Barry Bonds has been this summer's version of the shark attack.
Does anyone remember the great summer of the shark attacks? Probably not, because that was the summer of 2001, and what most people remember from that summer, if they remember anything from it at all, is 9/11, which occurred right at the end. But up until the very moment those airplanes slammed into the twin towers, the Pentagon and that field in Shanksville, PA, the news media had been regaling us all summer long with stories about one shark attack after another. Things reached the point where a Martian planning to spend his vacation on earth might well have looked around and concluded that beach resorts were competing for his business by seeing who could claim the most shark attacks.
Come to think of it, that same Martian, during that same summer, could also have become an expert on Chandra Levy by watching CNN.
Everyone knows that the one thing journalists do best is imitate each other. It's to be expected; they're lazy and they're always on deadline. Not much room for creative thinking there, but much, much room for copycat bullshit that fills space quickly. (They also imitate each other in their choice of words. One journalist uses -- or misuses -- a certain word, and the next thing you know they're all doing it, which explains why nobody "sympathizes" anymore but always "empathizes;" why anything and everything under the sun suddenly "resonates" with this or that segment of the population and why nobody has problems anymore; now everybody has "issues.")
So this summer every sportswriter in the country has been going on and on and on about Barry Bonds and his pursuit of Hank Aaron's lifetime home run record. It's the shark attack story of the summer. Not that it isn't noteworthy, mind you. I'm a baseball fan, and any time someone starts getting close to setting a new baseball record, I'm interested. I would probably be interested even if Bonds' pursuit of home runs #755 and #756, both of which he attained this week, had been an honest effort unaided by juicing. Unfortunately it wasn't. Bob Costas is absolutely, 100 percent right. No athlete suddenly becomes exponentially better at his sport as he approaches retirement age. It always -- not "usually," -- ALWAYS, goes the other way. David Wells was a hell of a pitcher in his day, but that day is reaching dusk. He's 44 and his ERA has crept above 14 this summer. It might be time for Boomer to hang up his glove and go open a restaurant or start working the phones for a job as a pitching coach somewhere. If Wells should all of a sudden begin throwing 100 mph fastballs at this stage of the game, I'd say the commissioner of baseball had something to investigate. Barry Bonds was always a superlative hitter, but don't tell me that his suddenly becoming a superHUMAN hitter at age 40-plus was the result of prayer and fasting.
I know he tested negative for juicing recently. Everyone knows that. It proves nothing. Look back further, and keep in mind Bonds' ego, which, if you could put it in a bottle, you'd have to use a giant redwood tree for a cork. Back in the late 1990s when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa dominated the headlines with their genial home-run derby, Bonds must have been grinding his teeth. Imagine, these two guys getting all the public attention that Bonds assumed was rightfully his! He promptly did -- well, whatever it was he did, it made him able to follow Sosa's 66 and McGwire's 70 home runs with 73 of his own in 2001.
Is anyone out there gullible enough to think that this "just happened?" McGwire and Sosa both ended up under a cloud when the steroid rumors started. We're supposed to believe that Bonds did it all on nothing more than protein shakes? Or more incredibly, that he "didn't know" what he was taking? As the poem goes, "And I am Marie of Roumania."
And the juicing issue is only part of the farce. There's something else you're not going to convince me of, and that's the "slump" Bonds supposedly went into in late July, when he "sat on" home run 754 for days and days. That was no slump, folks, that was marketing. Bonds could have hit home run #755 on July 31, Aug. 1 or Aug. 2 if he had wanted to. But here was the problem: his team, the San Francisco Giants, was playing a three-game stand against their hated rivals the Los Angeles Dodgers, in Los Angeles , during that three-day period. Now, anyone old enough to remember April 8, 1974, when Hammerin' Hank, the great Henry Aaron, broke Babe Ruth's lifetime record of 714 home runs, also remembers seeing the videotape of the great moment. Over and over. I was 18 that spring night, and I've seen that piece of tape at least 100 times. I would bet my next vacation that there was a meeting between Bonds, his manager Bruce Bochy and Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig. The videotape of Barry Bonds hitting #755 -- and especially #756 -- is going to be viewed into eternity. I'm sure none of them wanted such a "great moment" to be greeted with a shower of garbage and beer bottles, as it would have been had it occurred at Dodger Stadium. San Diego is a slightly less hostile environment for Bonds -- only slightly -- so I would bet they gave him the green light to hit Number 755 in Petco Park, as he did, off Clay Hensley, last Saturday. That could only look better on film than the shower of half-eaten hot dogs and plastic syringes that Dodger fans would have given him. Then, of course, giving Bonds Monday night off was Intermission time in this vaudeville revue. It allowed him to hit Number 756 on Tuesday, against the Washington Nationals, in the only ballpark in all of America where Bonds' 756th would be greeted with confetti and cheering instead of catcalls and trash: AT&T Park in San Francisco. There's no doubt in my mind that Bonds would have gone along with this, since he thinks he should be greeted with showers of confetti everywhere he goes anyway.
