Is there a mysterious clear liquid that can turn Barry Bonds into a busty dead blonde with baby daddy forensic drama? A creamy ointment that can stimulate the controversial slugger’s production of offensive remarks about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights? Bonds is now just weeks away from hammering Hank Aaron’s home run record into oblivion, and yet no one seems all that interested. Even Aaron himself has said he would prefer to play golf rather than witness the historic moment in person.
Chalk up some of our indifference—and Hank’s—to Bonds’ inability to tell flaxseed oil from human growth hormone, sure, but is there less to it than that, too? In the early 1970s, Aaron’s final assault on Babe Ruth’s record was a national obsession that dragged on for more than a year, attracting the sort of attention we now mostly reserve for digitally preserved celebrity meltdowns. In those days, however, video games barely existed, and there was no such thing as Internet porn, Ultimate Fighting Championship, Netflix or YouTube. With only Waltons reruns to contend with, it didn’t matter so much that baseball moved at the pace of a DMV line. At least it offered an excuse to guzzle beer and scream at strangers, and that was enough to make it the national pastime.
Now, however, it’s just another niche interest, beloved by some, ignored by most, and unless Bonds throws a tin of baked beans at Alec Baldwin’s rude, thoughtless little pig, his record-breaking achievement is unlikely to generate the breathless updates from Greta van Susteren and admonishing sermons from Geraldo Rivera it deserves. And that’s too bad, because Bonds is one of America’s most intriguing bad guys—surlier than Dick Cheney, as rich as a spoiled Hollywood superstar, but also that rare major-league jerk whose talent eclipses his villainy and whose industry and ambition eclipses his talent.
Indeed, if Depo-Testosterone could transform Paris Hilton into a better actor, would she endure the vomiting, swollen limbs and prolonged erections that would likely accompany her new thespian prowess? If Deca Durabolin promised George W. Bush a stronger grasp of foreign policy, would he be brave enough to take a needle in the ass for world peace? Of course not! Paris and Dubya are lazy, complacent, underachieving villains.
Bonds, on other hand, is the hardest working antihero this side of Satan. The cream and the clear didn’t give him the ability to decide which 98 mph fastball to lay off of and which one to swing at, or magically bestow comic-book biceps upon him. Even the authors of Game of Shadows, the 2006 best-seller that chronicles Bonds’ adventures with steroids and portrays him in the least flattering light possible, characterize Bonds’ work-out routines as “brutally hard” and his “exotic health-food diet” as something that had to be “choked down.”
Why did he subject himself to such tortures? According to Game of Shadows, Bonds spent the first 13 years of his career drug-free, and during that time, he signed baseball’s richest contract ever, won the league’s MVP award three times and appeared on eight All-Star teams. Conventional wisdom suggests that today’s huge salaries have ruined the purity of sports, but the opposite is true. Stars from earlier eras couldn’t afford to stop suiting up season after season; Bonds could, and yet he kept playing anyway. Indeed, with no pressing financial motive, with little to prove to anyone but himself, he risked liver damage, testicular downsizing, unseemly head bloating and a long list of even scarier maladies—and for what, exactly?
Game of Shadows offers various armchair diagnoses: issues with father, jealousy of Mark McGwire, a desire to achieve the adulation he felt he deserved. But while these may have been the triggers that led him down the path to performance enhancement, what kept him going after the steroid-use allegations surfaced? By now, he must know that the fans are never going to love him, and that he’s probably never going to love himself. And still he persists. Enduring the pieties of sportswriters, fueled by a grim diet of painkillers and egg whites, he’s a less joyful Sisyphus, an Ahab with killer lats, staying the course in an awesome display of pride and monomania and, to the consternation of his critics, succeeding wildly. It’s not news when an asshole triumphs, but it is great theater. For the next few weeks, baseball will be at least as interesting as whatever exotic murder is currently transfixing Greta Van Susteren.