http://www.nydailynews.com/
March 8th, 2006
Now it all comes out on Barry Bonds, in a book that tells us everything about him, in painstaking detail, that our eyes have told us for a long time. You could call Bonds a junkie off this new book "Game of Shadows," except that would be insulting to people who keep sticking needles in themselves because they are sick.
You continue to give him the benefit of the doubt if you want. You let Bonds defend himself by saying he has never failed a drug test, and that even if he was using steroids to break home run records, there was no real drug policy at the time. Go ahead. If this book is true, and it reads as true as confession, then Bonds' home run records lie and so does he. If these guys are wrong, let's see Bonds sue them, for all they have.Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, two reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle who have been out front on BALCO and Bonds and steroids from the start, now have their new book excerpted in their own newspaper and Sports Illustrated. And whatever Bonds says about this, however he tries to dismiss it, these two reporters and their reporting seem to take this guy right to the wall.
Baseball commissioner Bud Selig has no choice now but to appoint an independent prosecutor, maybe even John Dowd himself, the one who got the goods on Pete Rose, to investigate every single charge made against Bonds, and about his insane drug use, in this book. If a bimbo like Jose Canseco can get Congress to convene hearings about steroids in baseball, if Canseco's book can take down Mark McGwire, another whose home run records came out of a bottle, then the reporting of Fainaru-Wada and Williams ought to at least give us another Dowd.
No reasonable person believes that these two men made this story up, made up the amazing list of drugs they say Bonds ingested or injected for years and years, as Bonds suddenly turned into Babe Ruth, and started to look like him, too.
Maybe this is the real disgrace of Barry Bonds: He is someone blessed with a gift for baseball that maybe a handful of men ever had, and it wasn't enough. Now Fainaru-Wada and Williams say he became a drug cheat to catch up with the other drug cheats.
They say in this book that he shot a steroid called Winstrol into his buttocks. They say he rubbed steroids known as the cream and the clear on his body, then tried to tell a grand jury he thought it was flaxseed oil. According to "Game of Shadows," here is what else Barry Bonds took to make himself bigger than ever, trying to be the biggest home run hitter of all time:
Insulin.
Human growth hormone.
Testosterone decanoate.
A steroid known as Deca-Durabolin.
A narcolepsy stimulant called Modafinil.
Trenbolone, a steroid created to improve the muscle quality of cattle.
Clomid.
Do you know what clomid is? A women's infertility drug that is believed to help steroid users recover natural testosterone production.
Bonds still wants us to believe that everything he put on was pure muscle, even though he finally looked like nothing more than a fat, bloated, distant relative of the skinny kid he had been with the Pirates. Barry Bonds still wants us to believe that his personal trainer and friend Greg Anderson, somebody who once had the run of the Giants clubhouse, was pushing steroids on everybody except Bonds himself. His meal ticket.
Anderson was up to his eyeballs in the BALCO case, has been accused of obtaining steroids and growth hormones from AIDS patients. But Bonds, who thinks the world is stupid, or blind, kept saying that if he took anything Anderson gave him, he didn't know what it was.
You hear all the time that steroid sluggers weren't breaking the baseball law back in the late 1990s, and what would you do if somebody gave you a pill that might make you rich? This is what their public defenders say. We also hear that a lot of other guys were doing it. Yeah, a lot of other guys were doing drugs. There were a lot of drug cheats, some of whom we may never catch, and they finally made steroids in baseball the biggest scandal since the Black Sox. So they were a modern generation of bums in baseball.
And if you think it is automatic that cheats like this get a Hall of Fame vote, go back and read that laundry list of drugs and think again. These guys are owed nothing, by me or anybody else.
Now here we are: Their word, Bonds' word. If Bonds thinks these writers are the liars, you better believe he should sue. Because, boy, he can't have people saying he was a steroid junkie when he wasn't, right? He can't have people saying he only got to 73 home runs because he was using everything except Viagra to jack himself up and jack balls out of the ballpark.
Take a good look at this guy now. Then remember that Henry Aaron was 6 feet tall and 180 pounds when he was hitting 755 home runs for the Braves and the Brewers. If Bonds doesn't have the good grace to walk away from baseball after this season, if he somehow does stick around long enough to get to 756, someday Aaron will have to stand on a field next to him and congratulate him. It will be as much a shame as any of this.
"I won't even look at (the book)," Bonds said in Arizona yesterday. "Why would I?"
This is no longer a rush to judgment on Bonds. Just the judgment he deserves, for what he did to himself and what he has done to his sport. He would walk away now if he had any dignity. He does not. You can't get that out of a bottle.
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