Native Americans have made basketball their own as they hustle to retain and defend their culture and traditions<\/p>\n
Long before Michael Jordan changed the sport of basketball<\/a>, another Jordon transformed the National Basketball Association\u2019s (NBA) history by breaking the league\u2019s racial barrier as its first Native American<\/a> player.<\/p>\n In 1956, Phil \u201cThe Flash\u201d Jordon, a descendant of the Wailaki and Nomlaki tribes<\/a>, was drafted by the New York Knicks and played 10 seasons in the league. Though he may not carry the same cultural cache as other hoopers throughout professional basketball\u2019s century-plus existence, Jordon embodies a longstanding Native American fixation on the sport \u2013 especially at the community level. Throughout the years, Native Americans have embraced basketball and made it their own. One way they\u2019re doing so today is with \u201crez ball,\u201d a lightning-fast style of basketball associated with Native American teams.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Native Americans have made basketball their own as they hustle to retain and defend their culture and traditions Long before Michael Jordan changed the sport of basketball, another Jordon transformed the National Basketball Association\u2019s (NBA) history by breaking the league\u2019s racial barrier as its first Native American player. In 1956, Phil \u201cThe Flash\u201d Jordon, a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}