For now, league kisses off controversy

Talk about your great feel-good All-Star weekends ...

Of course, Vegas was awesome.

Whether that’s good or bad depends on whether you paid $200 to get into one of the parties where the star didn’t show -- Vince Carter, advertised as the host of a party in Paris Las Vegas, said he’d never heard of the party or the casino -- or actually got to see Prince jamming at 3 a.m.

Not that it was just a laugh-fest.

Amid reports of widespread mayhem, ESPN’s Bill Simmons wrote, “I know for a fact that the Strip was closed twice on Friday night because of shooting incidents (saw it myself), that there was a 20-person brawl outside the Mirage’s cab line at 5 a.m. that same night (my friend Marty saw it).”

AOL’s Jason Whitlock compared it to Atlanta’s Freaknik festival, which was canceled after it turned violent in 1999.

The game itself was the usual even-more-casual-than-summer-league exhibition. Aside from the parties, which were 24/7 and wall-to-wall, the neat events happened Saturday.

Gerald Green revived the dunk contest, jumping over 5-foot-9 defending champion Nate Robinson, who’d consented to take the place of the life-sized cardboard likeness Green had brought.

Best of all was Charles Barkley kissing 67-year-old referee Dick Bavetta on the lips after Charles had won their race.

Suddenly, love was breaking out all over. On ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” Tony Kornheiser called it a “lip lock.” When Bavetta showed up to work Wednesday’s Golden State-Memphis game, the Warriors’ mascot grabbed him and kissed him.

Fleeting as it all was, it was a welcome note in a league in which the ball can spark a controversy, not to mention seeing one of its greats go on a homophobic rant on the eve of the event.

Barkley remains one of the NBA’s greatest assets, even though he’s not technically in the NBA anymore, just because he’s so much fun.

Everyone in the NBA used to have more fun but that was in the pre-corporate, pre-multimillionaire days, before everyone began taking himself so seriously.

LeBron James, who just turned 22, was asked on a recent ESPN “Sunday Conversation” what his goal was.

“Global icon,” he said.

Actually, the weekend showed how much James has cooled off commercially while Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant and Gilbert Arenas have heated up.

After winning last season’s All-Star MVP award, James was asked at the media session why there were so many posters of other players on buildings and so few of his.

“I really don’t understand that,” said James, who’d noticed. “I don’t have an answer for that. Maybe we can go to Kinko’s, get some pictures and post them up on the walls.”

Nor was the press doting. The Washington Post’s Michael Lee, watching James and his grim-looking entourage emerge from a Hummer limo, wrote, “I thought Julius Caesar was somewhere in the middle of that gaggle but, alas, it was only LeBron.”

This is what happens when the media, sneaker companies, agents, et al, alight on you at 16 and you turn out to be the one in a million who lives up to the hype. You come out the other end as a superstar and a megalomaniac.

Or, as Commissioner David Stern likes to put it, “Welcome to my world.”

The vast bureaucracy known as the League Office is also a change from the little band of former GMs and ex-team publicists in the days when everyone got along. This is still a well-run league but no one gets along.

The Authority-Figure-Meets-Hip-Hop-Generation strife has taken a toll. Having seen his league bashed endlessly, Stern now campaigns zealously to enhance its image along with his wizardry in extending its brand.

Taking his All-Star game to Las Vegas was another coup, which could wind up with the NBA’s beating all the other leagues to the last great, untapped market.

However, Stern campaigns so vigorously, he seems to be falling for his own lines, as last week, when he called this “the golden era of the NBA” and the first D-League All-Star game “spectacular.”

The D-League stars were the players who were cut in NBA camps last fall, whose names we didn’t bother to learn because we knew they’d be gone soon.

On Sunday, Stern and Turner Sports President David Levy invited a small group of reporters to breakfast at the Mandalay Bay, where Stern announced bluntly that they wouldn’t bring the event back to the Thomas & Mack Center.

Everyone already knew a new arena was a prerequisite for Las Vegas’ getting a team. Eliminating the cheap option -- getting another All-Star game without a new arena -- was one more suggestion that Stern is serious about putting a team there.

Of course, the flirtation between the league and the city led to a great sensitivity to questions about gambling ... like the ones about Barkley’s talk of his huge losses.

If Barkley is impossible to embarrass, his boss isn’t. As reported by Slam magazine’s Lang Whitaker, Levy noted, “I think the media as well as Charles has talked about this too much.”

Stern: “And therefore ... “

Levy: “I will not talk to the media about my private talks with Charles.”

Not that it matters what Levy tells Barkley in those private talks, since Barkley couldn’t care less, which is what makes him so much fun.

After he’d outrun Bavetta, they brought out a blow-up of the $50,000 check that was being donated to the Las Vegas Boys Club in their names.

Barkley announced to the crowd and the TNT audience that they were donating “two blackjack hands to charity.”

I don’t know if this is the golden era, but we still have Charles.

mark.heisler@latimes.com