Sideline Cut: In November, 1994, I got courtside tickets to an NBA game featuring the Boston Celtics and the Phoenix Suns. This was in the old Boston Garden, a comically haughty old mansion with terrible lighting and dangerously narrow aisles. It was torn down a year later.

But these tickets were literally priceless in the sense that they were corporate-owned and never entered the public sphere. A second-division ballplayer turned barman whom I was friends with knew someone who knew someone, and that Friday evening we were, unbelievably, in possession of these front-row tickets and drinking beers in one of the hard chaw bars found nearby at North Station.

It was a great game to be at because Charles Barkley, the self-styled bad boy of the NBA, was, as they say, "in town" with Phoenix. Also included in their line-up was Danny Ainge, the choirboy guard making a sentimental return to the Boston court on which he had won three NBA championships along with the great Larry Bird.

The Celtics' pin-up was another ageing superstar, Dominique Wilkins, the only man alive who could match Michael Jordan in terms of aerial capability.

The last echoes of Boston's claims to basketball pre-eminence were just about discernible during that period, although the Celtics were definitely in decline.

This game, however, had a vintage feel to it, and it turned out to be a classic that went into overtime, shaking off the sleepy sense of deep winter routine that often characterises NBA games. It is one of the few ticket stubs from a sporting event that I have kept.

But I remember two specific events from that evening. In making a presentation to Ainge before the game, a television network persuaded the player to relive that night, back in the 1980s, when he had, well, bitten an opposition player called Tree Rollins during a row. Rollins was a stunningly built Afro-American forward, a huge man, and Ainge a sunny and devout athlete from Brigham Young University. During a skirmish on the court, Ainge ended up digging his teeth into Rollins to escape his clutches, an act that endeared him to the Boston fans.

The other aspect was the behaviour of a Boston couple who had acquired a kind of fame for proudly attending every Celtics game in their courtside seats dressed in green velour outfits that guaranteed them television exposure as backdrops to Magic Johnson or whoever. Back when the BBC produced a brief but brilliant NBA series in the 1980s, you would see the pair of them, lurid and leprechaun-ed up, part of the Garden scenery. It was disconcerting to find that they actually existed, that they arrived from the outside world and weren't just sports props. But they took their places three or four seats down from us and from the warm-up they began to taunt and provoke Charles Barkley. It was nothing racist, so far as we could gauge, but it was incessant and irritating.

And their baiting was unpleasant because it held an assumption that they were entitled to engage the player in this way. The thought occurred then that Barkley, with his tinderbox temper, might lose it, and by the fourth quarter we kind of hoped he might, so irritating were these fans. But Charles just kept scoring and laughing his manic, wide-eyed, gum-shield laugh and throwing the odd putdown in their direction. There was no harm.

But the details of what was just a typical, forgettable night in the history of the NBA came back to me as I watched, with some incredulity, the already notorious footage of Indiana's Ron Artest attacking the Detroit Pistons fans last Friday night.

It was one of those sporting moments that leap the cultural boundaries, broadcast into Irish homes normally oblivious to the happenings in the NBA - just as Eric Cantona's kung-fu leap at the Crystal Palace fan would make it onto barroom televisions in Dakota and Nebraska if it happened today.

The NBA has undergone a vast cultural shift in the 20 years since the Celtics ruled the game. Ever since the retirement of Larry Bird, the absence of truly exceptional, kick-ass white players has become a kind of an awkward topic. In 1992, the celebrated Olympic Dream Team featured four white members: Bird, John Stockton, Chris Mullins and Christian Laettner. That was on what was supposedly the finest team ever assembled. Now, with the Olympics beneath the interest of contemporary NBA players, the league still struggled greatly to find any white players worth selecting for Athens.

When Bird entered the league in 1981, he immortally declaimed that he was "just a hick from French Lick", a town in Indiana. That hayseed sentiment and the sight of this country bumpkin engaging in an elemental dual against Magic Johnson re-invigorated the NBA. Bird represented all the values held dear in the Midwestern prairie belt populated predominantly by white farming communities; Johnson was a young, black, urban sophisticate, smiling as he went about inspiring a new generation of ghetto children with a style of basketball that was inimitable.

Then Jordan came along in 1984 with his dreamlike game of power and beauty, playing basketball in a way that appeared to rip up all the coaching manuals even though Jordan was among the most rigorous executioners of basic theory that ever lived.

Since that period, heirs to Larry Bird have been hard to find while Jordan has any number of pale imitators posturing as his successor. The game has become so much faster, it has gone street, mixing power and grace and individual brilliance - and mistakes. The league is 85 per cent black in racial make-up now and in image and style has changed irrevocably. That relatively sudden shift has created a degree of unease, and all the theory and criticisms levelled at the NBA are indirect complaints about the diminishing influence of white players. The pervasion of tattoos and rap music is constantly referred to in negative terms. The decline in standard shooting and passing is an oblique but unmistakable hint that contemporary NBA players (i.e., black players) do not have enough respect for the game to practice at it as former (white) stars did.

Modern NBA players are recruited from a tender age, often weeded out from deprived socio-economic backgrounds and advised very clearly that their path to a life of untold riches lay through basketball. By high school, they are either contenders or has-beens: by their early 20s, they are either millionaires or failures. The system is cold, its turnover ruthless, its material rewards infinite. It still contains the best athletes in the world. Yet although in spirit and style it belongs to the playground now, it is being aimed at an audience willing to believe the game still bears some relationship to the slow, methodical, jump-shooting and - yes - white game so revered across the American plains.

It has led to a strange scenario, the inverse of which would be Phil Mickelson walking up the 18th at Augusta to an almost exclusively black gallery. Like America itself, the NBA is brimming with racial undercurrents and every so often, when fissures appear, there is the potential for the anarchy that occurred last weekend.

What it all suggests, though, is that the NBA is in trouble. They used to call Bird the Great White Hope and there aren't any more of his type left. What remains is a fairly brutal set of stereotypes that harks all the way back to the days of Abe Lincoln.

As a professional athlete, Artest reacted irresponsibly. But would the denunciations have been quite so vocal and outraged if a white, "All-American" superstar responded similarly to having a container of beer thrown at him? And given America's history, is the sight of a white man throwing something at a black man who is, in essence, performing for the entertainment of that white man, not absolutely revolting and incendiary?

And when you think about it, isn't the wonder not that Ron Artest leaped into the crowd to take justice into his own hands but that it does not happen in American basketball theatres every night of the week?