BARRY BONDS used to hit so many balls out of the San Francisco Giants’ stadium into McCovey Cove – 35 in his career – that the kayakers who gathered there to recover them dubbed themselves the Bonds Navy. They did a lucrative trade at hundreds of dollars a ball – $17,000 from one fan for the ball that brought Bonds one of his many records. His extraordinary career total of 762 home runs in 21 years in top baseball eclipsed even its greatest, Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron.
Now, however, the question is whether the balls’ soaring trajectories were chemically assisted, and the records tainted by Bonds’s alleged steroid abuse. His denials to a grand jury three years ago finally landed him in court yesterday on perjury charges, in what is likely to prove one of the final, highly theatrical chapters in US baseball’s steroid scandal era. OJ who?
Dozens of Major League players, including stars like Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, have been brought down in the scandal that implicated Balco laboratories, a sports supplement company which supplied performance-enhancing drugs mostly to baseball but also to many US athletes. Roger Clemens, one of baseball’s greatest pitchers, is accused of lying to Congress and his trial is scheduled for this summer. And Balco’s clients included former Olympic 100 metres champion Marion Jones who eventually returned the five medals she won at the 2000 games and was jailed for six months.
Bonds, who has strenuously maintained his innocence, has an uphill fight. Among the witnesses against him is a teammate who says Bonds admitted steroid abuse to him, a former personal shopper who says he saw him being injected by trainer, Greg Anderson, and former girlfriend Kimberly Bell. She will testify that Bonds, jealous of McGwire’s record-breaking season in 1998, had started using steroids in 2000, that they had dramatically worsened his sexual performance, shrunk his testicles, and made him highly irascible. And the three-week trial is expected to open with the jailing of Anderson for refusing to testify, although a tape of him implying he gave Bonds steroids will feature prominently.
For the US’s most-cherished game, the trial will open up sores from a past it has put behind it, in no small measure thanks to the sterling work of the sport’s former commissioner, Senator George Mitchell, and the era of mandatory testing he ushered in. Bonds may take comfort in the fact that the last sportsman his trial judge sentenced for lying about steroid use, a cyclist, got six months of house arrest. Bonds lives in Beverly Hills.