A week before he deposited his 40th home run of the season, leaving him two short of 700, there appeared in Atlanta the Barry Bonds people have wished more often to see, as opposed to the churlish jerk of reputation who leaves the impression Allen Barra has observed -- namely, that we who wanted to embrace him have been rebuked long enough for, ahem, invading his space.
Informed that no less than Hank Aaron had deemed him "one of the greatest hitters that ever played the game," Bonds's standard defense shields came down, and the man approaching his 700th career home run to a thundering roar of indifference let himself become an awestruck and endearingly awkward kid one more time. "I don't know about that," he told a Contra Costa Times reporter. "I'm amazed by all of this right now. I'm amazed by it all."
Aaron is not a man to mince a word, and he went nowhere near the switch on his blender when he spoke. "No question about it," said the man Sandy Koufax dubbed "Bad Henry." "You have to put it in context, that he's probably one of the greatest hitters that ever played the game."
"I've heard some people say Ted Williams, and Ted was great," Aaron continued. "Of course, Ted was the last player to hit .400. But who knows? If they pitched to Barry, he might hit .450. I'm sure it's going to be argued and debated among sportswriters and others, people would say Babe Ruth was the greatest, and I wish them all the luck in the world, but you have put Barry a little past Babe Ruth."
And, Aaron said, a little past himself. He received no argument from another fellow known to drive a ball or two 10 miles. "With all the records he's approaching, you've got to say that. He's a great player," said Harmon Killebrew to the same reporter. "Not too many people thought 700 homers was a mark many people would get to. He's done it in quick fashion."
Confronted with such praise, in that time and place, Bonds could not prevent himself a modesty that would be thought endearing had he not succeeded over too many years in leaving the impression that merely saying hello was tantamount to pulling a loaded pistol on him. He even spoke about the burden of his race in a tone and a tone coloring far, far different than the dismissive harrumph he emitted when waving off Boston, a town he had never visited prior to so speaking, as still a racist redoubt.
Bonds knows and said aloud that his likely passage of both the Bambino and Hammerin' Hank isn't even close to the psychic inferno through which Aaron passed when he approached, met, and left behind Ruth 30 years ago. (Bonds at 40 on the season has tied Aaron with eight 40-homer seasons.) If Bonds receives hate mail for approaching and passing Ruth and Aaron, it will probably be far more to roast his actual or alleged personality, with perhaps an isolated few -- idiocy transcending generations, after all -- roasting his race.
"To have Hank there, to have our great minority athletes support our other minority athletes, that's important to all of us," he told the Contra Costa Times. "No one understood (what he went through). A lot of the older writers know. Hank is always going to be our mentor, just like Jackie Robinson and the black athletes before us who went through the Negro League and couldn't participate in the major leagues at that time. They're the stepping stone to why the rest of us are here now. They'll always be our leaders, regardless of what we do. They're the ones who opened the doors for us. To me, they'll always be number one."
Such commentary is far enough beyond the kind of malspeak for which Bonds is as notorious as one of his patented drives into the waters of McCovey Cove. It is impossible to escape thinking that a such a thoughtfully-spoken Bonds, appearing more consistently whenever he opens his mouth, might have forged himself a far less churlish image over a far longer time. He might just have around him the embrace of fans who might, customarily, gaze upon a man approaching a prohibitive enough milestone with affection, rather than apprehension.
Perhaps in his private recesses, Bonds learns a little more by the day what his chosen carriage has cost him. Especially since it is suspected reliably enough that, should you encounter him in a situation in which he feels neither threatened nor exposed, he is a genuinely decent person when all is said and done.
(The casual Bonds hater, before launching a tantrum, might review again that if Bonds or any player today should be found living even one day's worth of Babe Ruth's lifestyle -- the insouciantly soulless womanizing, the gluttonous boozing, the fellowships with gangsters, the attempted manslaughter of his manager off the end of a speeding train, the thrust up into the stands to beat a heckler senseless, the pass made upon a teammate's wife, to name a few Ruthian behaviors -- there would be calls enough for a public hanging to drown out the laughs such behaviors are still known to arouse when the subject is good ol' Babe.)
Approaching Ruth and Aaron, surely Bonds is human enough to bristle that he is not anticipated with even half the affection attached to Ichiro Suzuki pursuing a prohibitive mark of his own. But maybe within that bristling there begins to arrive introspective inversion, an arrival Bonds suggested by his comments upon learning precisely how highly Bad Henry thinks of him.
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