Gene Collier: Debate on Bonds has just begun

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Very often, when Barry Bonds steps on home plate to punctuate another of his signature homers, he jabs at the heavens to thank God. Let's now point with him, literally or figuratively, and say together, "Thank God that's over!"

Of Bonds and his now unparalleled home run numbers, of the count up to the countdown, of the inescapable arguments they engendered thanks exclusively to the man himself, the Great Scambino, the Sultan of Stanozolol, the Colossus of the Cream and the Clear, the Terror of Trenbolone, let us agree at the minimum that Henry Aaron's 33-year-old career home run record of 755 has finally and irredeemably been, umm, surpassed.

Broken?

Not sure I can go there.

Wrecked?

Certainly.

This is the point in this essay where a lot of predictors will exit, identifying it as another blossoming screed against poor Barry, just because he is black, just because he does not like the media, just because he is misunderstood, just because he is not as palatable as Aaron to the broader white audience, and just because of whatever other amateur psycho-social palaver in which they care to traffic.

Sorry, I'm not playing defense today, except to point out the following:

Bonds and his numbers have been stripped across the front page of this sports section every single day of the summer, every single day since May 14? Just Barry and his relevant newsworthy numbers. Counting up. Counting down. And it's 100 percent syringe free. No context. No irony. No sarcasm.

Just the man and his numbers.

Maybe you noticed that yesterday, hours after Barry surpassed The Hammer, the front page of this newspaper proclaimed, "Home Run King." Not an asterisk in sight, nor should there have been.

In other words, here and in most media outlets, we're cool with all this on the surface. Because we dig immediate facts, sometimes even at the expense of some larger truth.

So don't be bringing me your bias theory.

But the truth is, alas and again, Greg Anderson is in jail for a third time on contempt charges. He was Bonds' personal trainer. He was Bonds' go-between to the perverse doping underworld that was BALCO, whose founder has been to prison and back for distributing designer (undetectable) steroids and human growth hormone. Anderson, whom Bonds reportedly underpaid, won't talk about it, which is why he is in jail. If Bonds is innocent, why is his head bigger than Mr. Met's and why doesn't Anderson just say so?



And the truth is, alas and again, that Bonds told a grand jury he took the stuff, but did not know what it was. If you believe someone who is making $17 million annually based just about exclusively on his musculature can ingest something without knowing what it is, something from an obscure laboratory, well, I can't help you.

In a sense, we're all at fault for the magnification of things that should be left to trivialists.

Too often we confuse baseball history with real history, mostly because the mileposts of too many lives, including my own, are marked with ball scores and numbers that probably should not matter as much as they do. I remember where I was when the Philadelphia Phillies lost a 12-game lead with 61/2 games left, where I was when Pete Rose punched the daylights out of Bud Harrelson, where I was when Aaron took Al Downing aboard Flight 715, where I was when the ball went between Bill Buckner's legs, where I was when Sid Bream beat Spanky LaValliere's swipe tag to the plate in Fulton County Stadium, even where I was, for God's sake, when Randall Simon whacked Milwaukee's sausage.

When Bonds surpassed Aaron, I was in bed watching "Frazier" with my eyes closed, something I probably would have been capable of forgetting by the end of this column had not my older son come in at 10 past midnight to see if I was awake.

"Did you hear Barry did it?" said the 22-year-old.

"Yeah?"

"You know it's sad," he said. "I'm supposed to love baseball, and I didn't come home early to see it or anything. It's just, so what?"

"Yeah."

"Sherry Niles?"

It is terribly sad, if not so much for us, as in the little understood way in which the highly privileged and the immensely gifted seem to find sadness in spite of themselves. Barry never felt respected enough. Never. No matter the topic.

In the Pirates' dugout at Three Rivers Stadium, circa 1989, I was in a meandering pregame conversation with Bonds, another writer, and some stadium staffers, too long before game time. The conversation bumped up against guns at one point, causing Barry to blurt, "All my friends have Uzis!"

Nobody wants to be framed by reflexive, intemperate things they said when they were 25, but Bonds was so promising in the baseball sense that he already had been grown a sense of entitlement the size of Delaware. When Mark McGwire, himself now a recluse without sympathy, won the nation's adulation through much the same depressing methods in 1998, Bonds simply could not deal with it, despite telling then girlfriend Kimberly Bell, "they're just letting him do it because he's a white boy." It was Bell who told "Game of Shadows" authors Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams that when a flight delay caused her to be late for a meeting with the eventual Home Run King, Barry said, "If you ever #$%@!pull some #$%@!like that again, I'll kill you, do you understand?"

No one wants to be framed by intemperate things they say when they're 37, but this was long after Bell started taping Barry's phone messages for fear that no one would be able to figure out why she was dead.

But for now, I guess it's long live the king.

Five or six or seven years from now, a Hall of Fame ballot will arrive at my house. On the instructions, it will tell me to base my vote on every candidate's "playing record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to his team."

That's a whole lot more than just the man and his numbers.


Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.