The Fatigued Barry Bonds

It really is hard to identify and sympathize with most athletes today. They are so far out of the realm of everyday life that it disconnects them from the rest of us. Today's athlete are fabulously wealthy, pampered and famous. They have access to anything they desire and have become equals in pop culture in their fame with other entertainers.

Athletes, some of them anyway, think themselves as 'entertainers' and seek to be compensated as such. Once upon a time, the disparity between a worker and an athlete was narrow. Obviously, it has widened in the modern era. An athlete was not seen as an entertainer but a representative of your community and the team to which you pledged allegiance to. There was a direct correlation between the sense of pride found in a community. In other words, it was easier to identify with an athlete of the past because they were just another link in a community. This made fan player relations healthy and hence the sense of awe some athletes commanded. Indeed, some of them, like Ruth and The Rocket, transcended sports and became cultural icons.

Today, because of the celebrity status attached and the obscene salaries very few, if any, athletes will ever transcend anything. They simply operate in a different fish bowl today. Athletes are mini-marketing empires now.

The media is key to building a niche-empire. A well taught athlete schooled in the art of good PR talk make for terribly bland interviews. The emotional, lazy, cantankerous or indifferent athlete make for better printing and ratings.

Which brings me to Barry Bonds. Bonds will no doubt go down as one of the all-time greats. He will be a well-deserved automatic inductee into the hallowed baseball Hall of Fame. Regardless of the steroid situation, Bonds was a famer. The Hall is filled with drug addicts, alcoholics, gamblers, racists, womanizers and adulterers, so there should be no debate about his nomination.

Barry Bonds and his alter ego "Love me" recently went on television in what seemed a carefully planned presentation to announce that he may miss the upcoming baseball season. He craftily turned the press conference into a showcase of self-pity. In this pathetic display, he said that he was tired and that the media had 'won' in that they finally 'beat' him. It was an incredible attempt to appeal to our sympathies. He even had his son stand by Love Me during the announcement.

What does all this reveal? It exposed Barry Bonds for who he really is - a jerk. He always was suspicious and confrontational of the media. The point is no longer about "finding" Barry Bonds. The point is that he never grew as a person in front of the cameras. Who knows what Bonds has had to put up with (and we should always keep this in mind) but given his wealth and fame he was not graceful in dealing with issues that confronted him. He came off as arrogant, condescending and classless - and increasingly filled with 'roid rage.

There is no reason to think of the usage of his son as nothing more than a publicity stunt. The writing was on the wall (Balco, tell-all books etc.) for Bonds. Things don't look so good on the horizon and he tried to pin all of it on the media. The media didn't make the decisions he made for himself. He freely made his choices. He chose to use steroids, he chose to be a difficult person, he chose to use the race card when it suited him, he chose to place himself above his team mates.

I kept listening to his sob story and it all came down to the following: here's a millionaire athlete who made life difficult for himself playing a sport he loved. Where does he come off saying he's tired? Can he face a cancer patient with such a comment? An aid worker who contributes and volunteers time to the benefit of society? Who made this a 'war'? Can it be he threw the first punch? Why is it only him that is in this situation? Could you imagine a young reporter, flushed with the love of the game, trying to earn a living having a hard dose of reality poured all over them by Barry Bonds? Imagine all the people he's made tired!

Baseball writers are known to be incredibly ignorant in their bias. Some are just plain mean-spirited and if you cross them wrong, will forever hold you accountable. As such, I was willing to give Bonds a free ride. But his last stunt was over the top. Barry Bonds is the ultimate example of an athlete that has spent his last cent of integrity. He lost not because they broke him. He came in already broken and refused to fix himself.

He made his accomplishments anti-climatic. He did not want to share his achievements with an adoring public. Baseball fans would not have minded a new player passing Ruth and Aaron. But he made the journey so distasteful he probably single handily increased the frequency of prayer's to the baseball gods to not let it happen.

Barry Bonds may be fatigued, but there is something that is more fatigued by his tiresome antics: the game of baseball.

Will anybody ever write a song for Barry Bonds?