Bonds away

Thousands of fans will pack Fenway Park this weekend, aimed with the intention of sticking it to Barry Bonds, booing the Giants slugger with a veracity normally reserved for Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter or Roger Clemens.

Ask why, and the answer will be a familiar one. “He’s a fraud.” “He took steroids.” “He cheated on his wife and taxes.”

Even those not named Curt Schilling would have a similar response. “He’s cheating history.”

True. But that’s only half the reason why Boston should unleash its fury upon Bonds.

The controversial home run king-to-be will visit Boston for the first time as a player this weekend when the Giants arrive for a much-anticipated series against the Red Sox, three years after Boston’s first trip to San Francisco in this wacky process we call interleague play.
It was before that trip in 2004 that Bonds told the Globe’s Gordon Edes what he thought of a city in which — until this week — he had never played.

“Boston is too racist for me,” he said. “I couldn’t play there.”
It is a judgment, he acknowledges, not derived of firsthand experience — he missed the 1999 All-Star Game, played in Boston, because of an injury — but on word-of-mouth.
“Only what guys have said,” he said, “but that’s been going on ever since my dad [Bobby] was playing baseball. I can’t play like that. That’s not for me, brother.”
When it was suggested the racial climate has changed in Boston, Bonds demurred.
“It ain’t changing,” he said. “It ain’t changing nowhere.”
They built a tunnel to honor Ted Williams in Boston. What did he imagine would be built for him?
“Nothing, man,” he said. “I’m black. They don’t build stuff for blacks.”

Granted there are some who might find no more wrong with Bonds’s words in 2004 than his use of a double negative. But for a city that has fought its reputation as a battleground of racism over the past 50 years, it was an unwanted dagger for communities that have worked ferociously to create a more integrated atmosphere.
Bonds isn’t likely to leave here after this weekend with a change in his viewpoint, thanks to the merciless treatment he’s bound to get in the Fens. This is how it works, after all, if you’re Barry Bonds. If they don’t like him, they must be racists. It doesn’t matter if you’re letting him know what you think about the alleged use of steroids and the home run record. Racist.
Bonds is but nine home runs away from breaking the grandest record in sport, transferring it from one of the greatest characters to ever play the game in Hank Aaron to one of the most despicable this side of Ty Cobb. (Wait, Aaron is black and Cobb was white. Can we say that, Barry?) Aaron has already said he won’t be there whenever Bonds does break his mark for career home runs, his own personal stance to display how he feels about this sham. Commissioner Bud Selig, in between stammering and excusing some other aspect of the game that he’s allowed to turn into a joke, has been noncommittal about his availability for the anticipated moment. George Mitchell might be there, but we’re having a difficult time finding the old chap.
Of course, blacks like Aaron, who only holds the record, were in the minority of a ridiculous ESPN/ABC poll that indicated that 75 percent of African-Americans wanted Bonds to break the record, as opposed to just 28 percent of whites. God forbid that Alex Rodriguez ever puts on his own charge toward Bonds’s soon-to-be record, simply for fear that we’ll have to be embroiled in even more racial controversy over this silly mark.
In a recent column for the Minnesota Star-Tribune, University of Hartford history chairman Warren Goldstein examined these results.
“Bonds’ surliness makes it easy for most white folks to say, ‘Race has nothing to do with it. Bonds is a jerk (or worse).’ It’s all about Bonds, not the speaker: a version of ‘I’m not a racist.’ Why then do twice as many white fans as black believe that Bonds ‘knowingly used steroids?’ Do white fans more easily believe that a haughty, self-absorbed black man cheated? Do black fans more easily doubt black guilt?”
It is indeed moments like this, when reading accusatory words like this, that I wish Mark McGwire were still around in the game, assaulting the record as well with performance-enhancers as his copilot, just so all us dumb white folks could have someone else to despise and even out the race field.
That isn’t to say that race does not play some factor in people’s hatred for Bonds. But it isn’t nearly as much of a reason as the reasons outlined in “Game of Shadows.” There is plenty of documentation to outline that the man cheated the sport. And if that isn’t obvious, you can always stare at his enlarged dome for a few moments and make a decision.
This chase has the world fascinated. Bonds discusses soccer with a British columnist, and all of a sudden he’s “miscast” as the villain. He wasn’t as outgoing with another Canadian reporter, but the fact that Bonds didn’t feel he had to explain himself was just keen with Joe O’Connor. “Heroes seldom do,” he writes.
Hero. After all, isn’t this the kind of guy you want your child to aspire to?
Personally, I couldn’t care less when Bonds breaks the record, and in fact have to wonder why it’s such a big deal anymore anyway. Haven’t we lost all the allure of baseball’s “hallowed” marks since the late ‘90s? Didn’t McGwire and Sosa already make a mockery out of what had been baseball’s most sexy number in 1998, only to have Bonds spit even more on the Maris number? Why would 756 be any different? It’s just another number that baseball can watch fall thanks to ignoring the steroid era because the dumb-witted fans and media were all watching in awe, as if everyone were 7 years old and wanted nothing more than to be witnessing the greatest era in the game’s history.
After too much of a good thing, the numbers are diluted, and Major League Baseball, which champions its history more than any other sport, has nobody to blame but itself for looking the other way.
Despite being a team that the San Francisco Chronicle’s Betting Fool calls, “Old, boring and gutless,” the last-place Giants are one of the hottest tickets of the summer at Fenway Park. The draw, of course, is Bonds, who will witness Fenway and its inhabitants for the first time. Though there will be a good number of apologists, those people who feel the need to have a contrarian view, the majority of fans this weekend will have no problem unleashing on the slugger.
He cheated the game. But understand the real reason you’re booing Bonds this weekend.
He called you a racist without ever having met you.
This town doesn’t hate Bonds, Mr. Goldstein, because the fans think he “knowingly took steroids.” It hates Bonds because they know what he thinks of them.
And to be honest, the feeling is mutual.