in the racial tensions in the country at the time and was apprehensive about attending a school with so few Black students.
Ford recalled having an unforgettable first visit to Morgantown.
Garrett Ford became the first running back to rush for more than 1,000 yards during the 1966 season playing for coach Jim Carlen (WVU Athletic Communications photo).
“I get a call one day, and it was a guy named Bob Guenther from Gaithersburg, who played football at West Virginia,” he said. “This guy Guenther was going to bring me to Morgantown to meet coach (Gene) Corum and visit the school, and I didn’t want to go because I didn’t know anything about WVU.
“But they said if I came, I could bring some of my buddies with me, and five of us came and stayed down at the Hotel Morgan,” Ford said. “Roger Alford and Dick Leftridge were the two guys who showed us around. I went to Osage. They took me to Pursglove. They took me to White Avenue where the Black people in Morgantown lived. We visited a place on Clay Street, and it was full of coal miners, and here I was, 18 years old, being indoctrinated to this culture.”
What impressed Ford most about WVU was the shared experiences of all people living in the community at the time.
“I remember going to places in West Virginia where it didn’t matter if you were Black or white; we were all poor,” he said. “The Black people in West Virginia had like a brotherhood with their white friends and that was the thing that sold me on West Virginia, the people I met there.”
Ford led the team in rushing with 854 yards in 1965 as a sophomore playing alongside Leftridge, who became the Pittsburgh Steelers’ No. 1 draft choice in 1966, and he enjoyed one of the greatest individual performances in school history in WVU’s 63-48 victory over Pitt at Mountaineer Field that season.
In that game, he rushed for 192 yards and two touchdowns, caught four passes for 76 yards and a touchdown, and returned four kickoffs for 73 yards for 341 all-purpose yards. It was a school record that lasted 41 years until Steve Slaton topped it in 2006.
He rushed for a career-best 1,069 yards with seven touchdowns to earn second team All-America honors in 1966 playing for coach Jim Carlen.
“Garrett could really carry the mail,” West Virginia quarterback and later athletic director Ed Pastilong recalled this morning. “You would just hand the ball off to him and get out of the way.”
A debilitating ankle injury limited him to just 204 yards rushing during his senior season in 1967 and curtailed a promising professional career after only one season with the Denver Broncos in 1968.
Ford was planning to embark upon a career in banking in Quincy, Massachusetts, when Bobby Bowden called to see if he was interested in becoming the first Black assistant coach in West Virginia University history.
He agreed to take the job and planned on staying in Morgantown until his children were old enough to attend school. Then it was until they finished middle school. Then it became high school.
When he eventually retired from WVU in 2011, a couple of years had turned into 44.
Few can match the impact Garrett Ford had as an athlete, coach and administrator at West Virginia University.
When he worked on Frank Cignetti’s football staff, he spent an entire year recruiting South Charleston star running back Robert Alexander, considered the No. 1 high school football prospect in the country in 1977. Ford once recalled, with horror, seeing Alexander standing on Pitt’s sidelines during a 1976 game against West Virginia at Pitt Stadium.
“Our kids were in tennis shoes and here is (Tony) Dorsett wearing a mink fur coat with alligator loafers on and all that,” he chuckled. “Robert was on Pitt’s sideline that day and after the game they had a press conference where Robert was sitting right there with Dorsett. The police were escorting him around and everything.”
Ford’s only recruiting responsibility that year was Alexander, making it an all-or-nothing proposition.
“I went to his games. I went to his house, and we did dishes together,” he recalled. “Robert was a West Virginian, and we didn’t have that many West Virginia players of his status. He was on the CBS Evening News being proclaimed as ‘Alexander the Great’ and I felt the pressure because he was so big; it was hit or miss.”
When Alexander eventually picked West Virginia, his press conference was held at the Governor’s mansion.
By then, everyone was taking credit for Robert Alexander’s signing.
Soon after that, Ford transitioned to academic support services where he established many of the programs still in use today, including bringing back former players who left school early to earn their degrees. For years, he counseled some of the greatest players in school history, from Darryl Talley and Major Harris, to Pat White and Steve Slaton, to Geno Smith and Tavon Austin.
“I wanted to have more of an impact on the kids’ lives,” he once recalled. “I wanted to do something that got them situated, and I wanted to make sure they made progress every semester toward their degrees and that they got to learn a lot of stuff off the field, as well as on it.”
“Garrett had more to do with the success of West Virginia’s African American students – athletically, academically and socially – than any other person, and he always brought a student-centered perspective to athletic administration,” recalled WVU colleague Craig Walker, who spent 14 years working with Ford as the department’s assistant athletic director for finance and administration from 1981-95.
“Garrett knew everybody,” Pastilong added.
Ford, who earned a bachelor’s degree in physical education (1969) and a master’s degree in guidance and counseling (1973) from WVU, was promoted to assistant athletic director in 1985 and then to associate athletic director in 2002.
His son, Garrett Jr., played four years for West Virginia and rushed for a career-high 756 yards with six touchdowns as a freshman on the Mountaineers’ 1989 Gator Bowl team. His daughter, Tracie, briefly ran track for West Virginia, and her son Bryce was an outstanding four-year performer who finished his career in 2022 with 143 career receptions for 1,867 yards and 15 touchdowns, making it three generations of Fords at WVU.
Garrett and wife, Thelma, were living in a retirement community in Florida before they recently relocated to the Charlotte area to be near their children and five grandchildren, according to Garrett Jr.
“Dad died peacefully last night,” Garrett Jr. said. “He was wearing a West Virginia shirt when the people from the funeral home came today to pick him up. They asked us why he was wearing a West Virginia shirt down here, and it’s because West Virginia was his life. He just loved his time there.”
Funeral arrangements are pending. Garrett Jr. indicated the family is considering having a memorial service in Morgantown later this spring.
Ford, 80, was inducted into the West Virginia University Sports Hall of Fame in 1995 and the School of Physical Education Hall of Fame in 2004.
