We don't pick our favourite sports team; they pick us. I'm speaking about investing passion as opposed to indulging fashion. If you were swept away on the wings of Air Jordan back when Michael had his Chicago Bulls flying to six championships in eight years, did you also live and die with the Bulls over the last five years, minus Jordan, when they were one of the worst teams in the history of the NBA?
Probably not, but if that's your thing, so be it. You simply will never know the befuddling and bewitching feeling in your stomach when you check the scores to see if your team won or lost. Like love, it's totally illogical: I don't know why, I just know how.
Ridiculously loyal fans cling to a bond forged years earlier. Maybe it's the hometown team, maybe it's inherited. Often, though, it's a charismatic performer who hooks you for life. That's certainly what happened to me with Bobby Bonds and the San Francisco Giants. I grew up in Ontario and had no conception or connection with the distant metropolis of San Francisco. But Bonds was everything my young body wasn't: strong and fast. He combined these qualities like few before him and did it in such riveting style that I quickly became a Giants fan.
Bobby Bonds died this past week at 57 from lung cancer and the mind reeled at the memories, the hooks his style of play sunk into my impressionable mind. His Major League debut was televised in 1968 with the Giants playing the Los Angeles Dodgers, their hated rivals. I was watching when Bonds became the second player in baseball history to hit a grand slam in his first game and I was watching a few months later when Bonds raced madly and leaped to catch a ball heading over the fence only to be out-jumped by Willie Mays, who made the catch, and fell in a tangled heap as they collided. I was hooked. Not by Mays, whom I obviously liked but he was 37 at the time and I was far too young to have enjoyed the brilliant peak of his career. But by Bonds, the 22 year-old called the next Willie Mays. Since I basically missed the first one, I wanted a front row seat for the next Mays.
For anyone to be compared to the greatest baseball player ever, despite Bond's obvious tools, was a joke. But to carry the burden of Mays over the course of a very successful 14-year Major League career is enough to make a man downright bitter. Bonds did things no one ever did in the game, like hit 30 home runs and steal 30 bases in a season five times. It just never seemed to be enough. Largely because of that Bonds battled alcoholism for years.
He was known by the media to be moody and prickly but among his teammates and coaches, he was a very popular leader. He was liked and respected inside the game but aloof outside of it, a fact that Bonds' oldest son Barry grew up with intimate knowledge of. After seven seasons in San Francisco, Barry's dad spent the next seven years playing for seven different teams. He became a journeyman with superstar talent because there was much more value in trading Bonds than keeping him, so management did it again and again.