Cheer for Bonds? You bet, By: David Yates

04/08/2007

Stand up and cheer for Barry Bonds when he hits his 756th home run ("What will you do when Bonds hit the big home run," Our View, April 4)? You bet I will!

And everyone else should, too. Did he take steroids? Of course! Did a lot of other people take steroids? Of course. Does that make it right? No. Where was the commissioner? Where was the owner and the manager and the team doctor? Where were all the people who had firsthand knowledge on all the baseball teams in the land and all the other sports from high school up? And the players union is also hugely responsible! They were counting the money. It was good for the business. Sosa and McGwire and dozens of others all bulked up and hit the ball out of the park and we all loved it!

Don't stand behind your printing press and tell me you weren't titillated by the home run races of a few years ago and in the back of your mind you knew that there was a drug issue boiling. Hank Aaron seems like a stand-up guy and I wouldn't for a minute cast un-warranted suspicion on him or his achievement, but I am convinced that there were things that went on years ago of which we had no knowledge. This is the information age and the press is leading the parade to divulge every bit of minutiae about anyone in the spotlight. We live in the "love to bash and debase our heroes" age. If we look back just 45 years ago, we as a people wanted our heroes to be larger than life and not subject to the foibles of us commoners. We didn't learn until years later that John Kennedy was a philanderer and Rock Hudson was gay. Even if we heard it, we chose not to believe it. We didn't want to know. And little Arnie Schwarzenegger (governor of Cah-Lee-forrr-nia) we thought was just lifting weights.

Forgetting what time and devotion it takes to excel at anything, we delight in pointing out that our stars are human too and they screw up just like we do. It must help our self-esteem. Barry was watching other players bulk up and getting all the attention and he saw that none of the overseers of the game were doing anything about it and decided not to be left behind. Having said all this, be reminded as you noted, that Bonds hasn't failed a drug test and hasn't been convicted of anything! As far as I have been able to determine taking steroids doesn't help hand-eye coordination and if anything, bulking up the body seems to slow it down. In that light perhaps Barry had to overcome the effects of the steroids to still knock it out of the park. Even little wiry ballplayers hit home runs. And before steroids, Barry was a formidable player anyway. Put an asterisk beside the record *(may have taken drugs). That'll look stupid in a 100 years.

So before standing on your bully pulpit and thumping your "Game of Shadows" bible, and declaring Barry unfit for the title, clean up your own house and catch a few more of the typos in your own publication and stop running the same cartoon twice in the same issue under different titles.