My Barry Bonds Admission

Sportswriting is, of course, a wonderful life. I love this job. There are, however, a few fun little irritations every sportswriter must endure. Every sportswriter will remember times, for instance, when they got beat by deadline. You know you are beat when you are staring at a blank screen, two minutes to deadline ... and the game is not over. That's a bad feeling.

This often happens at the Orange Bowl (with its 4 hour, 19 minute halftime show) or at an NBA Finals game, which now begins at 11 p.m. This deadline crush leads to all sorts of comical moments. One legendary old sportswriter apparently faced too many impossible deadlines. So late in his life, when his deadline expired while a baseball game trudged through extra innings, he simply took his computer (which back then weighed roughly 228 pounds) and threw it out the press box window. That story may just be a legend. One true story invoves a friend, who was dealing with a Monday Night Football game that would not end. In the press box he started shouting "I don't know who is going to win!" over and over again.

We've all been there. During Game 4 of the 2001 World Series, deadline hovered, it was the ninth inning, the Yankees were down to Arizona by two runs. I was OK ... I had an entire column written about how the Yankees (soon to be down three games to one) were finally finished, and all I had to do was hit the send button. Then Tino Martinez hit a two-run homer to tie the game, and I was left staring at 800 of the most useless words you have ever seen. By the time Derek Jeter hit the extra inning home run that won the game (finishing off one of the greatest games I've ever seen), I was a trembling wreck. In the madness, I somehow adjusted the column to almost, sort of fit the occasion (mostly by adding the word "not" as in "The Yankees are NOT finished") but I slept fitfully that night. I had post-traumatic Tino disorder. I thought: "Wow, I can't go through something like that again."

The next day, the Yankees trailed Arizona 2-0 in the ninth inning. It was Scott Brosius this time who hit the two-run home run that wrecked my deadline and my blood pressure.

Anyway, there are a few minor annoyances that sportswriters must deal with -- bad deadlines, canceled flights, computer glitches, lost reservations and so on. But many sportswriters will tell you the No. 1 difficulty of being a sportswriter can be summed up in two words: "Barry" and "Bonds." I think it's fair to say that if you asked sportswriters to come up with a field of 64 bad guys to deal with in sports, Barry would be the overall No. 1 seed.

Everybody in the business, it seems, has a story about the evils of Barry, whether it was seeing him insult a kid who wanted an autograph or shove a teammate out of the way so he could get to his locker room recliner or verbally assault a sportswriter who asked an innocent question such as: "Hi Barry." There are the steroid stories, the bad teammate stories, the ego stories. And, of course, there was the time he threw rocks at that orphanage.

Getting mistreated by Barry Bonds is more than an annoyance. It's a sportswriter rite of passage. It's one of those things sportswriters brag about over dinner. Everybody tries to top the other with a good Barry story.

I'm always quiet at those sessions. Here's my problem: Barry Bonds has always been nice to me.
I don't mean he's been semi-nice or tolerable. He's always been nice -- really, really nice. The first time I interviewed him, I was a kid columnist in Augusta, Ga. Nobody was nice to me then. The security guards on the field hassled me. The people working the concession stand mocked me. Barry Bonds was nice. He talked to me for an extended period of time, answered every one of the questions, never showed even the slightest sign of being annoyed or grumpy at all. I can remember sitting next to one of the Pittsburgh writers in the press box that night and saying, "Hey, that Barry Bonds is a pretty good guy, isn't he?" The writer glared at me as if I had said "You know, Stalin had his good points."

So, it was a fluke. By the next time I interviewed Bonds, I was a columnist in Cincinnati and I knew his reputation. I still needed to talk to him. I went up to him pretty timidly and asked if he had a couple of minutes. Maybe he was just shocked that someone wanted to talk to him because AGAIN he was great, perhaps even better than the first time. He talked happily about baseball and life -- Bonds can be a remarkably charming guy -- and he showed absolutely no interest in the interview ever ending. A writer who had covered Bonds for a long time told me, "Yeah, he can be like that once or twice a year. You caught him on the right day."

Actually, I had caught him on the right day twice. The third time was at an All-Star Game, so I knew there was no way he would be in a good mood with all those reporters around. But, surprise, he was great again. He saw that I was from Kansas City, and he talked about Buck O'Neil and George Brett and whatever else. Barry Bonds would not know me if I brought him five forms of identification, and yet every single time I approached him, he was great. Frankly I cannot think of another high-profile baseball player who was really good and open every time I approached him -- including some who have reputations as the greatest guys in the world.

So weird. A couple of years ago - this was after Bonds' body had transformed and his head had grown and all that - he came to Kansas City. He went to tour the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum with Buck O'Neil. Reporters were not allowed anywhere near him, of course, but about halfway through the tour I got a call from Buck and our friend Bob, who was leading the tour.

"You won't believe this," Bob said.

"What's that?"

"Barry was looking at all the photographs of the Negro Leagues players. He was walking right up to them and touching them. And ..."

"And?"

"And he just started crying."

I believed it. None of this is meant to negate the millions of "Barry is a bad guy" stories. Those are all real. He is on the brink of breaking Hank Aaron's hallowed home run record, and he's going to get obliterated by the press and fans and everybody else. The people running baseball will cover their eyes. That's OK, he brought most of that on himself. But I have to say: We sometimes create cartoon images of people in the media. There are countless stories casting Barry Bonds as the villain. And in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say: The guy's always been really nice to me.