I had this problem recently. The solution was to install Python 2.7 as a software collection: https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/python27/

This installs it to /opt/rh, and you can run commands that need them with "scl enable python27 mything" or by sourcing /opt/rh/python27/enable in a script to set up PATH, etc.