Me and Mr. Bonds

A longtime Giants fan reflects on the coming Barry Bonds train wreck -- and the unflattering mirror his case holds up to our morality.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Baseball, San Francisco Giants, Barry Bonds, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Steroids

Photos: AP/Wide World

Photo composite of Barry Bonds.

Oct. 24, 2006 | Sometime next summer, there's going to be a moral train wreck. Unless neither the Giants nor any other major league team signs him, or he gets injured or sent to the Big House for tax evasion like Al Capone, Barry Bonds is going to break Hank Aaron's home run record. And all hell is going to break loose.

Thanks to Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada's "Game of Shadows," we now know beyond a reasonable doubt that Barry Bonds used steroids over a five-year period. For many, including leading sports journalists like Bob Costas, this has made Bonds a pariah. Bonds is not the only one -- Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro, among others, have been disgraced by the steroid scandal. But Bonds is in a pariah class by himself. And now that he is just 22 big flies away from setting the most hallowed record in baseball, it is impossible to close our eyes and hope the whole thing just goes away.

Baseball takes its records very seriously. It is a game that reveres its history; its feats are engraved in tablets that are handed down from atop the statistical equivalent of Mt. Sinai. Having Bonds at the top of the record book will be like discovering that Thomas Jefferson plagiarized the Declaration of Independence.

So when No. 25 smashes No. 756, the entire baseball world is going to melt down. There will be hand-wringing over whether Bonds' record should be marked with an asterisk, whether he should be elected to the Hall of Fame, whether the whole sport is tainted forever, and so on. And it won't just be the baseball world that will freak out. Congressmen will pontificate about what this says about our morally corrupt society. Ethics professors will appear on Fox News. Sports doctors will duel like expert witnesses in court about how much steroids improve performance in baseball. The race issue will come up. The asshole issue will be debated. There will be more debate over Barry Bonds than there was over going to war in Iraq -- not that that's saying much.

But there is one place where there will be no debate, no doubts, no boos, no catcalls, nothing but love and adulation and awe and a huge celebration. That place will be in AT&T Park, Section 119, Row 26, Seat 8. That's where I'll be sitting.

If Barry hits it at home and I'm lucky enough to be there, I'll be screaming like God had just opened the seventh seal. And I'll be doing that even though I'm 99 percent sure Barry cheated -- and I don't approve of cheating.

I won't be alone. There will be 40,000 screaming Giants' fans around me experiencing the same non-asterisked rapture, and several hundred thousand more fans throughout Northern California. And there will be millions across the country who aren't Bonds or Giants fans, but will still applaud Bonds' feat and regard it as legit.

But much of the rest of the country and the media will stare at us with horror, as if we'd just staged a Ku Klux Klan rally or hosted a meeting of the North American Man/Boy Love Association. An AP-AOL poll released last week showed that half of all baseball fans are rooting against Bonds as he chases Aaron's record. Only a third want him to break it. So I've got a lot of explaining to do on behalf of my fellow, outnumbered Bonds defenders. All aboard -- let's get this train wreck started early!

We don't want our sports stories to end like this. Sports is supposed to be entertaining and uplifting. It's art with a jock strap. Like art, it manifests human striving and excellence. Like art, it's bottled reality. It has plot twists, a climax, a denouement and an ending. It makes you feel like life has a shape. At its Aristotelean best, it can even make you feel pity and terror, although these sublime emotions are generally reserved for Oakland Raiders fans.

That's what it's supposed to do. What it's not supposed to do is force you to confront the fact that you are a moral relativist, a hypocrite, a proto-fascist, and, not to put too fine a point on it, a lying, self-serving sack of shit.

But that's what the Barry Bonds saga has done to us Giants fans. (OK, there may be a few who have rejected Barry, but I don't know any.) Sports has turned us into a horde of Mark Foleys, but with one big difference: We refuse to resign and remain defiantly in our hot tubs, wallowing in a sea of congressional pages. Me and Mr. Bonds -- we got a thang going on. We both know that it's wrong -- well, he doesn't, but I do -- but it's much too strong to let it go.

Sports, a pastime that is supposed to enliven, stimulate and ennoble our existence, instead has turned it into an eternal cover of a Billy Paul song.

Next page: It's only sports, and normal moral standards shouldn't be expected to apply