ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE early 1990s, Jerome Kersey was the object of a great romance.

Kersey and his teammates with the Portland Trail Blazers sometimes couldn't pay for their meals at local restaurants, but not because they didn't have enough money. Blazers fans who, to paraphrase Stevie Wonder, loved their team too much, maybe three much, were eager to pick up the tab.

"Some other patron in the restaurant would it, or sometimes the manager would say, 'We want to buy you dinner,'" Kersey says. "We never went out looking for free dinners, it just happened. We'd say no. but they'd ,say it was their pleasure." Such was the love between the city and the team.

This season, Kersey rejoined a very different Blazers team as an executive. The franchise's relationship with its fans has deteriorated in a way that's unprecedented in the annals of sports. On a team now known as the Jail Blazers, Bonzi Wells' middle-finger salute to the home fans earlier this season was just another item on a long laundry list of ugly episodes by a team of malcontents (Wells was soon thereafter dealt to the Memphis Grizzlies).

If the tension between Portland's players and its fans was a unique situation, the Blazers would be a cautionary tale. Instead, they're the poster children of a leaguewide problem: The days of Doc, Magic, Bird, and MJ--who dominated BASKETBALL DIGESTS first 30 years--are dead and gone, and today's stars haven't spurred fans to the same levels of adoration.

Attendance, though buoyed by Jordan's latest comeback, has been gradually slipping since 1995. Network television ratings are on a nine-season schneid. Superstars are more likely to be the subject of controversy and derision than adulation. Where is the love?

Perhaps the reason is simple: There simply aren't players in the NBA today with the electrifying genius of MJ, Magic, et al. The last time the NBA hit an ebb in popularity, during the late '70s and early '80s, the league was between the Russell/Chamberlain/West/Robertson halcyon days and the new rivalries that would push the game to greater heights. That might be one reason, but it doesn't account for the frustration shown by both fans and players alike.

MORE MONEY, MORE PROBLEMS

Ask older fans if today's players are paid too much, and you'll probably get a resounding yes. Never mind that the players have an agreement with the owners to take roughly half of the league's earnings--an agreement which has been in place, in some form, since 1983, making the NBA the first of the four major sports leagues to have a salary cap.

It's an old axe, but the unprecedented wealth of current players has created a new side effect: It keeps them at a greater distance from the rank and file fans.

"The whole league has changed," says Kersey, who retired as a player in 2001 after 17 seasons. "Players aren't as visible in the community anymore. Guys have all kind of things happening off the court. The entourages have gotten a little bigger."

Sacramento Kings forward Tony Massenburg, who has been floating around the NBA since 1990, has noted the same change.

"Look at the Kobe situation," Massenburg says. "He chartered flights back and forth from Colorado. Ten years ago, nobody would have imagined an NBA player being able to charter his own plane. Teams have their own planes, but now players are able to charter planes for themselves. Nobody did that back in the day, but now it's pretty standard across the league that players who want to do that, can. That's just one example of how things have changed."

And today's stars are doing more than just living large--they're open about it in ways never seen before, showing off their cribs, rides, and social lives on MTV and ESPN. Magic might have been spotted in

full-length fur coats, and Dr. J and Clyde Frazier may have sported threads worthy of the cover of Jet, but today's players are in a different category. That category, can, in short, be called hip-hop.

"[Hip-hop] is an attitude," Massenburg explains. "It's more of an in-your-face kind of thing."

Turn on MTV and you'll see what he's talking about. Much of play- today's hip-hop is about getting a piece of the action any way you have to, enjoying it to the fullest (or more exactly, living like a pimp), and not worrying about the consequences--a blend of materialism and fatalism born in the drug culture and imported to mainstream America.

"Hip-hop is influencing society, and so it's influencing the sports world, too," says Massenburg, as he slides off a pair of headphones that are mainlining Jay-Z into his cerebrum. "Sports is just an abbreviated version of society. Changes in everyday life eventually show up on the basketball court."

THE HIP-HOP GENERATION

Got a chip on my shoulder the size of the Golden Nugget in Vegas/And [#%@!] being famous, I came to get the butters/I came from the gutter, my success in this game/is sort of like "Projectic Justice," a payment for brushes with police officers, a peace offering

--Jay-Z, "Some People Hate"

Can the me-against-the-world weltanschauungs of players such as Rasheed Wallace and Allen Iverson be traced back to the music they listen to? Or did the same society that produced Jay-Z's chart-topping rapping also give us Iverson's rap about practice and Wallace's rap about the being exploited by the league (even as he completes a six-year, $80 million contract)? Either way, it's clear that some of today's players think that the NBA lifestyle is something that's owed, not earned.

Kersey, who as director of player programs is responsible for "providing support on and off the court for every member of the Trail Blazers team," is trying to shift the players' mindsets by posing it as a simple question of doing business.

"We just have to concentrate on making the players aware not only of how they play the game but of the fact that a lot of people are coming to see them play," Kersey says. "You have to make players aware of the business side of basketball. If you don't keep the fans and income is weak for the NBA, that will effect what kind of dollars you can make."

Whether hip-hop is really to blame or just a bogeyman, not everyone in the league appreciates it. Cleveland Cavaliers coach Paul Silas, who as a player was president of the NBA players' association, this season banned hardcore rap from the stereo in the Cavs' locker room before games.

"I can't stand it," Silas says of the music "I let them play it for a while but then they have to concentrate on the game. You really can't concentrate on the game with that stuff going on. I want them to visualize who they're playing against. I don't want it blaring when some guys might want to get within themselves and meditate."

The in-your-face attitude of today's players extends to their dealings with the front office as well. Dennis Johnson, former coach of the youngest, hip-hoppingest team in the NBA, the Los Angeles Clippers, says the players of today are less afraid to take on management than ever before.

"They'll challenge everything--things that happen on the court or things that happen off the court," says Johnson, who as a player won championships with the Boston Celtics and Seattle SuperSonics. "They want a right to know. The crowd from 20 years ago, if [management] said it was right they took it"

This seems like a good change--when disputes are handled with the enthusiasm of paying customers kept in mind.

DAVID STERN AND THE ESPN EFFECT

Although the players are evolving, some of the changes in the NBA's culture can be traced back to the league itself. Early in the David Stern era, the NBA decided to market its personalities even more so than its teams.

"They have theme parks, and we have theme parks," Stern told Sports Illustrated in 1991, comparing the N BA to the Walt Disney Company. "Only we call them arenas. They have characters: Mickey Mouse, Goofy. Our characters are named Magic and Michael."

As Stern was building his "characters," ESPN and emerging sports media enterprises were priming the pump for the NBA with a steady stream of highlights, usually featuring dunks.

"Today's players are more celebrities," says Johnson, who currently works as an advance scout for the Blazers. "ESPN has made them that. I hate to say somebody has made them that, because they're good."

At first glance, Cherokee Parks would appear--body emblazoned in tattoos--to be just another devotee of the hip-hop lifestyle. But Parks' four-year basketball education at Duke under coach Mike Krzyzewski has given him an insight and advantage over many of his peers.

"[Younger players] are better one-on-one, but they miss out on a lot of the team concepts you learn in college," Parks says. "Passing the ball, defensive positioning, setting screens ... in college you spend a lot of time in practice working on those things. In the NBA there isn't time; you have a game one night, maybe you have one practice to try to get ready for the next game."