All stars until dunked by Kiwis

Of the major American sports, basketball is the only one that is totally indigenous: it was invented at a Massachusetts YMCA in 1891 by Dr James Naismith, who was anxious to keep young Christian men healthily occupied on cold New England winter nights.

It is, arguably, the quintessential American sport too: the game of the ghettoes and almost every suburban driveway. The idea that any other country might be better at it than the United States has always been laughable.

Like England in pre-war soccer the US used to treat international competition with disdain. But at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 their professionals joined in and created the "Dream Team", who demolished the world. Whenever the US had been able to field their pros since then they had won - 58 in a row. Furthermore, in this year's World Championships they had home advantage, playing in Indianapolis, regarded as the most basketball-crazed city on the planet.

The results were stunning. They lost not once, not twice, but three times. When the tournament finished on Sunday, with Yugoslavia crowned as champions, the US finished sixth, two places below New Zealand. Through failing to get a medal they are now far from certain of qualifying for the next Olympics.

They did not field their strongest team. Basketball is out of season and marquee names such as Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant had better things to do. But this was a team of top-flight professionals, most of whom have been good enough to play in all-star games - the benchmark of excellence in American sport - and the idea that they might prove inferior to anyone, never mind New Zealand, was in nobody's script. But then, in far more sombre and important ways than this, it is the week for the US to confront the concept of its vulnerability.

Even on the sports pages, however, the gnashing of teeth has been subdued. The rhythm of American sport is inexorable. It is the start of the gridiron season and approaching the climax of the baseball season (saved from a premature close when the planned strike was called off with three hours to spare). Basketball is important, but not just now.

And the US does have this mental block about international events. The Olympics are one thing. But a mere world championship? Indianapolis, which will turn out en masse for a high school game, cold-shouldered the event. The US-Spain game got an official crowd of 4,469.

The organisers appear to have accepted that they pitched the price of tickets insanely high and picked the wrong city. Cosmopolitan events work best over here when they can draw on the ethnic supporters cheering on their own teams; that was the secret of the 1994 World Cup. In New York or California they might have found a few New Zealanders. In the homogenous heartland, where few new migrants penetrate, no one wanted to know.

But in the offices of the National Basketball Association they are now far from indifferent. This is a thunderingly successful operation, renowned for its awesome marketing and greatly admired by other sports. It will never again allow a team to enter any competition quite as casually prepared as this one, for sure, but the problem may go deeper than that.

All the NBA's marketing has been centred on star individuals and the game has increasingly been skewed that way. "It's one guy on the side, dribble, dribble, dribble, and everyone else get out of the way" as one old coach put it this week. "That's not really basketball."

Many of the overseas players are active in the NBA and have learned skills from their masters (there, you never thought there might be an analogy with English cricket, did you?) but at the same time retaining the passion and discipline of their own game.

"I think the young kid in Europe is getting better training, said the shocked US coach George Karl. "The money, the greed of the NBA, does that have any effect on our competitive nature? Yeah, you could write that." David Stern, the NBA commissioner, declined to comment on this theory. Maybe he was too busy hunting for New Zealand in his atlas.