Business…click, go, and peep this month’s BSN joint, a look at Barry Bonds.
An update is coming soon, I promise. School’s been the real deal, but I’ll be back on it shortly. This week’s column will be on TI, and next week’s will be on Anthony Hamilton. Instead of posting here about Grandmaster Flash, that will be a column entry in late January. Be on the lookout for that one.
And belated Happy Happy to Shaka T. and Cam.
5 thoughts on “Somebody said something about juice?”
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In regards to steroids and professional athletes: I don’t see why it really matters if an athlete uses performance enhancing drugs in certain sports. We all enjoy seeing athletes perform at the highest levels and performance enhancing drugs help them to do that. In my humble opinion, there’s only so much the drugs can do anyway. There has to be a certain amount of God-given talent and natural athletic ability present for the drugs to help. If a bumbling, clumsy idiot takes performance enhancing drugs, then they will become the same but with muscles. For some reason, I think that track and field should be the exception , (along with most Olympic sports), for banning these drugs. However, in the cases of the NBA, NFL & MLB , I say go for it.
I agree with you Bomani. Mark McGwire admitted to using a performance enhancing drug. What happened?
Nothing. The public didn’t care. McGwire was in the midst of “saving baseball”. Do people want the organically grown, free-range, natural athlete? Nah. We want to be entertained. The storm surrounding Barry Bonds has as much to do with his personality as with his “cheating”. Arrogant. I say he is confident. In a sport where a failure rate of 70 percent is exceptional any confidence must border on being arrogance. Is Bonds personable. Hell no. Unlike most sports fans I don’t need to like a guy to appreciate how well he does his job.
Cheating…cheating was watching opposing pitchers fall all over themselves to serve up the next gopher ball to Big Mac as he sought to hit seventy homer runs.
Barry Bonds gets whacked last week for “so called” cheating. However, the true atrocity last week was the firing of Ty Willingham of Notre Dame. Here’s a brother, who didn’t CHEAT, won football games,ran a clean program, and represented Notre Dame with class. However, they fire him before his contract is up? I guess you aren’t cheating you aren’t trying.
Yeah, it was a crappy thing to do, but in a way, this could be a good thing for Willingham. Now he’ll have the opportunity to coach for a program that realizes that you can’t recruit and succeed based on past (WAY past) glories. Give Ty a couple years, and he’ll be just fine. If not, then the whole damn NCAA needs to be scrapped.
16. 49. (The number of home runs Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire hit, respectively, in their rookie seasons)
To me, that’s the biggest argument to be made for the difference between the two men and how they are treated. McGwire showed early on in his career that he was a home run hitter, setting the rookie record while doing it. On the other hand, Bonds came in as a very good hitter, but not an overwhelming threat to put one in the stands.
Both players changed as they got older. They got better and bigger. Yet McGwire’s change wasn’t as hard to accept, if that’s the right word. He was a pretty big guy to begin with and steadily got bigger over the years.
Barry couldn’t have been more than a buck sixty or seventy at most in his early career (if my memory of the ’91 and ’92 playoffs serves me correctly). His bulk-up, especially coming so fast after turning 35, is a tad bit harder to swallow.
Now I would agree that steroids and andro don’t make a hitter better, insofar that they won’t improve hand-eye coordination or ability to judge the strike zone. But I absolutely think that steroids and andro will make whatever you do hit go farther than it would normally. So if you already hit home runs such as McGwire, they won’t come more frequently because of drugs. It’s just that instead of being “average” ones, they become majestic, tape-measure shots. Whereas Barry Bonds turned all those line-drive doubles into home runs and rode that into the record books.
You also have to think about the legality of the drugs they used. They both used performance enhancers, yes, and they were both legal in the eyes of baseball at the time of their use. The one huge difference is that andro was legal by U.S. law at the time McGwire used it. Steroids have been illegal for years. (By the way, it’s not lost on me that this could be considered nitpicking)
I don’t see how Bonds’ ego would be a deterrent to taking steroids. In fact, I think that because of Bonds’ monstrous ego, he couldn’t be satisfied with being considered one of the greats of his generation as he would’ve been without them. He had to be “the” greatest. It wasn’t good enough that he looked like his godfather, Willie Mays in the field and could’ve been Ted Williams at the plate. He wanted the most glamorous record in sports. That’s his tragic flaw as I see it.
It just irritates me to no end when something I love, like baseball, gets this dark cloud hanging over it. It wasn’t just Barry Bonds that did this. McGwire should shoulder some of the blame too. And anyone else who did something to make them better than they would’ve been otherwise. These players have hit the genetic jackpot at birth and all they have to do is what they’re supposed to and collect massive checks for doing it. When they cut corners and and get greedy for more, it pisses me off. Not only is it a slap in the face to those who played before, some of them heroes of ours and of our fathers, it’s an insult to those who can’t play and only want to see something real on the field.