duncan228
02-15-2009, 08:56 PM
NBA all-star game a chance to celebrate drug-free event (http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5i6K1FgZ6OGCBE2odlYMPQo1-a7Ig)
PHOENIX — Business was brisk on a street corner outside U.S. Airways Center, where the economic meltdown seemed to be taking a weekend holiday. Instead of people looking for jobs, there were people with thick wads of hundred-dollar bills more than eager to exchange them for a few choice seats inside.
Their money got them tickets, and the tickets got them a show.
No league depends on star power more than the NBA, and it was on display everywhere in the league's annual midseason celebration. If Kobe and LeBron on the same court wasn't enough, there was the usual display of former greats along with rappers, singers and the glittering types who came just to be seen.
Best of all, there wasn't one person among the 20,000 in the house wondering whether Shaquille O'Neal was on human growth hormone.
After a week of tolerating the seamy underbelly of sports, Sunday gave us a badly needed reprieve from news of all things A-Rod and the bumbling idiots who run baseball. It gave us a chance to celebrate instead of speculate, a chance to believe for at least one day that the athletes we saw didn't need any help from a test tube.
The drivers in the Daytona 500 certainly weren't juiced. When they talk about testing in NASCAR they're talking about the cars, and the only cheating that goes on happens under the hood.
More remarkably, perhaps, is how the NBA - a league that has had more than its share of problems with recreational drugs - seems to have mostly escaped the suspicion that its players take performance-enhancing drugs. While baseball's all-star games have been filled with juicers both known and unknown, the NBA's big weekend takes place with few questions about what's real and what's not.
"It helps tremendously," Tim Duncan said. "There are no questions. They know we're tested. They know we're clean and they know the product that's put on the floor are natural athletes that are performing the way they perform."
The reasons behind that are many, though commissioner David Stern would like everyone to believe that the league's drug-testing program is so stringent that it's almost impossible to cheat. Olympic drug-testing experts say that's not entirely true because there's not enough tests and they don't test for enough things, but what is true is that everyone in the league is tested four times a year and it's truly random.
The real reason, though, may be that steroids never became a big part of the NBA culture because the perception among players is that they wouldn't help much.
"I don't know why, but it's never been a part of our game," Chauncey Billups said. "Our game is sheer athleticism and running up and down. It's kind of mental. It's not about who's got the biggest muscles. Our game is more athletic. You can't really be as physical as it once was, so you don't need to do anything like that."
Being suspicion-free wasn't the only thing the NBA was celebrating this weekend. The league's appointment of a retired general as its referee czar seems to have mostly put the Tim Donaghy scandal behind it, and Stern and union chief Billy Hunter appeared together Saturday to say they were already talking in advance about a new collective bargaining agreement to deal with current economic realities.
Stern said attendance and revenues should remain flat, or dip just slightly this season, and television ratings are up. And the league is doing something baseball should have done years ago and starting games in its championship finals-at least those on Sunday - an hour earlier so that more kids can watch.
And then there's the matter of Bill Russell.
The former Celtics great turned 75 this week, and he's in mourning because his wife recently died. But he stood next to Stern on Saturday, choking up at times at her memory, and thanked the league for its decision to name the finals MVP award after him.
"This is one of my proudest moments in basketball," Russell said.
In a league built on stars, Russell was one of the earliest - and the biggest. He won 11 championships with Boston because, as he said, the only statistic he ever thought about was winning.
Today's NBA stars may not be as single-minded, as the fuss over LeBron's recent triple-double that wasn't showed. And none of them are going to win 11 titles because times have changed and parity won't allow it.
But with LeBron and Kobe the league has two stars who can carry it for years, much like Michael Jordan did in his prime and Larry Bird and Magic Johnson did before that. They'll set records, win their share of championships, and give people a reason who might not usually care a reason to watch.
Best of all, fans will be able to believe they're doing it naturally.
That's a product people won't mind paying money to see.
PHOENIX — Business was brisk on a street corner outside U.S. Airways Center, where the economic meltdown seemed to be taking a weekend holiday. Instead of people looking for jobs, there were people with thick wads of hundred-dollar bills more than eager to exchange them for a few choice seats inside.
Their money got them tickets, and the tickets got them a show.
No league depends on star power more than the NBA, and it was on display everywhere in the league's annual midseason celebration. If Kobe and LeBron on the same court wasn't enough, there was the usual display of former greats along with rappers, singers and the glittering types who came just to be seen.
Best of all, there wasn't one person among the 20,000 in the house wondering whether Shaquille O'Neal was on human growth hormone.
After a week of tolerating the seamy underbelly of sports, Sunday gave us a badly needed reprieve from news of all things A-Rod and the bumbling idiots who run baseball. It gave us a chance to celebrate instead of speculate, a chance to believe for at least one day that the athletes we saw didn't need any help from a test tube.
The drivers in the Daytona 500 certainly weren't juiced. When they talk about testing in NASCAR they're talking about the cars, and the only cheating that goes on happens under the hood.
More remarkably, perhaps, is how the NBA - a league that has had more than its share of problems with recreational drugs - seems to have mostly escaped the suspicion that its players take performance-enhancing drugs. While baseball's all-star games have been filled with juicers both known and unknown, the NBA's big weekend takes place with few questions about what's real and what's not.
"It helps tremendously," Tim Duncan said. "There are no questions. They know we're tested. They know we're clean and they know the product that's put on the floor are natural athletes that are performing the way they perform."
The reasons behind that are many, though commissioner David Stern would like everyone to believe that the league's drug-testing program is so stringent that it's almost impossible to cheat. Olympic drug-testing experts say that's not entirely true because there's not enough tests and they don't test for enough things, but what is true is that everyone in the league is tested four times a year and it's truly random.
The real reason, though, may be that steroids never became a big part of the NBA culture because the perception among players is that they wouldn't help much.
"I don't know why, but it's never been a part of our game," Chauncey Billups said. "Our game is sheer athleticism and running up and down. It's kind of mental. It's not about who's got the biggest muscles. Our game is more athletic. You can't really be as physical as it once was, so you don't need to do anything like that."
Being suspicion-free wasn't the only thing the NBA was celebrating this weekend. The league's appointment of a retired general as its referee czar seems to have mostly put the Tim Donaghy scandal behind it, and Stern and union chief Billy Hunter appeared together Saturday to say they were already talking in advance about a new collective bargaining agreement to deal with current economic realities.
Stern said attendance and revenues should remain flat, or dip just slightly this season, and television ratings are up. And the league is doing something baseball should have done years ago and starting games in its championship finals-at least those on Sunday - an hour earlier so that more kids can watch.
And then there's the matter of Bill Russell.
The former Celtics great turned 75 this week, and he's in mourning because his wife recently died. But he stood next to Stern on Saturday, choking up at times at her memory, and thanked the league for its decision to name the finals MVP award after him.
"This is one of my proudest moments in basketball," Russell said.
In a league built on stars, Russell was one of the earliest - and the biggest. He won 11 championships with Boston because, as he said, the only statistic he ever thought about was winning.
Today's NBA stars may not be as single-minded, as the fuss over LeBron's recent triple-double that wasn't showed. And none of them are going to win 11 titles because times have changed and parity won't allow it.
But with LeBron and Kobe the league has two stars who can carry it for years, much like Michael Jordan did in his prime and Larry Bird and Magic Johnson did before that. They'll set records, win their share of championships, and give people a reason who might not usually care a reason to watch.
Best of all, fans will be able to believe they're doing it naturally.
That's a product people won't mind paying money to see.