When we try too hard to reach a goal, when we push aside our humanity and humility, even if we accomplish it, we fail for succeeding.  That is the emerging moral of the Barry Bonds story.

     Bonds, for my non-US readers, is a baseball player on the verge of matching one of the all time great records: Babe Ruth’s career home run mark.  He is one home run away.  Almost certainly in the next week or so, Bonds will tie and then surpass Ruth, moving into the number two career home run spot, behind Hank Aaron.

    Although Aaron faced enormous pressure when he passed Ruth, those ugly, racist taunts and questions have receded into the past.  It is easy and comfortable, given the integrity of his career, to say that Aaron is the home run champion.  While Bonds, and his defenders, will claim that racism now motiviates his critics, there is one, clear and damning difference in the Bonds case: he has pumped himself full of performance enhancing drugs that have given him an inhuman, chemically-induced edge over Aaron.  Bonds is neither the player nor the man that Aaron was.

      Bonds is a perfect embodiment of our tendency to "adore twisty paths," as the Tao Te Ching tells us.  Denying the limits of our human capacities, turning toward drugs and cosmetics and panacea of all sorts, distorts our humanity, even if we seem to attain a transient sense of victory or superiority.   Bonds has exercised his will – the power all humans possess to choose the expedient and selfish over the prudent and social – to force his way forward for momentary glory.  But when we tell his story years from now it will not grow greater, as Aaron’s has, but will always retain a grubby and squalid character.  How did his drug dealer get the steroids and human growth hormones and other chemicals he pumped into his veins?

But Anderson didn’t think of himself as Bonds’s drug dealer. When Bonds
paid him, he liked to think it was for weight training. As far as
supplying drugs, Anderson thought of his role as "middleman." In San
Francisco he knew AIDS patients who had prescriptions for testosterone
and human growth hormone and were willing to sell their drugs for cash.
Anderson bought and resold them virtually at cost to clients who wanted
them for their anabolic effects. Likewise, Anderson knew many sources
of conventional bodybuilders’ steroids like Deca-Durabolin and
Winstrol. He resold those at almost no markup as well. Bonds was keenly
interested in performance-enhancing drugs. He asked their
pharmaceutical names and then sought, through third parties, medical
advice about the drugs. The medical advice was negative. You shouldn’t
take the drugs, he was told, but Anderson said those concerns were
overblown, and Bonds ignored the advice he had sought.

    Grubbing testosterone from dying AIDS patients: that is how Bonds has moved up the home run list. 

      Makes me think of this passage from the Lieh Tzu I came across a couple of nights ago:

Things make themseles go counter to the Way, the Way does not go counter to things. (91)

    Bonds’ shame is not a reflection of an inevitable human nature; we are not all necessarily bad in Way.  Rather, Bonds has brought his misfortune on himself: he has made himself go counter to Way.  Maybe that is what we can tell our grandchildren when we are recounting the summer of the second eclicpse of the Babe.