March 18 (Bloomberg) -- Will Scott, the kid Michael Jordan once made cry, is all smiles now.

Scott, who left Cornell University after his freshman season and heads for graduate studies at the University of Oxford in September, is a reserve on the top-seeded University of Louisville team that faces Morehead State in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

The chance to play for college basketball’s biggest prize helped lure the 6-foot-3 guard away from the Ivy League, even if that meant needing help from Louisville coach Rick Pitino, an old family friend, to convince his parents it was the right move.

“He said, ‘You can get a great education anywhere, but do you want to look back in 10 years and not know what it was like to be on a championship basketball team?,’” Scott said in an interview.

Scott, 24, is the son of longtime New York Knicks doctor Norman Scott and has seen championships up close. As a 7-year- old, he traveled with Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and other future Hall of Fame players as they qualified for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, where they won the gold medal.

His most memorable Olympic moment came one morning at breakfast. Eating a bowl of cereal, he looked up and saw Jordan, “like God,” peering down at him.

“I froze, and then I ran to the side of the room and started crying because I didn’t know what to do,” the fifth- year senior recalled with a laugh during last week’s Big East Conference Tournament in New York.

Books, Basketball

At Cornell, Scott clashed with coach Steve Donahue and spent six weeks convincing his parents that he would get both a quality education and a better basketball experience if he joined Pitino, a former coach with the National Basketball Association’s Knicks.

“He wasn’t happy at Cornell, and if he stayed there, he wasn’t going to play basketball,” Norman Scott, who worked for the Knicks for 27 years before stepping down in 2005, said in an interview. “He turned it on down there. When you have kids, they have to get the motivation themselves.”

Scott’s brother, Eric, is Louisville’s director of basketball operations, while his sister, Kelly, just finished her senior season as a women’s basketball team captain at the University of Pennsylvania. Their mother, Susan, is a surgeon who also has been a team doctor for the New York Liberty of the Women’s NBA.

On to Oxford

Will Scott already has a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a minor in Chinese from Louisville, and he’ll have an MBA by the time he leaves for Oxford, England, in September to earn a master’s in Chinese studies.

“He’d take a pay cut going to the NBA, where he’s going,” said former Knicks guard Allan Houston, one of the familiar faces Scott saw last week at the Big East tournament and the man Scott modeled his shot after.

Wearing Houston’s No. 20, Scott averaged 2.3 points in 19 games during the 2008-09 regular season, making 34.5 percent of his 3-point attempts as the Cardinals went 25-5 overall and 16-2 in the Big East. He played one minute in the conference championship victory over Syracuse, without a point, rebound or assist.

As a shooter who calls himself poor athletically and a bad defensive player, he said he was “pretty realistic” about his role on the team.

“He came to Louisville because he wanted to play in front of 19,500 people and be part of that experience, and we knew he was going to be one of the premier students at our university,” Pitino said in an interview.

Big Red

Scott’s old team will also be playing in front of a big crowd this week. Cornell won the Ivy League championship for the second straight season and is the No. 14 seed in the West region of the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament, playing third-seeded Missouri in its opening game.

“That’s great, but we have a chance to win it all, and that’s really special,” he said.

After growing up in Manhattan and starting college in Ithaca, New York, Scott said he now prefers the people and lifestyle down South.

With one caveat.

“You can’t get a good bagel and you can’t get good pizza,” he said. “It’s a killer.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Mason Levinson in New York at mlevinson@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 18, 2009 00:00 EDT