Much blame has been heaped upon the U.S. players for their selfish, uninspired play, their failure to adjust to enemy tactics, their poor sportsmanship. But why should we blame those who served? Did we learn nothing from Vietnam? The problem was not those who took up the honor of our Grand Old Flag and sacrificed a month out of their busy NBA off-season to fight for what is right. The problem was those who did not.

And those who did not were the finest basketball players in the land — Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Tracy McGrady, Allen Iverson. Even worse were Jason Kidd and Ray Allen, who signed up for service, thumped their chest about it in TV commercials but then left the team like rat deserters in the night. Sure, Kidd and Allen, along with O'Neal and Duncan, claimed "injuries," but what if minor owies had stopped The Greatest Generation in World War II? We'd all be forced to spend our fall Sundays watching soccer and sumo wrestling, that's what.

Without our top players, what was left of the U.S. team turned out to be cannon fodder for Argentina, Yugoslavia and Spain, the foes who vanquished Our Boys and, incidentally, had no trouble getting THEIR best and brightest to serve. You know how committed they were? To get in better fighting shape, NBA player and Yugoslav center Vlade Divac quit smoking! Can you make any greater sacrifice?

The people can go only where their leaders take them. But look at the signal O'Neal, Bryant and their ilk sent to the American people: Staying on top of the world does not matter. Is it any wonder that most of the games in Indianapolis were played in front of so few Americans? Five thousand Turks showed up, Germans delighted in Duke University; Cameron Crazies-style organized cheers (all on the count of funf); and Puerto Ricans exploded into a percussionistic frenzy that hasn't been seen since Sheila E.'s first solo album. Yet Americans got more excited over Jimmy Buffett's new restaurant, filling that with more people than saw the United States play Puerto Rico in Conseco Fieldhouse.

Our basketball traitors, so unreliable they make Benedict Arnold spin off the wrong pivot foot in his grave, obviously have put their individual financial success above their love of country, failing to realize that only eternal vigilance and a strong defense, whether it be man-to-man or zone, will keep basketball the American game that it is. (Yes, I know basketball was invented by a Canadian, but the knowledge that our neighbor to the north could lay claim to the sport at any time should keep us on at least an orange-level homeland security alert.)

So the question is, what are we as a nation to do with these cowards who, when the country called for them, let the machine pick it up? Tar and feather them? Put them in the stockade? Take away their Escalade privileges?

The beauty of this nation we call the United States of America is that we are all free to have our own feelings and deliver our own responses to those that have made American the laughingstock of the world's basketball playground. And my response is to wag my left index finger and say: for shame. For shame!

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.