The basketball in Claude Johnson’s hands was far from anything the Thunder players gathered before him had ever played with.
Laces protruded from its worn leather side, laces that had to be undone in order to manually inflate it.
Johnson, executive director of the Black Fives Foundation, held an early piece of black basketball history, and he was about to hand it to a group of today’s basketball players.
As the founder of an organization that seeks to, as its mission statement says, “research, preserve, showcase, and teach” the pre-1950s history of African-Americans in basketball, Johnson has worked with NBA teams before.