Here's something I am sure you won't hear(or read, if you want to get technical) very often around this country:
I feel sorry for Barry Bonds.
In my heart of hearts, I have genuine sympathy for the sporting world's biggest bad guy. Now, I know what you're going to say. "Well, he did this to himself. He chose to cheat. He chose to allegedly lie to a grand jury. He chose to be a prick to us and the media."
You'd be right, but we all make choices in life. Some good. Some bad. Nobody's perfect and nobody is invincible to making the wrong decisions.
Why did Barry Bonds take performance-enhancing drugs?
The same reason Jose Canseco did. The same reason A-Rod did...and Manny Ramirez...and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa...and hundreds more while they tried to make their mark in the hallowed halls of America's favorite pastime. Barry Bonds cheated because, back then, we really didn't care about steroids. We didn't care about how allowing abnormal athletes to become even more abnormal would affect us until the dream world we envisioned for the game of baseball started to blur the lines of reality. We're ok with paying good money to watch 14-13 slugfests.....but not when it comes at the expense of the history of what made this game great. Not when it threatened to erase the memories and careers of the old legends we held so dear to us.
If I can play Devil's Advocate here, what did Barry Bonds ever do to us?
He cheated the game of baseball. So did Roger Clemens.
He lied to us. So did George W. Bush.
He was an asshole. Guess what? A lot of celebrities are.
The power of being the fan or the sportswriter or the sports radio shock jock is that we get to write the story lines and get to choose whose good and whose evil in the sports world instead of the athletes themselves. It's an unfair abuse of power. We're also fine with given the once-shunned second chances. Kobe Bryant was a rapist and a scourge to the NBA until he started winning championships and becoming the closing thing to Michael Jordan since Jordan hung 'em up. After that, it was OK for him to sell us sneakers and sports drinks and put his poster on our walls and his jersey on our backs. Micheal Vick was inhumane evil incarnate for three or four years while going through his dogfighting saga......until he started flashing the potential that made him the next great NFL quarterback.
I'm not saying Bryant and Vick didn't deserve another shot at our adoration. I'm asking why we never gave that shot to Barry Bonds. Barry Bonds is a liar, a cheater, and an all-around jerk...so what would be a suitable punishment for him? Vick did two years in a prison cell in Leavenworth to pay his debt to society. What's the going price for forgiveness for arguably the greatest hitter of our generation?
Don't begin to tell me that if Barry Bonds stood at the top of the steps of the Supreme Court, admitted to using steroids and apologized for the Albert Haynesworth-sized skidmark of tarnish he put on the game of baseball that you would absolve him of his sins. Barry Bonds may have wronged us by using steroids to take a wrecking ball to nearly every relevant record the game of baseball had to offer, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't feel bad for what the man has had to go through. 
Would YOU want syringes thrown at you while you're at work? Would YOU like one of your former flings to announce to the whole world that you were a two-pump chump unable to satisfy a woman with balls the size of cherries? Would YOU want to have a nation clamoring for someone to take a gigantic eraser to everything you've accomplished over your illustrious career simply because you got caught using the same advantage that so many of your peers were using? Would YOU like strangers threatening your life?
We shrug our shoulders at Bonds' obstacles because he isn't our kind of bad guy. We don't look at him like we do a LeBron James, as a man who we may not like at the moment but are willing to let jump back into our hearts after awhile. We scripted Bonds into being the baddest of bad guys and, rather than beg for our mercy and our adoration, he basked in the hatred. Then, when the out pour of dislike became too much for even a man with genetically-enhanced shoulders to bear, he did what any normal human being would have done: he fought back.
"All you guys lied. All of ya'll. In the story or whatever - you have lied. Should you have an asterisk beside your name? All of you lied. All of you have said something wrong. All of you have dirt. All of you. When your closet's clean, then come clean somebody else's. But clean yours first, OK." -- Barry Bonds, March 7, 2006.
The beauty of being on the other side of the microscope is that we never have to look at ourselves and judge ourselves. We never have to pay for our sins or worry about living our lives on the straight and narrow. I feel for Barry Bonds because, like him, I have made mistakes. Maybe not as big or as public or as detrimental to the business that I am a part of, but I have made mistakes. I, like Barry Bonds, am human. I, like Barry Bonds, would do whatever it took to ensure that I finished my career as the greatest to ever step foot in the arena especially if I knew my peers were cutting the same corners I was and getting away with it. It's easy to point fingers and say "How could you do this to us, Barry!?" but, you know what, you would do it too. If you had the choice between taking a risk at being great, wealthy, famous and remembered or being ordinary, a majority of you would take the chance at being condemned in exchange for immortality.
People in this country will root on women who let TV producers marry them off in front of the world, teenagers who get knocked up for a reality show and a couple Us Weekly covers, and greedy bastards who would eat eel shit for money but we won't forgive a man facing years of imprisonment and a lifetime of embarrassment.
Barry Bonds didn't offend us because he broke baseball's rules. He offended us because he broke OUR rules. He played the role of bad guy on HIS terms, not OURS. Much like Terrell Owens or Rasheed Wallace or even Muhammad Ali, Barry Bonds thumbed his nose at the cultivated image we wanted for him. THAT was his crime and it's OUR ego, not his, that puts Bonds in the world of ridicule he has and will continue to find himself in.
We scripted this punishment for Barry Bonds, but who the hell are WE to judge HIM?
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