Vintage “Rawlings RSS Official” Red White and Blue paneled “ABA Mike Storen COMMISSIONER”
Rare Official Rawlings ABA Mike Storen basketball displays the classic red, white, and blue ABA colors, which helped to set this flashier league apart from its older and more established counterpart, the NBA, which used orange balls.
This ball shows tremendous signs of game usage, but this survivor still holding air. This is one of the few remaining survivors that is a recent discovery from a collector’s garage.
Because the fact that this was a fledgling league that tried vehemently to compete with the NBA the distribution and budget was far inferior to that of the NBA which means that very few of these original specimens exist today. We can not stress how rare an artifact such as this ball actually is. Storen was commissioner for only one season (1973-74).
Side note: Mike Storen was a successful ABA executive, building strong teams in Indiana and Kentucky. His daughter Hanna [Storen] Storm is a very successful sports broadcaster known to most for her NBA coverage and a wide range of work on ESPN.