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John Zant: To Be or Not To Be Enthralled by Bonds |
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By John Zant
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Thursday, June 28 2007 |
As I write this, Barry Bonds needs seven more home runs to surpass Henry Aaron’s 755, and I wonder: Why am I not more excited to see somebody break one of the most hallowed records in sports for only the second time in 86 years?
 John Zant
I found out why so many writers dislike Bonds five years ago. The 2002 season was coming down to the final weeks, and I went to San Francisco to cover an important series between the Dodgers and the Giants.
In the Giants’ clubhouse before the game, a cluster of reporters engaged in conversations with players. Bonds entered the room with a couple of his acolytes and proceeded to his private lounge chair in the corner. None of the reporters approached him to get his thoughts on the upcoming game, the pennant race, the weather or whatever.
I thought I could break the ice by playing the family card. Karena Bonds, Barry’s first cousin, was starting her freshman year at UCSB. She was going to play for the Gaucho women’s basketball team. I walked up to Barry, introduced myself, and asked if he could say something about Karena.
His response left me stunned and shaken. I do not remember his exact words, which included several profanities, but the gist was that he was a professional baseball player, and he had nothing to say about college basketball, and I should get lost.
So I retreated, with new sympathy for the beat writers who had to deal with him all season long. He could not have had a softer request than the one I threw at him – how easy it would have been for him to say something nice about his cousin, who would always speak highly of Barry during her career at UCSB – but he lived down to his reputation as a surly jerk.
That’s how I joined the not very exclusive “Snubbed Club” of journalists who had demeaning encounters with Bonds. Yet my experience seems trivial next to the magnitude of the home run record. Not so trivial, however, is another issue that clouds Bonds’ achievements – steroids. The book “Game of Shadows” makes it abundantly clear that Bonds started to go on a power rampage after the 1998 season – when he jealously watched Mark McGwire hit 70 homers – with the aid of performance-enhancing drugs.
In spite of all that, I wonder if I’m selling Bonds short. I have read several essays recently rebuking those who consider Bonds unworthy to wear the crown.
Zev Chavets wrote an April 14 piece in the Los Angeles Times, asserting that Babe Ruth went on his home-run binge in the 1920s because “the grandees of the game decided to soup up the ball – a form of enhancement at least as intrusive as steroids – and presto, the Babe (and in his wake, others) hit 50 a season out of the park.”
I don’t buy that argument one bit. The dead ball era did end when Ruth came along, but he was head and shoulders above every other hitter in the game. He led the majors in 1926 with 47 home runs; the next best was 19 by Al Simmons. When Ruth smacked his 700th round-tripper in 1934, only two others in baseball history had hit 300 – Lou Gehrig with 314 and Rogers Hornsby with 301.
Chavets insinuated that Bonds’ blackness is the reason he is not receiving his due acclaim. That point also was made by Dave Zirin in another L.A. Times essay (May 20) titled “Behind the Barry-bashing.” Zirin’s argument is stronger. He points to a survey that asked fans why Bonds is so hated; 25 percent of the black respondents cited his race as the reason, while none of the whites did. Zirin writes that this divide “represents a visceral response to the way Bonds has been subjected to criticism when white players with reputations of steroid use haven’t gotten nearly the heat he has.”
It is believed the use of the drugs was so rampant that the recent phase of baseball history has been called the “Steroid Era.” In that sense, it is unfair to single Bonds out for condemnation.
I don’t know anybody more in love with baseball than Bill Pintard, the manager of the Santa Barbara Foresters, and he thinks Bonds’ achievements should be celebrated because he’s one of the reasons the game has been worth watching.
“I talk all the time,” Pintard said, “but when Bonds comes up to the plate, I don’t talk.” Pintard is on the scouting staff of the Angels and was in their stadium when Bonds hit some tremendous shots during the 2002 World Series. “He hit a home run out the tunnel in right field,” he said. “He hit one of the hardest balls I’ve ever seen past Scott Spiezio at first base.”
I was there too and remember the electricity that surged through the ballpark whenever Bonds came up. But neither can I forget the time he zapped me in the Giants clubhouse a month earlier.
In the “Big Bam,” an entertaining biography of Ruth, author Leigh Montville lists various terms of wonderment that writers applied to the Babe: The Sultan of Swat, the Caliph of Clout, the Wizard of Whack, the Rajah of Rap, the Wazir of Wham, the Maharaja of Mash.
My own tags for Barry Bonds would be the Bellwether of Bellicosity, the Viceroy of Virulence, the Spokesman of Spite, the Paragon of Perversity, the Titan of Truculence, the Mogul of Malice.
Wherever it comes from, the anger that dwells in Bonds seems to be distilled in that violent instant when he takes a swing at the ball, so often hitting it squarely because of his exceptional eye. Because of that, when all is said and done, he will be the new Home Run King. |
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