Barry Bonds is now baseball’s home run king, but he sits on an uneasy throne.
In San Francisco, the 43-year-old Bonds is warmly embraced, standing ovations greeting his at-bats, as they did Tuesday night when he passed Hank Aaron with home run No. 756. Outside of the cocoon of AT&T Park, he’s a villain, his swollen head and thick arms, chest and neck symbols of all that has gone wrong with sports: egomaniacs fueled by performance-enhancing drugs.
“There is a cloud of suspicion over everything he has done,” former commissioner Fay Vincent said.
When Aaron clubbed his 715th home run to pass Babe Ruth in 1974, racial tensions, not drug suspicions, tainted the pursuit. Aaron received hate mail from those unable to accept an African-American trumping Babe Ruth. But most fans in the stadium at least were outwardly supportive, unlike their reaction to Bonds on the road this season. No modern sports figure has set a milestone amid such public criticism.
Bonds made history Tuesday night while still the subject of a federal government grand jury that was extended another six months as it tries to determine whether he cheated on his taxes and committed perjury during his BALCO testimony in 2003.
That’s an issue that has haunted Bonds and baseball well before the book “Game of Shadows” alleged, through painstaking details of his daily regimen, that the slugger began using steroids and human growth hormone after the 1998 season. Bonds’ connection to the BALCO scandal – he told a grand jury in 2003 that he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs – has diminished the significance of the most prestigious record in sports for many.
Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, one of Bonds’ most severe critics, implied recently that Bonds would be suing people if the steroids allegations against him were false. Bonds, who rarely talks to the press, has said his “day will come.”
He has challenged the federal government to take him down. But without the cooperation of his personal trainer Greg Anderson, who has been held in contempt of court since November for refusing to testify against Bonds and is now serving jail time, the feds have struggled to make a case. Anderson’s lawyer said the bodybuilder, who was a childhood friend of the slugger’s, will never help the government.
Fans have tossed syringes at Bonds in visiting parks, booed him lustily, and held up signs with asterisks. And yet, he continued his trudge to history with a single-minded focus that at times left teammates and current manager Bruce Bochy in awe.
“When his at-bats come around, he’s able to concentrate and separate all of the distractions,” said Bochy, in his first year with the Giants.
Said teammate Omar Vizquel: “It’s been a distraction. You try to feed off the energy, but it was hard to avoid what was happening.”
Bonds’ personality only inflames the situation. He’s boorish with the media, often isolates himself from teammates and comes across as arrogant. As Houston Astros Hall of Fame broadcaster Milo Hamilton said, “He invites you to not like him.”
This isn’t to suggest that Bonds doesn’t have his supporters. Rockies pitcher Matt Herges, a one-time teammate, has long been pulling for Bonds to break the record. So has Mets outfielder Moises Alou – “I see how hard he works,” Alou said – and Washington Nationals reliever Ray King, who has accused the government of conducting a witch hunt.
Rockies all-star slugger Matt Holliday put all the controversy aside when asked to assess Bonds and his ability to crush a baseball.
“I am amazed at the efficiency that Bonds gets off his swing, how quick he gets to the inside pitch,” Holliday said. “Some of the things he has done, I can’t fathom as a player who’s supposedly in the same league as him.”
That, in many ways and on many levels, is his legacy.
