Barry Bonds, Racistby Nicholas Stix

Barry Bonds hates white people. In an excerpt from former Chicago White Sox player Ron Kittle’s book, Ron Kittle's Tales from the White Sox Dugout, that appeared in yesterday’s Southtown News newspaper from suburban Chicago, Kittle quotes Bonds as saying, "I don't sign for white people." The setting was the visitors’ clubhouse at the Chicago Cubs’ Wrigley Field, in 1993. Kittle, by then retired from the game, had asked Bonds to sign two jerseys he’d worn in games, so that Kittle could auction the jerseys for his charity helping kids with cancer, Indiana Sports Charities.

"I paid about $110 of my own money for them, so they could be auctioned off at the golf outing. I did that all the time for stars like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Derek Jeter and Roger Clemens. When I tell them how their autographs help the cause, every player gladly signs — with one exception. “I walked up to Bonds at his locker in the Wrigley Field visitors' clubhouse, introduced myself and said, ‘Barry, if you sign these, they'll bring in a lot of money for kids who need help.

“Bonds stood up, looked me in the eye and said, ‘I don't sign for white people.’ If lightning hits me today, I will swear those were his exact words. Matt Williams and other Giants were in the room and they heard what Bonds said. “I stood there for a minute, and the veins in my neck were popping. I've only been that mad a few times in my life. I was going to beat the (heck) out of him, really kick his (butt), but Williams saw what was happening, so he came over and got between us. Matt said, ‘Ron, that's just the way he is.’

“I said, ‘White guys aren't the only ones who get cancer,’ but Bonds had turned his back on me and walked out of the clubhouse. Somebody must have run in and alerted Dusty Baker, who was the manager of the Giants then.

“So Dusty came out of his office, put his arm around me, gave me a big old hug and said, ‘Aw, Kitty, he's just got that (bad) attitude again.’ Dusty gave me an autographed team ball for the auction, but I never got the Bonds jerseys signed. Later, I gave one of them to Scott Paulson, the Wilson sporting goods representative, and shredded the other one. But that day, I drove from Wrigley Field at about 150 miles per hour and sat there, fuming.

“I'll never forget what that man said. So if Barry Bonds is looking for a breath of fresh air to live and I'm the only one who has to give it to him, unfortunately, the man will die. I just don't like guys like that."

The Southland News reported that Bonds’ spokeswoman and a Giants’ spokesman both declined comment on the story. I could see how lefty readers might doubt that Kittle is telling the truth. After all, those white devils just can’t be trusted. Besides, hasn’t Barry Bonds told us himself of his sufferings at the hands of white racism? Maybe Ron Kittle is just another evil, white racist. Indeed, Prof. Leonard Moore of LSU has informed us that a great many white people do in fact resent Bonds’ march through the record books. As Katherine Corcoran reported in the March 30 San Jose Mercury News,

“Still, there are many who argue that race is at the core of the San Francisco Giants super-slugger's troubles. They see a time-worn pattern of a federal government and a predominantly white media tearing down a strong black athlete - who this time happens to be on the cusp of besting the home run mark of a beloved white icon.

"‘If you have a black man who's conscious and independent and on the verge of breaking Babe Ruth's record...that's frightening,’ said Leonard Moore, a Louisiana State University professor who teaches a course on the history of the African-American athlete. ‘If you speak out, if you don't play to what white America wants, there will be persecution, scrutiny and unfair reporting.’”

