10:27 AM EST on Tuesday, November 23, 2004

It's now four days later. Four days of seeing the replay over and over. Four days after a terrible incident that now seems as familiar as some home movie. Four days of furor. Four days of seeing the replay burned into the national consciousness.

Four days after the brawl between the Pacers and the Pistons turned into one of the worst in sports history.

So what to make of it?

It's easy to demonize the troubled Ron Artest, to blame Friday night's fiasco on his going into the stands, the move that took a stereotypical NBA fight and escalated it into a national story. To say that if there was no Ron Artest then none of this would have happened, to blame everything on a problematic personality who has

become the newest poster child for NBA dysfunction.

But there's enough blame to go around to fill an entire arena, from the over-reaction of Ben Wallace, to the referees who should have gotten Artest out of the building quicker, to the lack of adequate security, to the fans who threw a match on Artest's anger.

So what to make of it?

How did an incident between two teams, one we've seen so many times before, escalate into something so ugly?

I suspect it's several things, none the least being the growing disconnect that exists between fans and players. Many players have come to be viewed by fans as spoiled, overpaid princes, whose sense of entitlement too often seems as large as their paychecks. It's a gulf only increased by the fact that, in the NBA anyway, the overwhelming majority of the players is black and the overwhelming majority of the fans is white.

Whatever the reasons, the disconnect is there, one that only seems to widen as both the salaries and ticket prices get bigger, the money coloring everything.

Why else do some fans think they have the right to yell obscenities at players? Why else do they think that the price of a ticket somehow makes them immune to the realities of every day life, namely that when you yell obscenities at people there might be repercussions?

Or do you really think you're going to hit Artest in the face with a plastic cup and not get some kind of reaction?

I also suspect that some of the roots of this is the legacy of the WWE, a generation of fans who have grown up with professional wrestling, a make-believe world where heroes and villains are all part of the show, and screaming obscenities at the villains is as much a part of it as body slams and fake blood.

The problem is that WWE performers are walking cartoons, not to be taken seriously. They are not perceived to be real people with real emotions. They are merely performers in the circus, right? But we live in a culture where the line got blurred a long time ago, where in a sense it's all WWE culture, the posturing of the players, the response of the fans -- everything.

That's the world that's been the arena for a long time. We see it in the endless chest-bumping of the players, the look-at-me showmanship, the "gangsta" image that's so much a part of youth culture, one that so many young players so clearly identify with. We see it in the fans who too often bring their discontent into the arena, discontent at the players' attitudes, discontent on how the NBA has degenerated, discontent at the prices, discontent, period.

Couple that with a society hooked on violence, whether it's popular culture or crowds of jubilant fans celebrating winning teams. The kind of violence that too often seems to hang over situations like coastal fog over a summer resort, the sense that one wrong look, one wrong gesture, and it's all in your face.

Friday night we saw it turn into spontaneous combustion.

And, yes, this was an aberration. Yes, it probably would have been prevented if the plastic cup had missed Artest. Yes, there was the sense that it all got out of control too quickly, took on a life of its own, careening into chaos.

But Friday night was the NBA's worst nightmare: Players in the stands fighting with the fans. An arena out of control. The sense that anything could have happened. The worst kind of publicity for a league beset with public relations' problems to begin with, the perception that the NBA is full of too many players with too little respect for both the game, and the league that makes them millionaires.

That is what NBA commissioner David Stern responded to, doling out harsh suspensions in an attempt to stop the bleeding, trying to show that the league will not tolerate players going into the stands, will not tolerate the type of public relations holocaust that occurred Friday night.

But the larger problems remain.

Ron Artest, or no Ron Artest.