Yahoo! Sports – MLB – No apology
Regardless of what things Larry Beil has said about steroids, the public’s ability to process their effect, the players’ reliance on them, and the industry’s ambivalence about them, he ends this story with a Barry Bonds quote that is sums it all up perfectly well.
I am personally shocked that he seems to be surprised that Barry is out there selling: himself and the game. Doesn’t he know that the guy Barry is selling is him?
Isn’t there a lot of that though? We see people outraged because not everyone is all pulling together to make the universe what we want it to be? My God why didn’t Karl Malone stop cashing those million dollar checks, doesn’t he care what the “fans” think of his legacy? Why doesn’t Bonds “come clean?” even though he’s denied it 4000 times and actually *might* be clean.
And so forth, The press really does think they own the game and the players. That no individual can be bound by any rules other than whatever the press currently thinks constitutes morality, that no one can have personal motives that might relate to privacy or something other than what the press defines as the bottom line.
A union can’t do what it legally has to do (and is restricted to do) – negotiate for a class of employees as to work conditions and compensation and instead they have to be educators, marketers, interested in the good of the game even of that means their members get played less and have fewer rights…whah???????
We live in a DUMB, DUMB world.