There are four things wrong with Leonard Moore’s statement. Bonds is not on the verge “of breaking Babe Ruth’s record,” because Babe Ruth doesn’t hold the home run record, and hasn’t held it since Hank Aaron broke it on April 8, 1974. Leonard Moore doesn’t seem to know anything about the history of black athletes in America. When Hank Aaron was bearing down on the Babe’s ghost, some whites were indeed angry, and sent him hate mail, including death threats. (Not “frightened,” mind you, which is an old liberal cliché that exists only to make sanctimonious lefties feel morally superior to their opponents.) But when Aaron broke the Babe’s record, that was that. The reasons for conjuring up a non-existent record, are to steal Hank Aaron’s ordeal for use by Bonds, and so that frauds like Leonard Moore can claim that white Americans are as racist as they ever were, and black Americans are the same victims they were under Jim Crow. Far from suffering from unfair reporting, Barry Bonds has enjoyed a holiday from serious scrutiny. In an unwitting self-caricature, in 2002, the New York Times sent a well-connected lefty, David Grann, who knew nothing about baseball to do a puff piece on Bonds. Grann thought that baseball teams were led by “head coaches”; he didn’t know that baseball teams have managers, and neither did his clueless editor at the Times Sunday Magazine, Adam Moss. Grann insinuated that Bonds and his father, Bobby, both were victimized by white racism. Most black public figures enjoy a holiday from journalistic scrutiny, unless racist black activists or journalists have deemed them “insufficiently black.” The lack of scrutiny of black public figures or black social pathologies derives from black race-baiting and racist black newsroom enforcers and their white allies. Black celebrities intimidate white media by declaring in advance that the white media are racist. For years, singer Whitney Houston has been the master of this game. She has repeatedly declared that the “white media” seek to break up her troubled marriage to singer Bobby Brown, all the while enjoying sycophantic puff pieces from that same, supposedly racist white media. And as William McGowan has shown in his book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, black staffers and editors (I call them racist black newsroom enforcers) in every major newsroom see to it that black public figures and social problems get softball treatment. For instance, corrupt, black Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry got away with murder for years, because black staffers at the Washington Post refused to expose him, and sandbagged any white staffers who tried. In Jill Nelson’s memoir of her time as a well-paid Post staffer, Volunteer Slavery, Nelson referred to her white superiors, such as socialist editor Ben Bradlee, as “white boys,” and bragged of having intervened to skew coverage of Barry, so that readers would not discover that a woman had charged the mayor with having raped her. Racist blacks and their leftwing, white allies still push the myth of the independent, and thus persecuted, successful black man. In the revised, 1995 version of his 1992 race book, Two Nations, white political scientist Andrew Hacker suggested that a white conspiracy targeted successful black men such as Marion Barry, Mike Tyson, and O.J. Simpson. Barry was protected for years by a conspiracy – a black conspiracy of silence. Tyson was charged with rape by a young black woman, Desiree Washington, and eventually convicted. White folks had nothing to do with it. And as for O.J., the less said, the better. There is no record of any whites being upset at Bonds breaking Ruth’s “record.” There is, however, a paper trail of blacks claiming that whites would be thus upset. Leonard Moore got his claim not from whites but as my colleague Lisa Fabrizio wrote two years ago, from one Barry Bonds. In July, 2003, Bonds announced,

"755 isn't a number that's always caught my eye--the only number I'm concerned with is Babe Ruth's. As a left-handed hitter, I wiped him out. That's it. And in the baseball world, Babe Ruth's everything, right? I got his (single season) slugging percentage, I got him on on-base, I got him on walks and then I'll take his (lifetime) home run record and that's it. Don't talk about him no more."

White people were never concerned about Barry Bonds overtaking Babe Ruth; that was Bonds’ own obsession! And why? Because Babe Ruth is white, and Bonds fancies that overtaking Ruth would somehow drive white folks crazy. As I said, the man is seeking to steal Hank Aaron’s life. I’ll tell you, though, this is one white man who would be mighty angry, if Bonds “broke” Hank Aaron’s record. That in contrast to the spoiled baseball brat Bonds, Aaron actually did have to confront white racism, is just one of the accomplishments that make him tower over Bonds. Aaron had to hit within a much larger strike zone, against pitchers who stood on a higher mound, in ball parks with much deeper outfields, with a ball that was not juiced up, and with little of the watering-down of pitching that expansion caused. And last but not least, Aaron didn’t get his power out of a syringe, a bottle or a drug. His muscles were his own. If Aaron had had Bonds’ many advantages, he’d have hit over 900 dingers. The racial significance of Bonds and Leonard Moore’s statements is that you had one black man, Bonds, express his hatred of white folks, and then another black man, Moore, take Bonds’ statement and act as though it expressed white racism, rather than Bonds’ own black racism. And Moore’s racism, too, since he knew what he was doing. I suppose that in an age in which black race hoaxes are produced as if on an assembly line (if only America could produce goods the way it produces scams!), I supposed it would be hyperbole to call Bonds and Moore’s invention of white racists a hoax, so I’ll call it a hoaxette. Imagine a white player making racist statements. Oh, but we don’t have to. When relief pitcher John Rocker made politically incorrect statements about the riders on New York’s 7 train, he was forced to undergo psychological counseling and publicly debase himself. Actually, Rocker was never as openly racist as Bonds. (And if the people writing on Rocker had done any research, they would have known that his statement bore no resemblance to the 7 train, which is known in New York as the “Orient Express,” due to its heavily Asian ridership. It sounded to me as if Rocker had never even been on the 7 train.) We may need to stop comparing Barry Bonds to another foul-tempered, great left-handed hitter, Ted Williams, and start comparing him to another of baseball’s most vile racists, Ty Cobb.