RealGM

Poor decisions held Tito Horford back during his playing days. He vowed it would be different for his sons.

Tito Horford sat in the basement of his Lansing, Mich., home Sunday night, watching his son's Atlanta Hawks cruise through a playoff game with the Heat, and thought what he does a lot these days.

He thought how this is the payoff for all the time, all those years, when it didn't work out for him.

"I always told him, 'Don't make the mistakes I made,'" Tito Horford was saying now. "And you know what?"

He chuckled. "Alfred hasn't made any big mistakes at all. He's made so many good decisions. That's what I'm very proud of."

Horford was on the cell phone from Lansing, a couple of hours before a recruiter from his old school, the University of Miami, would be in town to watch his second son practice. Jonathan Horford, a 6-foot-9 junior, has the size and agility that made Al the second overall pick by Atlanta two years ago.

"You can't teach DNA," the father said.

You can teach life, though, and the father's experiences are always there for the sons like something from a cautionary scrapbook. He was a skinny 17-year-old from the Dominican Republic whom college basketball set upon with knives and forks because of his athletic talent in a 7-1 frame.

The University of Houston signed Horford, then went on probation in part because of its recruiting methods. LSU coach Dale Brown, whom Horford had accused of offering him a car and his stepbrother a job, said he wouldn't take Horford "if he crawled up the stairs of the Assembly Center."

Three weeks later, Horford was practicing in the Assembly Center. A month after that, he left LSU and ended up in Miami. This was 1986 and Miami was in its second year of revival.

"A lot of mistakes in there," Tito said. "I thought Miami, being closer to the Dominican and with the weather, would be perfect."


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