There's nothing sympathetic about Bonds or A-Rod. They're asswipes as individuals. Barry is a notorious piece of shyt to other people - teammates, coaches, media, friends, foes - and this has been documented as far back as his college days. For fukk's sake, he tried to steal my nikka Gary Shefffield's personal chef. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA A-Rod is a lame piece of shyt too. I think in Barry's case a lot of black dudes I know want to pretend Barry wasn't a piece of shyt and blame white people for assassinating his character; a lot of Domincan dudes I know ride with A-Rod regardless of how much of a buffoon he shows himself to be at every step.
Now, with a lot of white dudes I encounter, I notice they want to pretend that Clemens going to trial proves he didn't get "a pass." And that's where I get scared about the potential for rational dialogue... We live in a culture that produces frequent and irrational character attacks on black athletes, often backed by skimpy evidence, or sometimes none at all. When it comes to black athletes, it's a legitimate talking point for sports personalities, columnists, and the producers and editors who okay their material to contemplate whether black players are poorly equipped to play point guard and quarterback because they come from fatherless homes. Blacks' leadership abilities are questioned because of... dancing before a game, or after a big play. The examples are really endless and it would be a waste of my time to catalogue them all here.
Now let's contrast that with Roger Clemens. A man who unapologetically loafed his way through the final years of his contract with the Red Sox, improbably enough acted as if he had an axe to grind with them, went to another team and returned to form immediately (confirmation either of previous laziness or performance enhancers - neither of which he was taken to task for outside of Boston), went to the reviled Yankees, headhunted, almost killed Mike Piazza, threw a sawed off piece of a bat at Piazza in the World Series (HE WASN'T EVEN THROWN OUT OF THE fukkING GAME, UNCANNY), made racist comments at a major press conference about Asians, retired, unretired, retired, unretired, keeping hundreds of thousands worth of parting gifts along the way, got paid absurd amounts and had special provisions in his contract that cut down his travel and allowed him to barely be around his teammates... the list could go on, and on, and on... AND YET... reporters and columnists lobbed him softballs until the end, wrote fawning profiles, called him old school and tough and a true competitor. It wasn't until they had no fukking choice whatsoever that the coverage changed.And that's what drives self-respecting non-whites to a state of frustrated insanity - whites seem incapable of maintaining a consistent definition of what makes a person a piece of shyt across racial boundaries.
I'll never forget watching Joe Buck's dweebish, sanctimonious ass grill Chad Johnson about his touchdown celebrations as if he'd murdered someone, then when he had Brett Favre - a complete piece of shyt - on immediately after, Buck essentially dropped to his knees to blow him.
When we watch obvious - and yes, unless you are militantly ignorant, it's really fukking obvious - pieces of shyt like Lance Armstrong, Roger Clemens, and Brett Favre celebrated and championed until there's such overwhelming evidence to the contrary that the media finally has to begin to tear them down a bit... It makes people ride that much harder for the Barry Bonds and A-Rods of the world. It's like the Charlie Weis situation at Notre Dame. The white media and general public makes excuses on top of excuses on top of excuses until there's no possible doubt left... and only then do they finally take their former hero to task. It's guilty until proven innocent for a lot of non-white athletes, and innocent even after proven guilty for a lot of prominent white athletes.
