NBA All-Star Weekend: Did Vince McMahon and WWE Help David Stern Script This?

Professional wrestling, professional sports and pop culture have mixed for years.

That's only happened with greater—and more successful—frequency since Vince McMahon took over the "family business" from his father in the 1980s.

McMahon first thought to include celebrities and pro athletes in his shows, one of the main reasons that he succeeded in the wrasslin' game, while wealthy men such as Ted Turner floundered.

My 88-year-old grandmother still tells me stories of how she watched professional wrestling with her grandmother many, many years ago. She used to tell me the same stories when she saw that I was watching wrestling on television.

I don't watch wrestling as religiously as I did when I was younger.

If some of my details or name references are a bit off or outdated, I please ask that all WWE (and TNA, if there are any) fans forgive me, but continue to read the article, as I promise I do have a point.

McMahon and his company used to try to portray wrestling as "real."

We know that is not completely true. But it is also not completely false.

I knew from a fairly young age that story lines were scripted and certain people were going to win when the writers deemed it in everyone's best interest.

But I also knew that the pain was real. After all, how could you take the pain out of falling from a 20-foot cage through a table?

No one is talented enough of an actor to make that not hurt. The results are planned, but the action is legitimate.

Tired of fighting the critics, McMahon stop pretending everything was real, and renamed professional wrestling "Sports Entertainment."

Since then, he attracted some of the top athletes and celebrities to his shows.

From Cyndi Lauper to Pete Rose to Muhammad Ali to Bob Barker, everyone wanted to be a part of the WWE experience.

The NBA is no different.

Shaquille O'Neal was on an episode of Monday Night Raw around a year or so ago. He got into a "fight" with the Big Show, who is perhaps the only athlete to make Shaq look small.

Big Show even "fought" against Floyd Mayweather.

Maybe, if Manny Pacquiao signed on with the WWE, Mayweather would finally agree to take the fight the entire world wants to witness.

Nobody is too big to appear on WWE programming.

And nobody is too big to appear at an NBA game, especially when it comes to All-Star weekend in Los Angeles.

It looked like an awards show, only Dwyane Wade didn't hatch out of an egg and Kevin Garnett didn't use foul language to insult everyone (Actually, I can't be entirely sure about that second one).

TNT was smart enough to keep their microphones away from Garnett.

Let me make it clear that I don't think any professional or collegiate sport is fixed, rigged, planned or scripted. But anyone could have predicted the results from almost everything the 2011 NBA All-Star weekend.

It all began with the Celebrity game on Friday night.

Even though his team did not win and he only scored eight points, Justin Bieber was named as the MVP of the game.

How many 12-year-old girls do you figure voted in this poll?

My wife does not follow the league like she used to, but she knew before the game even tipped off that Bieber would win the MVP award.

We now jump to Saturday night.

I'm not saying that the Shooting Stars or Skills Challenge event were scripted.

There really wasn't enough fanfare involved anyway. It was fitting that the only player to wear a uniform from a California team won the Skills Challenge, even against more complete point guards such as Derrick Rose, Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook.

But kudos to Stephen Curry. He was impressive.

In the three-point contest, it also went down to an interesting finals, with Ray Allen and Paul Pierce of the Boston Celtics lumped in with James Jones of the hated Miami Heat.

Now, this was not a handicapped match, like you often see in wrestling. This would be the NBA's version of the triple-threat match, with Allen and Pierce playing the roles of former Degeneration X members Shawn Michael and Hunter Hearst Helmsley.

Since Jones plays for the Heat, he must have been the "heel" in this one, so picture the Million Dollar Man, Ted Dibiase. He was always the bad guy, right?

In the end, the "bad guy" won, with Jones capturing the title from two former winners, letting the Heat have a bit of revenge against the Celtics, who have defeated them in all three of their contests this season.

Thankfully, no steel chairs or sledgehammers were used to decide the outcome.

In the Slam Dunk Contest, did anyone truly feel that Blake Griffin, of the hometown Los Angeles Clippers, would not walk away with the trophy?

I'm not saying that his dunks were not impressive or that he did not deserve to win.

But even though John Cena seems to win the big events when he is supposed to, does it mean that he was always the better man?

Griffin may have been impressive, but Serge Ibaka got "jobbed," as they say in the wrestling business. Taking off from before the free throw line should have earned him higher scores.

It won the event for Julius Erving, Michael Jordan and Brent Barry, and they took off from closer to the hoop than Ibaka.

He also should have scored higher when he bit the stuffed animal off of the rim on his first dunk.

Although they are both youngsters, imagine Griffin as the guy who has already won over the fans, and Ibaka as the guy still trying to make a name for himself.

Much like McMahon would have scripted, Griffin had to win this event. Since it ultimately also came down to fan voting, that was made even easier.

The last thing to happen with such predictability was the All-Star Game itself on Sunday night.

The winner of the game was irrelevant. It didn't really matter if the game was won by the East or the West, although Stern must have been pleased with the outcome.

The West won the game in front of fans whose home teams play in that conference, and LeBron James took over the game in the end to help his team almost comeback and steal the victory.

In the end, Kobe Bryant, of the other hometown team, took home MVP honors, even though it was Kevin Durant who really helped the West win it.

The game may have been played in Los Angeles, but the story was written with Hollywood in mind.

So although I do not feel as if the NBA is fixed or scripted in any way, this weekend's events were easier to predict than a pay-per-view WWE event.

After all, even I don't know who is going to win the World Heavyweight championship at Wrestlemania 27 in Atlanta.

Or do I?

* Make sure to follow Kelley on Twitter @RobKelley24...