Records are Made to be Broken
Sports Media Types Uncomfortable with Barry Bonds Breaking Hank Aaron’s Home Run Mark

An end of an era moment occurred for me this past week. The New York Mets released infielder Julio Franco from the team. I’m not really a fan of the Mets and have only a passing familiarity with Franco’s career, which now may be at its end.

But his leaving the Mets resonates with me because it means that for the first time in my life, I am older than every single player in major league baseball. For a few years now, Franco has been the last remaining player older than me, but at 48 years of age and hitting a measly .200, it looks as if he will fail to achieve his dream of playing pro ball at age fifty.

“Hammerin’” Hank Aaron holds aloft home run ball number 715 after breaking Babe Ruth’s record in 1974 at Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta. Will Barry Bonds’ record-breaking homer be similar celebrated, or roundly ignored?

Of course, this development comes as no surprise to me. I’ve been older than all of the guys in the National Football League—even those place kickers named Anderson who seem to hang around forever—for several years now. I was born in 1960 and I don’t think there are any players left in the National Basketball League who were born in the entire decade of the 1960s.

I’m sure there are a few guys in motor sports who are older than I am…but I have always found the phrase “motor sports” to be something of an oxymoron…like “jumbo shrimp” or “vacation bible school.”

And don’t even get me started about professional golfers. Those “athletes” don’t even carry their own clubs and have conniption fits if somebody coughs while they are trying to make a four-foot putt. That’s something about sports that I’ve never understood. In the Olympics, 16-year-old female gymnasts have no problem doing back flips on a four-inch wide balance beam in front of an entire arena of cheering people. But pro golfers apparently can’t move a little white ball around the course unless they have total silence. Go figure.

If you’ve followed professional baseball this season, you no doubt know that controversial San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds is closing in on one of the most hallowed records in all of sports: Hank Aaron’s 755 career home run total. Many pundits are calling it a crime because they think Bonds started belting out homers at an astounding pace at a time when it is generally believed that many players in baseball were using performance-enhancing steroids.

For his part, Bonds has never failed a drug test nor has he admitted to using steroids. In 2005 he stated, “I don’t believe steroids can help eye-hand coordination (and) technically hit a baseball.”

If anything lends credence to Bonds’ contention that he has not taken steroids it would have to be the amazing length of his career. Most of the obvious steroid abusers in professional sports such as Mark Maguire, Lyle Alzado and Bill Romanowski, ended up sacrificing a few years at the tail end of their careers by bulking up on body mass during the early part of their careers. As the old saying goes, “the candle that burns twice as brightly only lasts half as long.”

Other than his remarkable hitting—especially in the second half of his career—no one has ever come up with any credible evidence that Bonds has taken steroids. But that’s all baseball commentators want to comment on as Bonds approaches Aaron’s home run total. At some point you have to ask yourself, why the tireless witch-hunt?

I believe there are a number of reasons for the nearly unanimous castigation of Bonds. First off, he has never been very friendly to the press. He is prickly when criticized and has on numerous occasions suggested that reporters are out to hurt his family when all they are doing are asking the kinds of questions that sports reporters ask. Now that it’s time to celebrate his achievements, it is understandable that the media is reluctant to jump on the Bonds bandwagon.

Secondly, Americans have been led to believe that professional athletes are the best role models that kids can have, so they better not be teaching our little leaguers to cheat by using steroids. Okay, without getting into why it’s probably not a good idea to have your kids idolizing professional athletes to the point of shooting up the same brand of steroids as their favorite all-star, let’s just say parents need to point their kids toward more suitable role models. There are plenty of good guys out there in sports, entertainment and real life, so pick a few and tell junior about their achievements.

I think the third reason that the media is down on Barry Bonds is that he is about to break the record of one of those good guys I just mentioned. When Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in the summer of 1974, my family lived in an old neighborhood in the middle of Mobile, Alabama—Aaron’s hometown. The fact that Aaron received death threats from whites who didn’t want an African-American to break Ruth’s record incensed the entire Mobile community. It was, along with the annual Mardi Gras parade down Government Boulevard, one of those rare instances where race didn’t matter very much to the Mobile citizenry. Henry Aaron gave everyone in Mobile bragging rights, something that wasn’t often the case in the seventies in that often-overlooked magnolia-filled southern city.

Compared to Aaron, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson, Willie Mays and his own father, Bobby Bonds, Barry Bonds has had a much smoother road to travel as a black American in the major leagues. He would do a lot to heal old wounds, repair his reputation, and make people forget about the steroid controversy if he would turn his record-breaking homer into an opportunity to salute Aaron and the rest of the Civil Rights-era trailblazers in baseball.