Banish Bonds? Too late now

In the pagan cult of celebrity worship some suggest is America's real religion, San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds appears to have entered the destruct cycle.

As recently as 2004, the 41-year-old left fielder seemed destined to become what baseball calls, with no seeming irony, an "immortal." Long one of baseball's premier outfielders, a perennial all-star and "five tool" athlete, Bonds experienced an astonishing late-career metamorphosis that caused many to describe him as maybe the greatest player in the game's history -- others as merely its greatest cheat.

In 2001, Bonds broke the single-season home run record with 73. He enters 2006 needing only 41 home runs to surpass Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron as baseball's all-time career leader, all but guaranteeing enshrinement in the baseball Hall of Fame.

If, that is, the gimpy knee that sidelined Bonds for most of 2005 holds up, the current outcry among sportswriters and broadcasters to have him banished from baseball as a steroid abuser fails, and Bonds escapes indictment for perjuring himself before to a San Francisco grand jury probing illegal prescription-drug use by athletes.

Granted, that's a lot of maybes. But if I were Pete Rose, the former Cincinnati Reds star banished from Major League Baseball for gambling, I'd lay odds that Bonds will accomplish every one of those goals. Indeed, the simplest thing might be to induct the pair into the Hall of Fame together, to get the boycotting, booing and political posturing out of the way all at once.

The cause of the latest furor over Bonds is Sports Illustrated's publication of a book excerpt called "Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports." Written by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, it details a federal investigation into what it hyperbolically calls "a conspiracy to corrupt the world of sports, a plot to engineer athletic superiority through an array of sophisticated and undetectable performance-enhancing drugs."

Seemingly because Bonds was the biggest fish in the prosecutor's net, he gets the full Kenneth Starr-style treatment. Besides leaked grand jury transcripts, confidential federal agents' notes, un-redacted affidavits, and evidence lists, the authors interviewed more than 200 sources, many anonymous. Some is what lawyers call "double hearsay," what somebody says somebody else said Bonds said.

Indeed, the enormous amount of confidential grand jury information given the reporters may indicate that Bonds needn't fear perjury charges for his dubious testimony. As Starr's leak-o-matic investigation also demonstrated, prosecutors who think they can make criminal cases normally keep the evidence to themselves.

Much of the Sports Illustrated excerpt consists of the "revelations" of Bonds' embittered former mistress, who unloads the entire angry courtesan's playbook. According to Kimberly Bell, Bonds turned to illegal steroid doping late in his career due to childish jealousy at the attention given Bunyan-esque slugger Mark McGwire, whose 70 home-run season in 1998 attracted attention the egotistical outfielder thought should rightfully be his, as the better all-around player. If McGwire could get away with it, so could he.

According to her, as Bonds' batting average and home run totals soared, his already difficult personality deteriorated. He started losing his hair and began shaving his head. "Bonds also suffered sexual dysfunction," we're told, "another common side effect of steroid use. Bonds became more quick-tempered. When his anger at Bell flared now, he would grab her, stand close to her and whisper intimidating, hurtful things ... he told her he would kill her if he found she was seeing someone else."

Yeah, well, maybe so. Then again, maybe not. Bell even takes a cheap shot at Bonds' wife, saying he married a black woman for political reasons. (A real sweetheart, isn't she?)

Which isn't to say that Barry Bonds' denials of steroid use are even remotely credible. Although he's never tested positive for banned substances, his defense lawyer once conceded that it was "possible Bonds took steroids unwittingly, mixed into a supplement or nutritional shake without his knowledge."

Bonds' grand jury testimony was downright laughable. Exhausted in the wake of his father's death, he claimed he'd simply taken whatever his personal trainer gave him. "Greg came to the ballpark and said, you know, 'This will help you recover.' And he rubbed some cream on my arm ... gave me some flax seed oil, man. It's like, 'Whatever, dude.'"

But you know what? Never mind that another word for "steroids" is "hormones," and that athletes increasingly risk expulsion for substances with legitimate medical uses. Absent prosecution, there's nothing baseball commissioner Bud Selig can do. Baseball didn't effectively ban steroids until 2002, Bonds has never tested positive, and Selig can't probe one guy without probing scores of others, many since retired. Like it or not, baseball, and baseball fans, are simply going to have to live with what actually happened on the field.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.