SELENA ROBERTS
The New York Times
Published: July 23, 2006
WHAT inspires unconditional devotion to a lout?
By most accounts, Greg Anderson is not a foolish lug, but in choosing prison vistas over personal freedom, he has been a fool for Barry Bonds.
Of earthy intelligence, San Franciscans are too sophisticated to be enamored of material excess, but once inside AT&T Park, they have been love-struck over the expandable Bonds.
• There are former sycophants who have turned on Bonds (see his former mistress Kimberly Bell and his former business associate Steve K. Hoskins) with unseemly accounts of his steroid mood swings and money shell games. And with one revealing anecdote after another, the author Jeff Pearlman, in his book “Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero,” describes a callous superstar who belittles subordinates and discards relationships at random.
“He beats people down,” Pearlman said Thursday in a telephone interview. “He wears people out.”
If Bonds’s mean streak is the length of a dragon’s tail, if steroid evidence subverts his march on history, why does his pocket of protectors still defend his myth as the good fairy of martyrdom?
Before the steroid allegations, Jim Warren worked for Bonds as his trainer — a job for the thick-skinned. He uses one word to describe Bonds as an employer.
“Brutal,” Warren said when reached Friday. “He was a sweet, sensitive man with the worst temper ever. He’s got no — whatever the mechanism that a lot of us have to not say that last thing — he doesn’t have that. He’ll throw you under the bus.”
And yet Warren instinctively defended an ogre who wasn’t a take-your-secretary-to-lunch kind of boss. He was demeaning and demanding, but Bonds was also the most diligent athlete Warren had ever trained. One day, the radio-show barker Jim Rome was criticizing Bonds on the air. On Line 1, the caller was Warren.
“Bonds was my guy,” said Warren, who is the national director for Wellbridge health clubs and now trains only nonprofessionals. “I called because that’s what I thought you did. But why would I do that? I don’t know. He has a weird way of instilling that type of loyalty in people.”
It is warped, really. Warren has a home video of Bonds playing Duck Duck Goose with his 5-year-old son. “Of course, two days later, Barry is calling me a racist or whatever,” Warren said. “You let it go. You hold on to those great moments.”
But can a fleeting glimpse of warmth soften a jail cell bed? Can cameo acts of kindness sustain a man through prison visits?
Anderson was willing to spend 15 days in a federal prison rather than testify before a grand jury investigating Bonds for perjury and tax evasion. Anderson was released Thursday when no indictment was brought against Bonds, but he could be sent back to prison for as long as 18 months if his refusals persist. He will never break, Anderson’s law team has said.
If so, Anderson is apparently willing to play the role of Lil’ Kim, without the cleavage and stilettos. She was the bodacious rapper who preferred the label of convict over ratfink and served nearly a 10-month sentence for it.
But she had her street cred to lose. What’s in it for Anderson?
As Bonds described in grand jury testimony reported by The San Francisco Chronicle, “Greg has nothing, man,” adding: “Guy lives in his car half the time. He lives with his girlfriend, rents a room so he can be with his kid, you know?”
Bonds was unapologetic in detailing his frugality with Anderson, acknowledging payments of $15,000 in 2003 and $20,000 after his 73-home-run season in 2001. According to The Chronicle, a juror asked Bonds why he hadn’t bought his all-but-homeless buddy a house. “One, I’m black,” Bonds said, “and I’m keeping my money.”
Pearlman’s book illuminates this portrayal of Bonds as cruelly cheap and confounded by race issues, as perpetually insecure and doggedly mistrustful.
Somehow, Anderson, as Pearlman described, penetrated the wall to become one of five people in Bonds’s inner circle. Anderson’s identity as the true-blue bodyguard to Bonds’s legacy may trump his being called a snitch.
“Greg may not have a lot of people left,” Warren said.
The fear of losing Bonds may be Anderson’s most powerful motivation for remaining silent. Fear of losing face may be another.
Ridicule is a powerful suppressant. How many whistle-blowers are there in baseball? Truly, the list stops at Jose Canseco, mercenary tell-all novelist. George J. Mitchell, the head of baseball’s steroid self-examination, is beating the base paths for moles, but eyewitness accounts are not easy to come by.
Players and managers spend more time in clubhouses than they do at home, but curiously know nothing when pressed. Boston’s Curt Schilling once made bold estimates about steroid use in baseball but flipped his integrity in front of Congress. Why are we even here, he wondered out loud.
•Balco brought us here. A second grand jury may keep us here. There, of course, could be closure for Giants fans blindly devoted to Bonds, for players too afraid to point him out, and, mostly, for Anderson.
Bonds is the keeper of resolution. If he has a drop of compassion — if he, as he has said, is innocent of all allegations — Bonds could do what he does best: make a demand, not a request. He could tell Anderson: “I’m not worth prison. Testify.’’
But can a selfless act exist in a narcissist’s heart? Anderson may be about to find out.
E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com
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