As celebrations, or lack thereof, are in the offing for Barry Bonds inevitable breaking of Babe Ruth's home run record, I have to go there. There is the place of race and hypocrisy.
Here's my gut. Two things. One, Barry has decided not to break Hank Aaron's record because he knows and respects Aaron in the way that black sports royalty does. Two, he has decided to beat Babe Ruth's record both to be considered greater and to spite anybody with any notion that blacks shouldn't be numbers one and two, whether or not such people exist.
So on the one hand Bonds could be left with his own inside old boy racial preferences for Aaron and fighting an invisible enemy. He could be the only one accused of playing ethnic favorites, but enemies who will mention race and the Babe will step out of the woodwork and legitimate whatever race card Bonds might be said to be playing. This is my prediction.
Now I completely understand where Bonds is coming from. He's about my age and this was the burden we were handed in our youth. It basically goes something like this, yeah you're talented and all that, but don't take yourself too seriously; you're never going to beat X. X being whatever white superstar or old boy people could pull out of their imaginations or history. Speaking for myself, I can remember such things being said about legal and accounting partnerships when I was in prep school in the late 70s. It's one of the reasons I went into science, just like Asians. We bogard. We've got something to prove.
What happens when you achieve the impossible in such a way that proves you have nothing further to prove? What further if along the way you figure out that nobody is giving you the props you deserve and you decide not to be perfectly graceful for their benefit? You become Barry Bonds. Or at least that's the way I see him. And you know, I think that's exactly the same thing that happened to Moe Greene, and inveterate Cobb readers knows that cuts me deeply.
About the performance enhancement? Well, my opinion is that it's rather like Las Vegas. Gambling is legal there and people from every state where it's illegal go there. Vegas gets bigger and bigger, other state laws get looser and looser. Why do we even bother pretending this is not the way things are? In the end, we have to admit that gambling is a relatively small moral complaint given the real threats against this nation. So is juicing. I say pay college athletes and let them take every drug under the sun. It's just entertainment.
People who lament the loss of the purity of sport are hypocrites. There is no purity in spectator sports. There is purity in playing sport for honor. That's what you get at the local sandlot, that's not what you get broadcast in primetime in HD.
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