No, Stark, you don't get it
Why is it that people can't seem to let go of their collective idea of the way things ought to be?
First of all, in the name of full disclosure, I should tell you that my favorite baseball player is Barry Bonds. There are many reasons for this. I have admiration for genius, for individuals who strive for greatness and a form of immortality through achievement. Make no mistake, what Bonds has done on the baseball field is a form of genius. Here, in our midst, right before our eyes, we have a player who is so good that he changes the way the game is played.
On another level, I admire Bonds because for strictly personal reasons. As I've hit my mid-thirties, the number of professional athletes currently playing who are older than I am have dwindled to a precious few. Not many of these contemporaries are still performing at the top of their game. No one in the NFL now that Jerry Rice has declined. No one in the NBA since Jordan retired. In baseball, you have Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens but I've always like hitters, who create, better than pitchers, who stifle. And Bonds is the best. I've never been one who places athletes on a hero-worshipping pedastol (my personal heroes are Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway) but, if I did, it would be impossible for me to idolize a person younger than myself. Still, in a sense, Bonds touches something in the latent child buried within me. For me, he's the last great baseball hero.
Everything I've said applies strictly to on-the-field performance. But as I get older, I come to admire Bonds as a person more and more. Here is a man who is strikingly individual, who doesn't pander to any public- and/or media-fueled expectation of what a player or a person should be like. Bonds is the sports version of a counter-cultural icon. His defiance, his arrogance, his anger, - I admire all of these traits. He seems to only care about achieving his full potieniality as a ballplayer. If that's selfish, I can only wish that all athletes were as selfish. If I knew Bonds personally, perhaps I wouldn't like him. That's OK - there are a lot of people that I admire but don't like.
Of course, the Bonds that I've sketched here is not the sort of person that is going to ever come to know mass adulation. For Jayson Stark, Bonds is "strange" and apparently in need of some psychiatric counseling. He portrays Bonds as some sort of schizophrenic, babbling maniac. I urge you to read the full transcript of the press conference. Read the answers in the context in which they were uttered and to how the questions were asked. That's all I ask. What emerges, to me, is simply a guy who has a certain way of approaching life, his profession and the trappings that go along with it. He made a hell of a lot more sense to me than Jason Giambi.
Maybe Barry Bonds isn't the man that Jayson Stark would have him be. I think it's safe to say that Bonds can say the same thing about Stark.
First of all, in the name of full disclosure, I should tell you that my favorite baseball player is Barry Bonds. There are many reasons for this. I have admiration for genius, for individuals who strive for greatness and a form of immortality through achievement. Make no mistake, what Bonds has done on the baseball field is a form of genius. Here, in our midst, right before our eyes, we have a player who is so good that he changes the way the game is played.
On another level, I admire Bonds because for strictly personal reasons. As I've hit my mid-thirties, the number of professional athletes currently playing who are older than I am have dwindled to a precious few. Not many of these contemporaries are still performing at the top of their game. No one in the NFL now that Jerry Rice has declined. No one in the NBA since Jordan retired. In baseball, you have Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens but I've always like hitters, who create, better than pitchers, who stifle. And Bonds is the best. I've never been one who places athletes on a hero-worshipping pedastol (my personal heroes are Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway) but, if I did, it would be impossible for me to idolize a person younger than myself. Still, in a sense, Bonds touches something in the latent child buried within me. For me, he's the last great baseball hero.
Everything I've said applies strictly to on-the-field performance. But as I get older, I come to admire Bonds as a person more and more. Here is a man who is strikingly individual, who doesn't pander to any public- and/or media-fueled expectation of what a player or a person should be like. Bonds is the sports version of a counter-cultural icon. His defiance, his arrogance, his anger, - I admire all of these traits. He seems to only care about achieving his full potieniality as a ballplayer. If that's selfish, I can only wish that all athletes were as selfish. If I knew Bonds personally, perhaps I wouldn't like him. That's OK - there are a lot of people that I admire but don't like.
Of course, the Bonds that I've sketched here is not the sort of person that is going to ever come to know mass adulation. For Jayson Stark, Bonds is "strange" and apparently in need of some psychiatric counseling. He portrays Bonds as some sort of schizophrenic, babbling maniac. I urge you to read the full transcript of the press conference. Read the answers in the context in which they were uttered and to how the questions were asked. That's all I ask. What emerges, to me, is simply a guy who has a certain way of approaching life, his profession and the trappings that go along with it. He made a hell of a lot more sense to me than Jason Giambi.
Maybe Barry Bonds isn't the man that Jayson Stark would have him be. I think it's safe to say that Bonds can say the same thing about Stark.