| Ryan White |
 | 0 Comments |  | 30 Read | May 13, 2007 |
I ll start this one off by stating that this will not be your usual discussion on Barry Bonds. Lately there have been two different ways to write about him:
A. The author usually believes Bonds did steroids hates him, his attitude, and the fact that he s going to break the all-time home run record.
B. The author doesn t care for Bonds, but respects the fact that he s going to break the record and either disregards that he may have used steroids or states that its questionable.
Personally, I would rather choose a third line of thought. I like him, I hope he breaks the record, and I especially hope he did steroids to do it. The few readers that I have right now, are probably replying with a collective what?!?!? but that s my position, and I mean it. Let me preface the following by also stating that for 13 years (precisely October 14, 1992-somewhere around late 2005) I absolutely hated Bonds, but the short periods sandwiching those dates I have loved his superstar persona, and his on-field abilities. Quick aside - Growing up in Watertown, New York, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates short-A team, and also an area that did not get cable until I moved out sort of forced my hand on teams that I grew up rooting for. They had to be on national television a lot, could not be a local-ish squad (how boring is it to be in New York and root for the Bills, Giants, Jets, Mets, Yanks, Knicks, Rangers, Islanders, or Syracuse ughh), and for the most part I would stick with them through thick and thin. This adequately explains my love of the Dallas Cowboys (Tony Dorsett was my football hero), Miami Hurricanes (the Flutie game is my first college football memory), Milwaukee Brewers (my AL team, the first World Series I remember, and for those who still doubt me, I still own the Robin Yount 3,000 hit book), Pittsburgh Pirates (my NL team that I would root for when the Crew was done which was usually mid-August), and Toronto Maple Leafs (which I have stopped really caring about altogether). So, long story short, after following the short-A Pirates fortunes (which included Jay Buhner, Moises Alou, and my personal favorite - Mike Berger) year-after-year the big team became important to me. Especially during the 1990-1992 run with the Killer-B sâ? (Bonilla/Bonds/Bell), Doug Drabek, John Smiley, and a host of others including my personal favorite - Andy Van Slyke. When their run came to a climactic finish, they staged and improbable comeback from 3-1 down to the Braves in the NLCS, and were up 2-0 in the 9th inning. To keep the pain of this memory at a minimum I will briefly state that Bonds couldn t throw out Sid I m slower than your 84 year-old grandmotherâ? Bream, and I could not forgive him (granted Bream was on 2nd base, but still it was Sid Bream) until he became one of the most hated players in baseball. Now I can t root for him enough. Why?There are a few obvious reasons. The first is that people are all up on their high horse about him possibly using steroids. My thinking on this is Who cares? The most popular sport in all of America right now is football right? Yet no one gets upset when Demarcus Ware/Julius Peppers/Jevon Kearse weigh between 260-300 lbs and run 4.5 40 s right? Or that Tom Brady magically went from having a candy arm to throwing one of the best deep balls in the sport, or that Patrick Kearny looks and acts like the linebacker from The Program. I mean if we can let a sport of cokeheads (aka Joe Montana s ailing back, two letters L T), vicodin addicts (Brett Favre), potheads (Mark Stepnosky, Ricky Williams), and supplement users (Julius Peppers, Shawne Merriman) become the biggest and most popular sport in the United States why do we hate Bonds - a person who has admitted to nothing?Secondly, I love the fact that many members of the media are dancing around the idea that a lot of the hatred towards Bonds centers on the fact that he is a black man (however contentious the notion of distinct racesâ? are). This week on Around the Horn, First and Ten, and Sportscenter our respected sportscasters had a chance to talk about it, but in all three situations, while the specter of race hung in the air, none of the talking heads bit, and I think it s a shame. I m sure many people again are getting on their high (white) horse and saying we don t hate him because he s black, but because he s an assholeâ?, and that race has nothing to do with this and you (I) shouldn t bring it upâ?. I disagree on both points. First of all you cannot deny that race is at least somewhat involved in this issue, when an independent study found that 70 percent of white people don t want Bonds to break the record, whereas 70 percent of black people want him to. More to this point, why don t people hate Roger Clemens at the same level that they hate Barry Bonds? By most accounts Clemens is every bit the asshole Bonds is (he has sold out Boston, Toronto, New York, Houston, and probably New York again before it s all done), breaking records left and right, and most likely used steroids to accomplish these things - while the real best pitcher of our generation, Pedro Martinez, certainly did not. Yet Clemens is revered in the media and with many in general, to the point that Suzyn Waldman nearly pissed herself twice when he said he was returning to the team that Clemens pretended he was retiring from in 2003. This guy is a grade A Bondsian jerk, yet people love the white, flame-throwing Texan, why? At least Bonds has only played for two teams in his entire career, and has never fake retired, practiced at his old team s facilities all winter/spring, then signed with someone else, or went on a chicken wing diet after signing a big deal with his first team, or got himself in shape after getting chased out of town by that team, or forced himself into a trade to the best team in baseball, or thrown a bat at anybody ever, or never produced in a big game in his entire life. As for the second point, and jumping from W.E.B Dubois belief "that the problem of the Twentieth [sic] Century is the problem of color lineâ?, I assert that a whole lot of the (white) media s, and the (white) baseball fan s collective frustration with Bonds has to do with the fact that he is black. As a sport and cultural studies teacher at the University of Maryland, and Towson University, I can positively state that most white people/students initially roll their eyes when the topic of race is introduced. They point to the fact that Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams and others are heroes of theirs, and their contemporary s so doesn t that prove that we are past racism in our country? My first reply is that yeah they are your heroes, but would you let them (or more disarmingly someone that looks like them) sleep with your sister/brotherâ?? While very few offer a reply, the silence is quite telling, and often opens the discussion up quite nicely. Following this opening salvo I usually assert that in the United States, since we have been faced with race/racism for a very large period of our history we have, as a collective, gotten marginally better when it comes to dealing with race, but, at the same time, we have also become better racists and this goes for everyone, not just white people. Moreover many people point to the Oprah s, Tiger s, and MJ s, and say that yes we are over raceâ?, but yet we still live in a country that has a huge black/latino/white poverty disparity (something like 23/27/9 percent respectively), and incarceration rate (a black male is about 10 times more likely to serve time in jail than a white male). This carries over to sport, where Sports Illustrated runs front cover articles that ask Where did the white athlete go?â?, yet never asks Where did the black baseball player go?â?, or Did a black Winter Olympian ever exist?â? It also carries over when Steve McNair gets a DUI for a little known Tennessee law which states that you cannot ride drunk with another person under the influenceâ?. While I do not doubt the law, what is left unsaid is the fact that McNair also broke another little known Tennessee lawâ? the one that states two black men driving a nice car at 3 in the morning, MUST be breaking the law, and have to be pulled overâ?. Finally I also believe that this carries over to sport and Major League Baseball, when it comes to Barry Bonds. People don t care so much that he used steroids (Big Mac did, Clemens did, and so did many other MLB players in the past 20-30 years), they care because he s a black man breaking the home run record, but they have these lovely excuses for hating him, just the same as the cops in Tennessee did in pulling over McNair. For that I am disappointed in the direction of our country, and our sports fans, but not in Bonds. I hope he breaks the record, and I will be happy when he does. In fact I hope he goes into Fenway Park, the same place where he vowed never to play because Boston hates black people , hits 756 and takes his time circling the bases, then gives the crowd a Clemens like glare.
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