AP Features, August 8th, 2007
We all know President Bush is an early-to-bed kinda guy. Still, there was something particularly apt about his spokesman's revelation that at 11:51 p.m. Eastern, when Barry Bonds broke the hallowed home run record, the president was likely asleep.
Clearly, many people experienced a similar lack of engagement with this landmark event, whether they were actually asleep, or just metaphorically so.
The initial reason is obvious: the cloud of suspicion of steroid use that has long hovered over Bonds on his march to home run No. 756. But could it be more than that?
In 1974, when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record, the way we consumed our news, our sports, our popular culture was radically different. There was no TiVo, no DVRs, no 24-hour cable, no Web video to catch up with the next morning. You wanted to see the game? You watched it live.
These days, there's so much out there competing for our eyeballs _ some call it cultural fragmentation _ that perhaps we're less able as a nation to share a communal experience. At least, that's how one theory would have it. Thus, a seminal moment like the felling of a huge sports record would be just another event amid all the noise, competing for attention.
Hogwash, says a huge baseball fan, author W.P. Kinsella, whose novel "Shoeless Joe" became the movie "Field of Dreams." Kinsella watches baseball on TV almost every night. And yet on Wednesday, after conversing with a reporter for 10 minutes about sports and culture and life, he asked, in all seriousness, "Oh, did Bonds break the record last night?"
Turns out the author had been watching a British detective show, so much disdain does he harbor for Bonds, whom he calls a "cheat, a jerk, and a nasty person who shouldn't get credit for anything." He says Bonds himself is the only reason the country has not been energized and inspired by the record _ the ultimate achievement, after all, in a game that means so much to so many.
"Ten years from now, it'll be a really big deal when A-Rod breaks the record," Kinsella says. "If it were A-Rod right now, people would be ecstatic."
Supporting the fragmentation theory _ at least in part _ is the fact that Aaron still holds the record when it comes to television ratings. ESPN2's broadcast of Tuesday's game received a 1.1 cable rating, which translates to 995,000 households. When Aaron hit his 715th home run, NBC's broadcast received a 22.3 rating, the equivalent of 14.9 million homes. Back in Aaron's day, there were only a fraction of the TV channels, and baseball as a sport had far less competition.
But media analyst Marty Kaplan says a communal sense of ecstasy _ or other emotions, such as shock and horror _ is still very possible today, despite the fragmentation over the last few decades.
"The evidence is that when a win or a victory is regarded as legitimate, people are thrilled to share the excitement _ in the moment, or afterward," says Kaplan, of the University of Southern California. "Look at the Red Sox World Series win _ it was a national phenomenon."
The reaction to Bonds, Kaplan says, "is all about our ambivalence. It's hard to be thrilled by something whose authenticity is in doubt."
Media coverage of Bonds' run all along has focused on that doubt. When he finally broke the record, the New York Post took its usual no-holds-barred approach: On the cover, it illustrated the number 756 with a bunch of medical syringes. The rival Daily News, by contrast, had a tamer though still stinging "King of Shame" headline.
"You cheer Bonds if you want to," wrote Daily News columnist Mike Lupica. "You believe he is something more than the lyin' king of home runs. Not me."
In The New York Times, however, columnist George Vecsey argued for Bonds to get his due. "Nobody _ and certainly not some chemist in a white smock _ swung the bat for Bonds against objects moving 80 or 90 or 100 miles an hour," Vecsey wrote.
There's another aspect to the Bonds story that many point to as a reason for apathy: his personality.
At least outside his home base of San Francisco, "Bonds has a reputation of being surly, angry, and media-hostile," says Marc Ganis, president of Sportscorp Ltd., a Chicago-based sports consulting firm. "That has as much to do with the resounding thud that's greeted this record as the steroid accusations. Personality counts."
Essayist and author Roger Rosenblatt, an avid baseball fan himself, has no argument with that. Still, he's happy enough that Bonds landed the record.
"He's still one of the two or maybe three best players in history," Rosenblatt says.
He posits that the lack of enthusiasm over Bonds' achievement may have something to do with the waning value of records themselves.
"The very fact that it can be done somehow diminishes it," he says. "So many different home run records have been broken in the last 25-30 years."
Others find records to be of huge and enduring importance.
"I think all records mean a great deal," says David Cummings, senior deputy editor at ESPN The Magazine. "They're the foundation of all sports."
Cummings thinks there will be huge excitement next time _ that much more so because of the cloud of suspicion over Bonds' achievement.
"People," he says, "will want to be a part of it."
