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[jamack2]

The fact that a survey in 2007 can ask questions of a sampling of African-American baseball fans, essentially about how celebratory they expect to feel about the breaking of Hank Aaron’s all-time homerun record by Barry Bonds, and find that 29 percent are not enthusiastically awaiting the event, is the observation most singly demanding of further explication in Warren Goldstein’s June 8, 2007 essay “The Conundrum That Is Barry Bonds”.  Mr. Goldstein point out excellently the tenor of the challenges that have been faced, for well over a century, by African-American professional athletes in finding a fair shake and level playing fields to compete upon.  The anecdotes are well and poignantly chosen and reveal that he has long had a deep engagement with the issues of racial injustice in sports.  The phenomenon of Barry Bonds does rest atop a structure comprised of a lot of social history, so much of it contentious and shameful.  So, the question is, knowing so much of this implicitly, if not explicitly, why is it that a portion even as large of 29 percent of African-American fans finds little to cheer about in Bonds’ pursuit of Aaron’s record?  I suggest that that is the more incisive story line to pursue.  (The record is the issue, more than whether or not Bonds should eventually be in the Hall of Fame; had his career ended at age 32, before his dramatic physical transformation and uptick in his homerun rate, he still easily had credentials for the Hall).

There is an unfortunate tendency in our day for us to reduce overly issues of ‘history’ to a comparison of anecdote to current observation – the things that we can see today, just saw over the past few weeks, and expect to see in the upcoming few months.  Anecdotes demonstrate thematic points, but they do not always of themselves tell complete or complex stories, nor do they build a robust and deep historic perspective that is fully specific and appropriate to immediate issues.  Blacks have struggled for due recognition on the playing fields for generations as represented well in Mr. Goldstein’s essay.  I’m old enough to remember well and poignantly the specific racist vitriol, disrespect, and grief that Aaron had to endure in his final two seasons or so as he closed in on Ruth’s record.  I am old enough to remember well approximately the last 8 seasons of his career in fact.  Thus I recall the consummate professionalism and grace with which he did what a major league ball player is called upon to do, in spite of the animus against him.  His career was a model of consistency, excellence, professionalism – on and off the field – and dignity.  Which is not to say that he was a saint, but still to revel that if anyone could have endured the onslaught better, that it would be very hard to imagine.

The immediate and specific backdrop that is essential to grasping how some among African American fans feel about the Bonds pursuit of Aaron’s record is Hank Aaron himself and the knowledge of what he endured and how nobly and courageously he endured it and how above reproach was his pursuit of his excellence on the field of competition.  In the end, it was these qualities that even won over many who at the time had decried his eclipsing of Ruth.  What then are we to make of someone who surely has legitimate bones to pick with how sports writers, fans, the professional sports establishment related to him and to his late and great father, but who makes so little effort to exhibit any of the aforementioned dignity and stoic grace of an Aaron?  Who also, in all probability did use performance enhancing drugs substantially to increase, at relatively advanced athletic age,  the one relative aspect of his game that never before had so dramatically stood out (power, both in terms of numbers of home runs per at bats and in terms of flight distances of batted balls) from the host of his many extraordinary gifts before?  Who began attaining, for the first time, prodigious feats (e.g. 450 ft. plus home runs) at an age when power output in a ball player, by nature, starts to decline?  To know not in just a general and anecdotal way, but in a specific way the careers of the men involved in this dramatic set of events, and the kind of career arc that professional athletes unfailingly seem to have, is to get an idea of why there are some African-American fans who (a) revere Hank Aaron and his accomplishments; (b) have a very high degree of respect for Barry Bonds as one of the most gifted baseball players ever; (c) realize that in spite of his great gifts, Bonds exploits of the recent years of his career almost certainly have been augmented by the use of performance enhancing drugs; (d) that while Bonds may have some cause to feel unfairly targeted over the years for what some would call his ‘attitude’, that he is not the ‘original’ gifted, proud and dignified black man to have appeared on the MLB scene.  He has been preceded by a couple of generations of proud men of great gifts, solid comportment, and an overall solid sense of the boundaries within which one should pursue excellence in the game – Hank Aaron being one of the greatest of these.  We do not need to inflate Bonds, or swallow blindly the impropriety of his likely deeds, to celebrate the great contributions that hundreds of African American men have made to the caliber of play in MLB for the past 60 years and more.

Bonds will make it to the Hall on the strength of his pre-steroid accomplishments deservedly.  However it would be unjust to blindly crown him the New King of Swat, without caveat or asterisk.  His accomplishments do not represent a necessary salve for injustice to African-American sportsmen and women.  If one has been around long enough, then one knows that for now, and the foreseeable future, Hank Aaron is still the King and in more ways than on the naked stat sheet.