“How we name a thing, person, or a nation, shapes our perception and
conduct” – Sam Keen
Heroes are important in most cultures because they are winners who perform.
Everyone wants to be a winner, the best, a hero. In American culture heroes are most prevalent in sports.
Youth want to emulate sports heroes who emerge in times of adversity to guide their teams over obstacles toward victories that will be recorded in history. Indeed, these are admirable traits and the stakes are quite high.
In the novels The Natural and Shoeless Joe Jackson it is the heroes who
Alone take the blame for gambling and corruption that run rampant in baseball.
Owners and league officials repeatedly earn a pass. The Shoeless Joe Jacksons and (mythical) Roy Hobbs in these novels fall from hero to villain status while the real
villains in skyboxes are unscathed.
But what can one expect, this is baseball, which is synonymous with America. It also has a history of segregation, exploitation, avarice and greed.
Indeed, there is no innocence in baseball. Not only does its history include racial violence, exclusion, and corruption, but after the strike season in the mid-1990s it was desperate and took every advantage to lure disillusioned fans back to the game. Not only did Major League Baseball teams make ballparks smaller for power hitters and fill them with modern amenities for fans, it also turned the other way regarding steroid use.
However, when the turnstiles started moving again and when things became
too obvious after the Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa home run chases, it was the players and not the institution of baseball (the league office and owners) who emerged as villains threatening the integrity of the game.
And the number one villain threatening the morality of sports culture and American society became Barry Bonds, the new home run king and arguably the best player ever. Bonds, who is certainly the best player of his generation, has been for the past five years enemy number one for alleged steroid use.
Without concrete proof, this hero became a presumed criminal while in the process of ascending ultimate hero status.
After nearly three years of investigation, the government indicted Bonds for perjury in connection with the Balco investigation. Despite his conviction in the media, Bonds maintains his innocence, recently pleading not guilty to obstruction of justice and perjury.
What is most troublesome is not whether Bonds is innocent or guilty but that the federal government has spent millions of our tax dollars over the past three or four years trying to build a case. I can think of so many better uses of our federal tax dollars. There are schools in poor communities in dire need of books, computers and more teachers to lower the student ratio in classes; kids in juvenile detention could use resources to decrease illiteracy, which is connected to adult crime rates.
A similar waste of money that could have made a greater impact as a charitable donation is The Mitchell Report. This report, which took nearly two years to complete, turned up few new surprises, except allegations about stars Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte.
Meanwhile, fans and media who have already convicted Bonds now are showing apathy for Clemens and Pettitte, who were “trying to compete in a steroids era.”
Race obviously is a huge cause in Bonds’s fate. In his book Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, Sam Keen explains, “The hostile imagination begins with a simple but crippling assumption: what is strange or unknown is dangerous and intends us evil.”
Race, coupled with Bonds’s notorious “bad attitude,” made it easy for him to emerge as a sub-human, immoral stranger and villain threatening the “integrity” of baseball. Keen cautions us that how we name or describe persons, nations, or things shapes perceptions and conduct. America and its media have a long and powerful history of shaping black males as subhuman villains. An unfortunate truth is that black athletes, despite the plethora of heroes, often take the shape of villain, cheater and amoral outlaw.
Why is Bonds the poster boy of baseball’s steroid era, while America pitches around then Commissioner Bud Selig, the league office, team management (including President
George W. Bush, who owned the Texas Rangers in the 1990s) and stars like Clemens and McGwire?
Thabiti Lewis is a former reporter for the American. He is a Washington State University Vancouver professor in the Department of English and author of “Ballers of the New School: Race, Sport, and American Culture.”