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The first person to break the color barrier in professional men's basketball was a Japanese American named

Watt Misaka, a 5-7 point guard from Ogden, Utah, who was a first-round draft pick of the New York

Knicks in 1947, said to be strong and built for speed. He came to be known as kilowatt.

And for University of Utah fans, he was a legend.

Jerry Rappere, the artistic director of the Plan B Theater Company, knew the basics of this story.

He says it all seemed inspiring and all, but in some ways, incomplete.

I actually can't even pinpoint when I first heard about Wama Saka.

But it kind of stopped me in my tracks.

As a Japanese American man living in a place where there aren't very many Japanese Americans,

this person who should be vaunted in so many ways.

In a different timeline, we would be going to the Masaka instead of the Huntsman to watch

men's basketball, maybe.

And I was trying to figure out why I didn't know more about him.

When I asked other people about him, nobody seemed to know who he was or what they knew

is he had played basketball at the U.

So it was the intersection between my theatrically inquisitive self and my, me being a

Japanese person, wondering what the story really was.

So then I started digging and started reading about him and learning about him

and realized that I was just getting the same versions of the same facts told in different ways.

There was a lot about him, but not a lot about him.

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