PHOENIX — Business was brisk on a street corner outside U.S. Airways Center, where the economic meltdown seemed to be taking a weekend holiday. Instead of people looking for jobs, there were people with thick wads of hundred-dollar bills more than eager to exchange them for a few choice seats inside.

Their money got them tickets, and the tickets got them a show.

No league depends on star power more than the NBA, and it was on display everywhere in the league's annual midseason celebration. If Kobe and LeBron on the same court wasn't enough, there was the usual display of former greats along with rappers, singers and the glittering types who came just to be seen.

Best of all, there wasn't one person among the 20,000 in the house wondering whether Shaquille O'Neal was on human growth hormone.

After a week of tolerating the seamy underbelly of sports, yesterday gave us a badly needed reprieve from news of all things A-Rod and the bumbling idiots who run baseball. It gave us a chance to celebrate instead of speculate, a chance to believe for at least one day that the athletes we saw didn't need any help from a test tube.

The drivers in the Daytona 500 certainly weren't juiced. When they talk about testing in NASCAR they're talking about the cars, and the only cheating that goes on happens under the hood.

More remarkably, perhaps, is how the NBA — a league that has had more than its share of problems with recreational drugs — seems to have mostly escaped the suspicion that its players take performance-enhancing drugs. While baseball's All-Star games have been filled with juicers both known and unknown, the NBA's big weekend takes place with few questions about what's real and what's not.

"It helps tremendously," Tim Duncan said. "There are no questions. They know we're tested. They know we're clean and they know the product that's put on the floor are natural athletes that are performing the way they perform."

The reasons behind that are many, though commissioner David Stern would like everyone to believe that the league's drug-testing program is so stringent that it's almost impossible to cheat. Olympic drug-testing experts say that's not entirely true because there're not enough tests and they don't test for enough things, but what is true is that everyone in the league is tested four times a year and it's truly random.

The real reason, though, may be that steroids never became a big part of the NBA culture because the perception among players is that they wouldn't help much.

"Our game is sheer athleticism and running up and down," Chauncey Billups said. "It's not about who's got the biggest muscles. Our game is more athletic."

That's a product people won't mind paying money to see.

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg@ap.org.