Filial bonds: Baseball star seeks greatness in the name of the father

Watch Barry Bonds. Watch him every day. The second-best baseball player of all time is grieving for his father, his teacher, his hero, who d...

Watch Barry Bonds. Watch him every day. The second-best baseball player of all time is grieving for his father, his teacher, his hero, who died last week at 57. But he is also bearing witness to that father, who was misunderstood, some say blackballed from team to team — playing for eight clubs in eight years when Bonds was a teenager.

Barry has long felt Bobby’s pain, fed off it, used it as fuel, passing on vindication from one generation to the next. But now, after 18 months of watching his dad suffer from cancer, the son’s pain is off the charts.

Bobby Bonds’ last years in the major leagues coincided with my first seasons as a beat writer. Few players were better or more controversial. In his last eight years, he was transferred each season to a different club despite the fact that, in four of those seasons, he had 30 homers.

How Bobby got on the wrong side of the baseball establishment long ago is ancient history now. What’s pertinent is the impact on a son when a father he adores is ushered out of town when he’s 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18. How would any son, after that experience, feel toward owners, general managers, managers, coaches, reporters or fans? Would you trust them, consider them fair judges of a person’s character? Would you think they’d taken the trouble to know what made you tick?

Something, somebody, must pay. Barry knows what Bobby would want as a monument — the same thing he always asked for: Greatness. For weeks, Barry has lived a sorrowful, private saga that will grow in baseball legend with the decades, just as all aspects of the New York Giants slugger will surely grow larger with time.

Even now, after 73 home runs in 2001 and 653 career homers, almost no one seems to grasp what we are seeing. At the moment, with Tiger Woods in a funk, no one in any sport is as good as Bonds is at baseball. And few in any game have provided such heroics while in so much emotional pain.

Right now, Bonds is in a place that no baseball player except Babe Ruth has been. The 39-year-old is able to command the game, call his shot, do whatever the moment demands. The melodramatic feats Bonds has achieved in the last two weeks, and continues to do almost daily, border on the impossible. It’s outside baseball experience, except that he’s doing it.

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Two weeks ago, Bonds’ father left the hospital for the ballpark—one last time. Everybody knew he was there for a farewell. Barry won the game with a walk-off homer. He hit another walk-off home run the next night, too. Two days later, Bobby Bonds died.

For a week, the son stayed with the family, away from baseball. But his team needed him. So, last Saturday, Bonds returned to face Randy Johnson, perhaps the toughest left-handed pitcher ever for a left-handed hitter. No matter who you are, how do you cope with this kind of pressure, this level of self-inflicted demand?

In the fourth inning, Bonds homered off Johnson for the margin of victory in a 2-1 Giants win. Bonds looked up and pointed to the sky, as he does after every home run. But perhaps this time, it was just too much to look up. By the eighth inning, his heart was beating so fast—160 to 200 beats a minute, more than twice the normal rate—that team doctors yanked Bonds from the game and sent him to the hospital.

For a day, Bonds stayed hospitalized with ‘‘exhaustion.’’ But on Monday Bonds was back.

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Right now, Barry’s playing with a torn hamstring and can barely run. We’re not guaranteed how long he’ll stay at this level. So just watch him. Watch him every day. Because right now, nobody in any sport is as good as Barry Bonds is at baseball. That’s exactly what Bobby wanted. And it’s the parting memorial that the son bestowed.

(LA Times-Washington Post)