KEY POINTS:
Call it, if you like, the apotheosis of an American anti-hero. Last Wednesday Barry Lamar Bonds, outfielder for the San Francisco Giants, played in baseball's 78th annual All Star game. The venue was his hometown field of AT&T Park, set on the edge of the bay, in whose waters fans cluster in boats on game day hoping to catch - or dive after - one of Bonds' titanic home-run balls.
He did not manage this sort of splash during the All Star game. However, at least the crowd was behind him, cheering when he was introduced. Anywhere else he might have been booed. For Bonds is not only probably the greatest player of his generation, but beyond doubt its most divisive. Currently, he has 751 career home runs, 37 more than the legendary Babe Ruth. Within a few weeks, he will surely hit the five he needs to overtake Hank Aaron's 755, and claim America's most hallowed sports record. Barring injury - or a federal indictment for perjury or tax evasion.
That is the Barry Bonds conundrum. Is he a once-in-a-lifetime performer, or a steroid-fuelled cheat, with an over-sized chip on both shoulders?
Americans don't know what to think. Like every nation, they want to love their sporting superstars. They took the hellraising Ruth to their bosom and were captivated by Muhammad Ali. Now the mantle of divinity is wrapped around Tiger Woods, much as it was over Joe DiMaggio half a century ago.
However, the objects of such veneration have to keep their part of the bargain. Human failings are permitted. But they must play by the rules and they must be nice guys.
Bonds falls short on both counts. He may be a phenomenal baseball player, who has been voted the National League's most valuable player an unprecedented seven times (the next closest is three), and already holds a clutch of batting records, including the single season homer mark of 73 in 2001. But as for loveability: forget it.
The problem is not just his relations with the media, whom he blames for many of his difficulties. "You wanted me to jump off the bridge, and I've finally jumped," he told the press pack back in early 2005 when the drugs allegations were at their peak. That was Bonds blaming his woes on everybody and everything but himself. On Wednesday he basked in the unaccustomed adulation.
More often though, he comes across as surly and arrogant, self-centred and unco-operative. But even if he had been a paragon of sweetness, life would have been problematic. Bonds is also the emblem of the steroids scandal that has dogged baseball for a decade.
In a sense, the game has got what it deserved. For years it pretended no drugs problem existed, even when a steroid precursor banned in other sports was found in the locker of St Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire in the summer of 1998. That year, America was enthralled by the battle between McGwire and Sammy Sosa, of the Chicago Cubs, to break the existing single season record of 61 homers. They both shattered it, with McGwire hitting 70 - the mark Bonds would top just three years later.
Despite mounting evidence these feats were chemically propelled, the lords of Major League Baseball looked the other way. But then came the Balco scandal, and the lords of baseball could put their heads in the sand no longer.
The Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, ostensibly a supplier of nutritional supplements, provided an unmatched range of stimulants, from well-known steroids and human-growth hormone to the hitherto undetected designer steroid THG. It was the biggest illegal drugs scandal in US sport, counting dozens of top athletes among its clients. Among the baseball players, it became clear beyond reasonable doubt, was Bonds.
His statistics alone were suspect. Four of his best five seasons were 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004, all when Bonds was over 36, an age when even the mightiest slugger's powers would normally be waning.
Bonds still denies he knowingly took steroids and has never failed a baseball drugs test (not that, until last year at least, that obstacle ever amounted to much). But this defence was destroyed by Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, investigative reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle - first in the paper and then in their 2006 book Game of Shadows.
It is based on the supposedly secret transcripts of testimony to the Balco grand jury. These show Bonds received a version of THG known as "the clear" and another steroid called "the cream". He told the grand jury he thought they were flaxseed oil and an anti-arthritis balm, but evidence from other witnesses, including his former girlfriend, leaves scant doubt he was on a steroids regime, and knew it.
Hence the perjury investigation. The tax investigation stems from income Bonds generated by signing baseballs and other memorabilia, which he did not report to the authorities. Bonds did briefly sue the authors, but he did not challenge the allegations.
Instead he claimed Williams and Fainaru-Wada were guilty of an "unfair business practice," by making public grand jury testimony.
For baseball, a sport that reveres its statistics as no other, the revelations were devastating. The epic McGwire-Sosa home-run duel had been no more than a glorified lab test, as were many other statistics compiled in what had seemed baseball's most glorious offensive era.
Thus the dilemma posed by Bonds' inexorable march to overtake Aaron. Belatedly, and under fierce pressure from Congress, the MLB commissioner, Bud Selig, has tightened baseball's drug rules and even the players' union has been shamed into going along with it.
But as Bonds has approached the record, discomfort has only grown. Selig refuses to say if he will attend games when Bonds is poised to hit homer No 756. Others simply wish the man would go away.
Bonds joined the 500-homer club in 2001. His 600th came in August 2002, his 700th in September 2004. He hit his 715th to overtake Ruth in May 2006. Now only Aaron stands ahead.
And however much you might wish it, no one believes he will fail to reach the summit.
- The Independent
