Saturday Edition: What Barry Bonds Remembers

Saturday Edition 

What Barry Bonds Remembers

by Mark Anthony Neal

When Barry Bonds was recently convicted of obstruction of justice, it brought to an end a nearly decade long investigation of Bonds and his use of performance enhancement drugs (PED). Though Bonds is, perhaps, the most notorious of a generation of professional athletes who tried to chemically enhance their longevity on their respective fields of play, there were always elements of the investigation of Bonds, that suggested that there was something more at play.

In a society in which race still matters, the Federal Government’s case, in collusion with the popular media’s disdain for Bonds (as was the case throughout his career), was never simply about race. Bonds’ relative militancy in response to the trial and the legacy that he doggedly pursued throughout his career, were fueled by slights and insults that were remembered from generations earlier.

The conviction of Barry Bonds occurred, ironically, only days before Major League Baseball celebrated the 64th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s famous breaking of the color line in the sport. In far too many minds, Jackie Robinson—a legitimate national hero—is the direct anti-thesis of contemporary professional ball players like Bonds, who are invariably described as selfish, money hungry, and inaccessible. While such descriptions are used to depict many professional athletes, when applied to Black athletes, it takes on added animus. For example, terms like “ungrateful,” “arrogant” and "disrespectful" become shorthand for the very idea of the Black athlete, whether directed at Jack Johnson or the Michigan Fab Five.

For several generations of Americans, Robinson was the embodiment of the Black athlete who was grateful for his opportunity to play professional sports; the kind of figure who became a national treasure and an object of nostalgia in the aftermath of the (momentary) radicalization of Black athletes in the 1960s as exemplified by Jim Brown, Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul Jabbar), Tommy Smith, John Carlos, and most famously Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay). As Malcolm X suggested right after a young Cassius Clay won the heavyweight boxing championship, “Cassius Clay is the finest Negro athlete I have known…He is more than Jackie Robinson, because Robinson is the White man’s hero.”

With the image of Robinson gleefully galloping around the bases or stealing home, cemented in the national memory, few could bear witness to the pressures that he faced, or the ways that he fought back against the indignities that he faced. For a player who was known for stealing home, arguably one of the most difficult individual plays in the sport, in which one must use cunning and guile, it should not be surprising that Robinson might have responded to the racism of the day in ways that went unnoticed by many.

I was reminded of such moments during a recent lecture given by Cornell University Professor Grant Farred, "Stupid Bastards: Jackie Robinson and the Politics of Conciliation" in which he recalled an incident during a spring training game in New Orleans in 1949. The incident was initially covered by writer Roger Kahn in his well-read tome The Boys of Summer. In a nod Robinson’s drawing power, the owner of the field in New Orleans, allowed a group of Blacks to watch the game from the stands. Robinson though, was apparently dismayed when Black fans cheered the police officers who allowed them into the stands, shouting: “don’t cheer those goddamn bastards. Don’t cheer. Keep your fuckin’ mouths shut…Don’t cheer those bastards, you stupid bastards. Take what you got coming. Don’t cheer.” (108-109)

Robinson seemed to want to make sure that he and those Black fans who entered the stadium that day would never forget the price they had to pay—literally—for the privilege to play and watch a game. Robinson intrinsically understood that there were many more important and difficult battles to wage. The police that those fans cheered that day, would be the same officers directing fire hoses at them and standing in the entrances of soon to be integrated public schools in a few short years.

To be sure, there were likely many such moments of private tirades by Jackie Robinson, besides the one that Kahn was privy to that day in 1949. Willie Mays, arguably the most popular Black ballplayer of the late 1950s and 1960s, recalls that his own relationship with Robinson was tainted, because the latter felt that Mays needed to be more outspoken about the racist insults that were still directed at Black players well into the 1960s. Robinson was no militant; a moderate Republican by choice, what angered Robinson most was when hard-work and diligence among Blacks was diminished by mainstream culture. Such was the case when Robinson, a second lieutenant in the Army, faced court martial in 1944 for challenging Jim Crow laws in Texas (Fort Hood).

If Mays was not interested, Robinson found an attentive congregation in some of Mays’ peers—the generation of Black ball players that emerged after Robinson broke the color line. Players like Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson and later Curt Flood—who was largely responsible for the advent of free agency in professional sports, because he resisted being treated as chattel—embodied a generation of Black baseball players whose sense of pride and justice, and willingness to challenge the status quo in the sport, and to a lesser extent the larger society, literally leveled the playing field.

Barry Bonds’ sense of this history was more personal; he had the opportunity to witness first hand the frustrated demeanor of his god-father Mays, as his legendary career came to an end and he realized that he would never be feted the way some of his White peers, like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, were. Bonds had an even more intimate view of his father’s struggles in the sport (particularly in the absence of Mays’ mentoring), as Barry Bonds’ skill-set—the quintessential five tool player of the 1970s—eroded in concert with his descent into alcoholism. Barry Bonds never forgave the press for being a source of his father’s anxieties and frustrations, which was manifested in his active disdain for the press corps beginning his rookie season with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1986.

Though he was not particularly close to his father, Bonds’ seemed driven to achieve a level of success that his father was unable to sustain. And though his level of achievement seemed to transcend the animus he generated among the journalists who covered him, Bonds seemed to literally shrink in the face of the two-headed muscle-bound homerun machine—Sosa and McGuire—who became the faces of the sport in the late 1990s. Bonds’ finely honed skill-set, which made him the logical heir to players like Mays and Mantle before him, was suddenly an afterthought for nation who desired a sport where “they bang(ed) ‘em, where they hang(ed) ‘em.” By all accounts, this is when Bonds’ dance with PEDs first began; Bonds making sure that he would not be forgotten.

Bonds and Ken Griffey, Jr.—linked by their like skills as players and fathers who excelled in the sport—were of the last generation of Black players who could remember the era in which the presence of Black players radically transformed the sport. Griffey was not immune to witnessing the  slights that came with the racial shifts in the sport; he famously refused to even consider playing for the New York Yankees in response to how Yankee management treated his father. Yet Griffey, who was known throughout his career as “The Kid"--a clear nod to the boyish charm that Mays presented as the “Say Hey Kid—cultivated a much different relationship with the fans and the press corps, in comparison to Bonds.

The reasons why Bonds and Griffey chose to remember those slights and insults and for the vastly different ways that each chose to acknowledge them, remains to be seen. How Griffey processed this all—including the criticisms directed at him late in his career for not living up to the expectations placed on him—is likely locked away in those same little boxes that Jackie Robinson had to pack away his frustration and anger. The mask that Paul Laurence Dunbar surmised about at the end of the 19th century, was the game face that many Black athletes wore at the end of the 20th century. Griffey was as adept as any in this regard.

Griffey could always take comfort in how highly compensated he was, in ways that were unfathomable for Robinson and those first two generations of Black baseball players. Surely Bonds could also take comfort in such trinkets of success, but like that private rant that Roger Kahn captured in New Orleans in 1949, Bonds seemed to always want the fans, the press corps and sport itself, to pay for what he was forced to remember.

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Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University.  Neal is author of five books, including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (NYU Press).