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Barry Bonds as drug scapegoat
The age of undetectable drugs:
Barry Bonds as high-profile scapegoat
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
When Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants plugged one past Babe Ruth’s home run record of 714 last year, he was stoic in fending off long-standing accusations that he enhanced his performance by using steroids. Last week, Bonds hammered Number 755 into the stands, tying the great Hank Aaron’s record and then he slammed Number 756, making him baseball’s all-time home run champion. Fans cheered, fans jeered and baseball commissioner Bug Selig did an imitation of P.T. Barnum.
Bonds’s record is both a triumph and a defeat, for him as well as for baseball. It’s a triumph of his athleticism but a defeat in the spotlight it shines on the mendacity of pro sports.
For the record, Bonds has denied ever knowingly using steroids. (He has admitted that he used substances to speed his recovery from workouts and injuries faster.) Nobody believes him, but nothing is in place to indict his achievement, and Major League Baseball seems incapable of confronting the controversy.
Indeed, every few years some drug scandal erupts in professional sports or the Olympic cycle, only to recede without nailing down the truth about who used what. There are always high-profile exceptions, such as sprinter Ben Johnson’s disqualification for doping in the 1988 Seoul Games. But how many other dirty little needle secrets of past Olympics were swept under the carpet? How many in pro sports?
The case against Bonds
A sensational cover story in Sports Illustrated last year alleged that Bonds injected the powerful steroid Winstrol, and used other designer steroids, insulin, testosterone and human growth hormones. First-hand accounts of Bonds’ bumping drugs were investigated in Game of Shadows, the 2006 book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. The authors, reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle, reported Bonds’s use an array of performance enhancing drugs as early as 1998 provided by the notorious gym rat and dealer Greg Anderson. The authors tracked the dramatic change in Bonds’s body and his overall performance, and the book describes the Bonds’ dramatic physique changes, such as packing on 15 pounds of muscle at age 35.
Selig reacted by promising investigations and sanctions against baseball players who use any performance-enhancing drugs. But that’s easier said than done. Today a whole new class of undetectable performance-enhancing drugs skate the line between natural enhancements, treatments and out-and-out steroids. Who can say which drugs are verboten and which ones aren’t?
Bonds was said to be jealous of his record-setting contemporaries Mark McGwire and Sammy Sousa, both of whom set single-season home run records. In court, Bonds was linked to Anderson, who was jailed for dealing as well as for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating steroid use in the sport.
Conspiracy of silence
The issue seems to have been defanged this season (or at least contained to concern with Bonds) as baseball fans blithely continue to fill their favorite ballparks. Hundreds of millions of dollars— not only for the players and teams but also for the media that cover them— depend on the fans’ faith in a product that, after all, possesses no intrinsic value. (Or perhaps you detect some intrinsic value in grown men running around a field and hitting balls with bats?) Is it churlish to ask why more sportswriters and talk-show hosts haven’t publicly wondered whether Barry Bonds is just the tip of the iceberg?
Baseball’s popularity has waned for decades in the face of competition from other leisure-time activities. It never truly recovered from the 232-day players’ strike of 1994-95, which cancelled an entire postseason and World Series, permanently disillusioning droves of faithful fans who believed baseball was about the joy of sport, team play, peanuts and Cracker Jacks and those eternal Boys of Summer.
But Barry Bonds is being held to a singular and arbitrary standard— at least until another player spills about the rampant use of newly engineered drugs.
Bonds could restore his heroic status (as opposed to his statistical status) by coming clean. Last Wednesday Bonds hit Number 757, knocking it all the way out of the park itself. But we already know he’s very strong. What we don‘t know is: How did he get that way?
Barry Bonds as high-profile scapegoat
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
When Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants plugged one past Babe Ruth’s home run record of 714 last year, he was stoic in fending off long-standing accusations that he enhanced his performance by using steroids. Last week, Bonds hammered Number 755 into the stands, tying the great Hank Aaron’s record and then he slammed Number 756, making him baseball’s all-time home run champion. Fans cheered, fans jeered and baseball commissioner Bug Selig did an imitation of P.T. Barnum.
Bonds’s record is both a triumph and a defeat, for him as well as for baseball. It’s a triumph of his athleticism but a defeat in the spotlight it shines on the mendacity of pro sports.
For the record, Bonds has denied ever knowingly using steroids. (He has admitted that he used substances to speed his recovery from workouts and injuries faster.) Nobody believes him, but nothing is in place to indict his achievement, and Major League Baseball seems incapable of confronting the controversy.
Indeed, every few years some drug scandal erupts in professional sports or the Olympic cycle, only to recede without nailing down the truth about who used what. There are always high-profile exceptions, such as sprinter Ben Johnson’s disqualification for doping in the 1988 Seoul Games. But how many other dirty little needle secrets of past Olympics were swept under the carpet? How many in pro sports?
The case against Bonds
A sensational cover story in Sports Illustrated last year alleged that Bonds injected the powerful steroid Winstrol, and used other designer steroids, insulin, testosterone and human growth hormones. First-hand accounts of Bonds’ bumping drugs were investigated in Game of Shadows, the 2006 book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. The authors, reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle, reported Bonds’s use an array of performance enhancing drugs as early as 1998 provided by the notorious gym rat and dealer Greg Anderson. The authors tracked the dramatic change in Bonds’s body and his overall performance, and the book describes the Bonds’ dramatic physique changes, such as packing on 15 pounds of muscle at age 35.
Selig reacted by promising investigations and sanctions against baseball players who use any performance-enhancing drugs. But that’s easier said than done. Today a whole new class of undetectable performance-enhancing drugs skate the line between natural enhancements, treatments and out-and-out steroids. Who can say which drugs are verboten and which ones aren’t?
Bonds was said to be jealous of his record-setting contemporaries Mark McGwire and Sammy Sousa, both of whom set single-season home run records. In court, Bonds was linked to Anderson, who was jailed for dealing as well as for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating steroid use in the sport.
Conspiracy of silence
The issue seems to have been defanged this season (or at least contained to concern with Bonds) as baseball fans blithely continue to fill their favorite ballparks. Hundreds of millions of dollars— not only for the players and teams but also for the media that cover them— depend on the fans’ faith in a product that, after all, possesses no intrinsic value. (Or perhaps you detect some intrinsic value in grown men running around a field and hitting balls with bats?) Is it churlish to ask why more sportswriters and talk-show hosts haven’t publicly wondered whether Barry Bonds is just the tip of the iceberg?
Baseball’s popularity has waned for decades in the face of competition from other leisure-time activities. It never truly recovered from the 232-day players’ strike of 1994-95, which cancelled an entire postseason and World Series, permanently disillusioning droves of faithful fans who believed baseball was about the joy of sport, team play, peanuts and Cracker Jacks and those eternal Boys of Summer.
But Barry Bonds is being held to a singular and arbitrary standard— at least until another player spills about the rampant use of newly engineered drugs.
Bonds could restore his heroic status (as opposed to his statistical status) by coming clean. Last Wednesday Bonds hit Number 757, knocking it all the way out of the park itself. But we already know he’s very strong. What we don‘t know is: How did he get that way?
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