In today's Friday Know-It-All, Editor Ira explores the legacy of NBA player Phil Jordon.

On March 2, 1962, Philadelphia Warriors center Wilt Chamberlain scored exactly 100 points against the New York Knicks, leading his team to a 169-147 victory that set a 20-year record for highest-scoring game in NBA history. That was one of five records broken that evening, with Chamberlain setting all-time marks for individual scoring and free throws made.

All of that is the stuff of legend amongst basketball fans, but one underreported factor in Chamberlain’s historic night is the man who might have been able to stop it: Phil Jordon. That’s a name you might not recognize, unless you’re a hardcore sports history fan. That’s a pity, because Phil Jordon deserves to be better remembered for several reasons.

Born into a poor community in California’s Redwood Empire region, Jordon claimed heritage from the Indigenous Wailaki and Nomlaki people. He grew to be the tallest member of an exceptionally tall family, standing 6’10” by the time he finished high school and dominating the local varsity basketball scene.

He accepted a scholarship in 1952 to play basketball at Whitworth University, a small Presbyterian school in Spokane, Washington. As the standout star of the Whitworth Pirates, Jordon developed a reputation as a dextrous big man who could consistently sink hook shots with either hand.

He eventually left college to earn some money on the barnstorming circuit — a network of semi-professional teams that traveled from city to city putting on games for the locals. These teams were usually backed by some kind of business sponsorship, and not always glamorous ones. One of Jordon’s teams, the Buchan’s Bakers, was sponsored by the same Seattle bakery where he held down a day job.

This was the late ’50s, a time when a good hook shot and a near seven-foot frame fairly well paved your road to the pros. Sure enough, the Minneapolis Lakers selected Jordon in the sixth round of the 1956 NBA draft. For reasons that I haven’t been able to determine, he never actually played for the Lakers. Instead, Phil Jordon made his NBA debut as a backup center for the New York Knicks at the start of the 1956 season, becoming the first Native American player in league history.

Jordon came into his own in his third season, after a trade to the Detroit Pistons. He reliably posted season averages of 10-plus points and eight-plus rebounds per game for the rest of his career, a nice line for any starting center. This was also well before the NBA started recording blocked shots as an official statistic, which almost certainly would have further spiced up Jordon’s CV.

In an era dominated by high-scoring big men like Minneapolis’ George Mikan, Boston’s Bill Russell, and, of course, Wilt Chamberlain, Jordon was never going to be a superstar, but he was the kind of blue-collar big guy that every fan base loves. In modern terms, he’d be the player you pick up in the later rounds of your fantasy draft and keep on your team all season because you know he’s giving you a 10-and-8 line every night.

Jordon became a classic NBA journeyman over his seven-year career. He played alongside the legendary Oscar Robertson with the Cincinnati Royals, returned to the Knicks as a starter, and closed out his career with a St. Louis Hawks team featuring future Hall of Famers Bob Pettit, Lenny Wilkens, and Zelmo Beaty. That’s a pretty primo career for an undersung basketball ground-breaker.

So where does Phil Jordon come into the story of Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game? He doesn’t, and that’s what the story is. Jordon would ordinarily have received the unenviable assignment of guarding the Warriors’ young superstar. On March 2, 1962, however, Jordon called in sick with the flu. (I should note that some accounts claim it was actually a hangover, but his family and teammates have vehemently denied that. I don’t think there’s a profession more prone to embellishment than “old-timey sportswriter,” so I’m inclined to side with the folks who knew him.)

Fortunately for the Knicks, Jordon’s backup Darrall Imhoff was just as big. Unfortunately for the Knicks, Wilt Chamberlain was playing out of his dang mind that night. Imhoff quickly found himself in foul trouble and on the bench. With both of their 6’10” centers out of the picture, New York struggled to guard the 7’1” Chamberlain with a rotation of players more than half-a-foot shorter than him. It was not a successful strategy.

Obviously, there’s no way to say for sure that Wilt Chamberlain wouldn’t have made history if Phil Jordon had been healthy that night in Philadelphia. But it seems fair to presume that the path to 100 points gets considerably harder to travel if there’s an extra giant standing in your way.

Details about Jordon’s life off-court are scarce. As far as I can tell, he was never interviewed about his part in Wilt Chamberlain’s record-breaking night. Sadly, there isn’t that much post-NBA story to tell. Jordon left the NBA after the 1963 season and returned to the Seattle area. He died two years later, at the age of 31 in a Puget Sound boating accident.

Phil Jordon’s legacy as the first Indigenous player in NBA history is oddly muted today. I found very few resources to pull from for this story, although I did find a pretty sweet t-shirt. That’s a shame. He’s an important figure in American sports history who deserves to be remembered as more than the guy who wasn’t there the night Wilt Chamberlain dropped a benjamin.