Everybody hates Barry Bonds.
I do, the people next door to me (if they notice him at all) hate him, and I’ll bet if you took a random poll on the street, you’d get a solid majority of Bonds haters and only a few Bonds defenders, with some lackadaisical abstentions, of course.
People in general hate Bonds because he has no couth. He’s rude to the fans (and to players); he has an attitude that has legs; he’s contemptuous of everyone and everything but his majestic self.
And he’s a darn good player, somewhat in the Ted Williams (no lover of fans, he) mold. Williams refused to tip his hat after homers. Bonds is supernaturally cool — though he does style his homers in a way that would have embarrassed Williams, who had real style — which can be described as the absence of any conscious striving for it.
Yes, the two men are very much alike in that they’re in it entirely for themselves and make no bones about it. But there are differences between Bonds and Williams; Bonds and Ruth; Bonds and Aaron.
Williams is, of course, out of the running in the home run category, though he didn’t do badly in that way. Both World War II and Korea took that possibility away from him. Ruth, whose record Bonds has recently surpassed — garnering him far more attention than Aaron — hit lots of singles and for a very high average.
He could’ve tried for the wall more often — and even said so himself. He didn’t because he was more of a team player than either Bonds or Williams knows, or knew, how to be. Ruth banged into the right-field wall on occasion and knocked himself silly at least once.
There’s a picture of him spread out on the outfield grass, unconscious. I can no more imagine Bonds doing something like that than I can see him donating last year’s salary to the Sudanese. Williams flat-out didn’t care; he was thinking too much of his next at-bat to go all out for a fly ball.
The boos that greet Barry Bonds are not racially motivated. I live around black people, and they can be vocally disdainful of the man in a way I, as a white person, cannot. I am glad, however, to hear the sentiments. Anybody who wishes to cry racism may do so, but he or she is grandstanding, and the majority of us — for whom racism is unacceptable — know it.
Bonds is a hero only statistically. Aaron was truly heroic in that he stood up at the plate against daily death threats (as if facing 90-mph fastballs were not enough!). He kept on hitting homers not only for himself, but for the idea of a man not backing down to the most degraded elements humankind has to offer.
His achievement is in the record books; but he did it, at least in part, for the dignity of us all. He exemplified grace under pressure for those at-bats and should be remembered as much for that as for his record-shattering power at the plate. His stature will only grow over time. Nor will there ever be asterisks to obfuscate his achievement.
Now for the steroids. By his own admission, Mickey Mantle hit a few homers drunk. So what? He would have hit more sober. Alcohol deters performance, and I don’t think anybody would disagree with that. By the same token, steroids enhance performance significantly, and there doesn’t seem to be any disagreement about that either.
Where there appears to be disagreement is whether Bonds is entitled to his home runs both as a user of steroids and as a sort of representative of the very best the game has to offer.
Lord Bryon said everybody wants a hero, and I think a man who has reached Bonds’ eminence should look inside and try to retrofit himself to fill that role. It’ll be a tough road to hoe, but he sort of owes it to a man who is far greater and made it possible for him to be out on the field, as he is today, defying us all with his talent, his statistical superiority and his addiction to success for its own sake.
Brett Busang is a Washington writer who also calls himself a “fallen artist.”
