Hating Bonds

In the Breakfast Table, where Scott Pianowski and I discussed the Bonds situation in some detail, Scott said something that I kind of glossed over because it's almost universal at this point, even among the handful of Bonds defenders. The "churlish, egomaniac" ... "can't go away" fast enough for him. In other places, I've read how people "hate Bonds with the intensity of a thousand suns."

Obviously, Bonds isn't a likeable guy. But, when you step back, it's surprising that we all have a tendency to care. I'll briefly discuss why I think that is. The objective isn't to change anyone's feelings, just to put them in a psychological context: we hate because he shatters our child-like notion that great artists have to be great people, too.

I think that all sports fans accept the fact that elite athletes are artists in every sense of the word. Bonds' brush is his bat and his canvas the baseball diamond.

In the human brain, the circuitry for morality is cross-wired with the circuitry for status. So our default position is that people who have achieved a high level of artistry are also "good people." Mostly, top athletes benefit from this evolutionary blindspot with commercial endorsements and status that transcends their sport to a degree often much greater than specific athletic accomplishments.

Now, it should go without saying that a person's artistic prodigy has nothing whatsoever to do with their morality. In other words, you can be a great artist and a terrible person. But when artists are rightly or wrongly revealed to be bad people there is, I think, a natural human instinct to respond angrily for reasons that have more to do with us than them or their specifc acts.

This has been going on with Bonds ever since he was generally labelled by the press as a "bad guy." Since 1999, steroids were trumped up as a reason to devalue the objective reality of his greatness despite a paucity (some would even say "nonexistence") of evidence on the relationship between steriods and baseball performance. Now that his accomplishments have been marginalized by most through these allegations, the federal government is taking the next logical next step in seeking to criminalize this behavior through a rarely used perjury prosecution.

Athletes wouldn't get their many millions if we didn't instinctively heroize them. So, don't feel too sorry for Bonds. But that doesn't legitimize the hostility we express when our assumptions are revealed to be false. Children commonly experience shock, disappointment and great anger when they first realize their parents aren't the superheros they want them to be. But adults are less sympathetic in failing to learn from this mistake and repeating the process when illusions about athletic superstars are similarly revealed.

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