Hall of Famer Brenda Jordan, an ahead-of-her-time athlete who scored 1,000 points before that was a thing in girls basketball – and, for that matter, before girls basketball was much of a thing on Staten Island – and regularly beat the boys at their own games, died April 16 of complications related to Alzheimer’s Disease. A member of the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2017, Jordan was 77.
Before players like Gerry Lawless, Sheila Tighe, and K.C. Comeford changed the way girls were expected to play on Staten Island, and long before women like Nicky Anosike and Jen Derevjanik made their mark in the WNBA, Jordan was an outlier, holding her own in Stapleton schoolyard games against the neighborhood boys. One of those neighborhood kids, John DiMaggio, who would go on to be an All-Met basketball star at Wagner College, pushed Jordan to abandon her set shot in favor of a jumper. They nailed a hoop to a telephone pole in the street, and wore it out over countless hours of practice, day and night.
It was her lifelong friend, Louise Dolce, now Louise Nicolosi, who recruited Jordan to join the parish basketball team at Immaculate Conception. “I was two years older, and the team captain,” Nicolosi said. “But Brenda was our mentor. She wanted to win every game. She taught us so much, and we started winning Island championships.”
In the summer she pitched and played shortstop for the Rosebank Cardinals – a boys team – in the Police Athletic League, only occasionally removing her ubiquitous baseball cap, so some beaten club could have their “Omigod, the pitcher’s a girl!” moment.
As an eighth grader at St. Joseph Hill Academy, Jordan was watching the varsity basketball team practice, when a loose ball bounced her way. She retrieved it and flipped it behind her back toward the hoop, off the backboard, and in. The coach, Ruth Burbank was watching. Without a second thought, Burbank announced, “You’re on the team next year!”
She scored 1,180 points in just 46 games at Hill, averaging 25 a game over four varsity seasons. The first time she broke the school single-game scoring record, with 46, the old record belonged to her older sister Maureen. The last time, she poured in 53 in a 67-51 victory against St. Peter’s, outscoring the program that would become the standard for girls basketball on the Island, all by herself.
The high school boys who came to watch her play – that was something else people weren’t accustomed to in those days – started calling her “Cousy,” an homage to the Boston Celtic star Bob Cousy, then in his 1950s prime.
“She was unstoppable,” Jordan’s old teammate Louise Nicolosi said. And then, after a pause, “but never a show-off.”
She stayed close to the games after high school, as a player in the Staten Island Women’s Softball League; and as a light-hearted presence on the bench at St. Peter’s softball and basketball games.
More recently, Jordan and Nicolosi, still best friends after all the years, reveled in watching the growth of women’s college basketball – Jordan was an incurable Notre Dame fan – and the WNBA; a joy informed by those championship runs in elementary school when the game plan, as Nicolisi remembers it, was as pure as one of the jumpers Jordan learned from John DiMaggio.
“Get the ball to Brenda, and we win.”
