A gay ex-NBA player confesses, an ex-NBA All-Star disses and the NBA flourishes in Las Vegas. Ah, the near poetry of professional basketball.

It does seem proper to ask what is wrong with this picture, and I don't mean the one where NBA commissioner David Stern is trying not to look down the costume of a Vegas showgirl.

On the other hand, maybe I do.

Whatever happens in Las Vegas this weekend will not, of course, stay in Las Vegas, since that is not the point.

The point of the NBA All-Star Game is to spread the word, display the talent, convert the indifferent and remind the unmoved that it is time to pay attention.

This is the rest stop between the Super Bowl and March Madness, the spot on the sports calendar that signals football is gone, baseball is yawning and Michael Jordan isn't coming back.

Up until now, the pro season has been so much calisthenics, disturbed slightly by the trade of Allen Iverson, the brawl in Madison Square Garden and the idle wonder of whether Charles Barkley will one day just explode like an overfilled inner tube.

The mystery from here will be whether Dallas or Phoenix gets the chance to beat Detroit or Miami for the NBA title.

There was the published admission by a mostly unknown, mostly British, former NBA player - John Amaechi - that he is a homosexual, which was mostly ignored until five-time All-Star Tim Hardaway blurted out on the radio that he hated gay people.

This was done with Hardaway as an official NBA representative promoting the All-Star Game and caused Stern to issue an official denial that Hardaway was speaking for anyone but himself. Hardaway was excused from further promotional duties.

And while all this was going on, a large All-Star jersey was being draped over a fake Statue of Liberty in Las Vegas. And that is not as much disrespect for a national icon as it being in Las Vegas in the first place.

The NBA - which has, if I remember the press release, declared bling to be bad - has chosen to collaborate with the glitziest, phoniest, most decadent, most tasteless place on Earth, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Recalling our own modest hosting of the same event a couple of years ago, other than a surplus of stretch limos and impolite stares at Yao Ming, little harm was done in Denver. No agendas were filled, no morals were bruised, no one wore fewer clothes than the players themselves.

If the NBA escapes Las Vegas as unscathed as it got out of our city, it should wipe its brow, exhale quietly and be glad it got away with being common.

Clearly, the NBA would prefer less tumult all around, it having a record of being against everything - individualism, style, sass or opinion.

So why would it volunteer to associate with a place that uses its games so deliberately as gambling items, unless maybe it is simply showing communities that do not bend to the wishes of new arenas or owner perks that there is a place to go whenever it feels like packing its bags.

The good folks in Sacramento and Memphis and Seattle and Milwaukee should pay attention, as if they could hear over the clanking of the dollar slots.

Vegas wants a sports team, any kind of sports team, having gotten a taste with Jerry Tarkanian's semipros at UNLV.

But love of sports has nothing to do with Las Vegas' motives. Simple greed is the reason for almost everything, and there is no way to deny that the NBA is endorsing those windowless gambling houses full of people in tuxedos taking money from people in distress.

Stern, once on the congressional record against gambling, just announced that gambling is the American way.

There is a basic dishonesty in attracting any sports event to Las Vegas. This All-Star Game, any regular-season game, as boxing was when boxing mattered, is merely a lure, the come-on for the regular line of business, which is separating gamblers from their money.

There is something overwhelmingly evil about gambling on the scale on which it is done in Nevada, even if the place would simply not exist unless people wanted such a place.

But it should stay exactly where it is, out of the way and out of touch with modesty.

lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2411

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