Roger Maris did not deserve the asterisk he got in the record books when he broke Ruth's 60-home-runs-in-one-season record in 1961. That was Commissioner Ford Frick, a big fan of the Bambino, being a poor sport. So what if Maris played a 162-game schedule instead of Ruth's 154? Everyone was playing that same schedule and no one else made a genuine run at Ruth's record that year, not even Maris' injury-plagued teammate Mickey Mantle. The point is, Maris did what he did without any chemical help outside of the cigarettes he was always puffing to calm his frazzled nerves. Bonds deserves an asterisk the size of a frisbee. But don't kid yourself. Even if he's found guilty of perjury regarding the steroid scandal, he won't get an asterisk. He probably won't even get a slap on the wrist. The lily-livered Lords of Baseball aren't going to kill the goose that juiced himself into laying golden eggs.
The classiest, most laudable gesture made by any media outlet this summer regarding Bonds and his new "record" was made by Sports Illustrated magazine, which I don't normally read. You've heard of damning with faint praise? SI had the courage to damn the Bonds travesty not with faint praise, but with praise directed where it should have gone. Late in July, as Bonds approached the big number, SI ran a cover story ... about Henry Aaron. "The Heart of 755," the cover proclaimed, with a photo of Aaron during his salad days as a player. I bought that issue as a gesture of solidarity with those who value fair play and honesty in sports, two commodities in rare supply these days. I read that Aaron didn't want to speak to Bonds especially, and that Commissioner Selig, while obliged to publicly acknowledge Bonds' quest, was more-or-less keeping his royal distance from the tainted slugger.
I won't make a secret of it: I don't like Barry Bonds. His whole life has been something of a baseball fairy tale. Son of Bobby Bonds, godson of Willie Mays; yes, it would appear that the angels, bearing hickory and horsehide, appeared at his cradle. It does seem to have been written in the stars on the day he was born that Bonds would be a force in baseball. The fates just seemed to like him somehow. Which makes it that much more unconscionable that he should have become the archetypal sports prima donna, the haughty, self-absorbed, arrogant, pampered, overpaid, whining brat that the public increasingly identifies (and incredibly, continues to reward) with professional sports. Bonds has even mastered that familiar Bill Clinton trick of making himself out to be the poor little victim of his mean old persecutors. Yeah, I feel real sorry for poor, misunderstood Barry Bonds, don't you? I never cried my eyes out so thoroughly for a spoiled-rotten multi-millionaire in my life. It's galling enough that we watch him go to the plate as artificially bulked-up as Lou Ferrigno in the old Incredible Hulk TV series. Let's also remember that Babe Ruth didn't even wear a helmet when he batted, while Bonds steps up to bat wearing so much body armor he looks like a member of a SWAT team. Nit-picking? No. His being that armored-up takes the inside of the plate away from the pitcher to begin with, giving Bonds an enormous, some would say (pitchers, for instance) unfair advantage. And we're supposed to take this guy's home run record seriously?
If there's a bright spot in all of this, it's that baseball players only get into the Hall of Fame if they're voted there by the sportswriters. Bonds has been so consistently hateful to the press that he's going to have a problem getting into the Hall of Fame before every sportswriter he's ever been nasty to has retired. May they all have the longevity -- and the memories -- of Shirley Povich.
Bring on the next Henry Aaron, should our children's children do anything to deserve him.
As for Barry Bonds, never mind the sports media that he's always whining about. Bring on the sharks.
