the grooves...
Why dont use a texture for it?
edit: a file texture of course.
Do not have any glue about renderman coding but thats how i would do it with maya shaders. You eventually translate it to renderman.
You probably try to project four ramps at the basketball. two of them need to be set to "Type->Circular Ramp" the other two are Type U or V. The color entry positions of all the ramps should represent a thin white line on black back at the mid so that the output gives white circles at the circular ramp and white lines at the U and V ramps. Have a look at a basketball so you will know how to project all the ramps. You will need to put the outputs of all projections into a plusMinusAverage that is set to add. At some points the output of the plusMinusAverage will have a value of 2, thats bad for your network, so use a clamp node to get it back to a maximum of 1. Now invert the whole thing with a reverse node and plug the output wherever you need this groove pattern.
Just as inspiration.