Somewhere, Barry Bonds is laughing. He's not working, but he's got to be laughing.
Bonds, stuck in baseball limbo, probably is following the latest round of unsavory reports about Roger Clemens, this time involving - yuck - an underage girl. Bonds' sport rejoiced as it washed its hands of him last offseason, even though he escaped with the all-time home run mark. Still, it was supposed to have been that simple: Out goes Bonds, out goes our "problem."
Now, a fresh dump truck-load of dirt lands on Clemens every other week, and as it does, it also lands on baseball. No one factored that in when the baseball world perpetrated the idea that the evil of performance-enhancing drugs in the national pastime began and ended with Bonds.
You might say this is baseball's chickens coming home to roost. But that analogy might get you "denounced and rejected" by certain presidential candidates. Let's just say it's an extreme version of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for."
The wish was for one unpleasant, uncooperative anti-hero to disappear and take his tainted records with him. If demonizing him as a steroid cheat did the job, then everything else would be worth it. "Everything else" included 24/7 coverage of everything related to him, endless commentary in print, on air and online shredding his character, and fans crisscrossing the country and packing stadiums to wave asterisk signs, dress as syringes and throw objects at him. And commissioners insolently shoving hands into pockets when records are broken.
Problem is, "everything else" also included congressional hearings, books, investigations, the Mitchell Report and the takedown of hero after hero, from Mark McGwire to Rafael Palmeiro to Rick Ankiel. And, eventually, the one who sold America an image of the rugged, John Wayne-style, all-American, clean-cut, family-first, rough-and-tumble Texan defying Father Time and extending his brilliant career on sheer grit.
That was Roger Clemens and the image he created for himself - which, in his defense, was too easy for America to drink in without questioning. America made it so easy, he got comfortable, then arrogant, then started tilting toward impenetrable. Thus, the hubris of challenging the Mitchell Report and its chief informant on Clemens, Brian McNamee.
And thus the resulting tales of hooking up with a teenage country star wannabe, ones that included references to Monica Lewinsky and cigars. (To reiterate - yuck.)
