Emmanuel: I could not agree more about the sports media's treatment of Bonds. Even before he was a star player, the local media saw his relative shyness and private nature as surliness and rudeness. Bonds' grew-up watching the damage the American sports media did to the player's families. What kid wants to see his dad insulted in headlines and on TV?
Worse yet, nothing Bonds did was illegal at the time he did it, nor was it out of the ordinary. If you wanted to keep-up, you took steroids. To single Bonds out was wrong. And I am having a really hard time forgetting and forgiving how the Giants front office treated Bonds after he retired. I haven't been to a Giants game since that night.
Bonds carried that team for years. He deserved better.
Emmanuel Enyinwa
02-Feb-2010 07:30
The sad end to a great career and the testament to the unprofessionalism that is rampant in the US media. I have pictures I took of Bonds on the night after he tied the home run record. I used a digital rebel and a 300mm lens to get some passable shots of him strolling about in left field. Surprised you would take a tortoise fast SD14 to a sports event, and still get nice shots.
In closing, I will say that Bonds had his faults (I will be the fist to admit it), but NOTHING he could ever do short of emptying an uzi into the stands cound justify the 2 minute hate the media subjected him to for seven long years. Foreign media often express shock that the media would treat someone that in most other countries would be considered a national treasure as if he were a mass murderer. For shame.