By Franz Lidz
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | SUBSCRIBE
OCTOBER 2017
The basketball is scuffed and scruffy, its provenance unknown, its rotating tricolors, when in motion, creating a mesmerizing pinwheel effect.
This sacred relic—an official game ball used by the late, lamented American Basketball Association—reposes behind glass at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. It came to symbolize the ABA, a renegade professional league that ditched the traditional brown ball almost as an act of youthful defiance.
