This is five stars for Barry Bonds (I know he's no longer with the Giants, but when I search his name, it's the SF Giants forum that comes up). His indictment is painful to watch. He's one of my heroes, has been for years. The whole asterisk seeking set, those who think his stats should have an asterisk next to them, is wrong. Whenever I talk to people to try to understand why there has always been this nasty witchhunt for him, they say it's because he's a jerk. So what. He's a tremendous, tremendous role-model. He's a gentle, soft-spoken man, married, a great father and family-man, doesn't beat his wife, he doesn't do drugs. He's not perfect, but how does that make him different from everyone else?
People argue that yes he did do drugs. That's silly. He was doing steroids when everyone in baseball was doing them - and still everyone is doing them in every other sport - in pro sports, high school and college.
It's a sad statement that we have to take our heroes down. The media made a decision that they don't like him because he's a jerk and doesn't play their game. The media is consistently cruel to him, and it's incongruous. Writers generally are liberal and feel very strongly about the right to one's own opinion. Within the writer's community though, no one, no one has the courage to have a differing opinion. Within the writing community, the rule is that you cannot write well of someone who disdains the media. To do that is to abandon your team. So not a single writer, nor anyone in the media, has the courage to come out and love him for the hero he is.
more