The Making of an Anti Hero: Barry Bonds Love Him or Hate Him

I am a sports fan. I love baseball. Therefore, I read many sports books about professional athletes like Tony Gwynn and Steve Garvey. I am a Padres fan so I watched Tony Gwynn work for many years and I must say that Tony Gwynn had a great deal of professionalism as well as having great athletic skills. However, many professional athletes while they have the great athletic ability, they also have a very big ego. It’s like they believe that they are owed the world.

And, the problem seems to be that the people that are around these types of professional athlete give him or whatever she or she wants, an example of this type of professional athlete is Barry Bonds. The book Love me, Hate me: The Making of an Anti Hero is the story of the rise and potential large fall of Barry Bonds. The tone of the book seems to clearly to scream that Barry bonds is a arrogant spoiled brat who while talented to an infinite power, most people would laugh with glee when, not if this great Giant, no pun intended , see Barry Bonds plays baseball for the San Francisco Giants, takes a mighty fall.

Barry Bonds has stolen five hundred bases and has hit over 500 home runs. This should make him a given for the Baseball Hall of Fame. But, with all the speculation of steroid use, his ticket to the Baseball Hall of Fame probably will not come true. Now, I am not a fan of Barry Bonds but, this book seems to just trash Bonds with incident after incident of his arrogance, anger, and infidelity splashed across the pages. After about chapter three, I had the entire picture of Barry Bonds and I didn’t want to know any more.

However, as a turned page after page, I grew more annoyed with every act of ignorance and ego. The most annoying incident to illustrate Barry Bonds’ ego involves when he was playing with the Pittsburgh Pirates early in his career and he was asked to autograph some baseball items to auction off in order to help the family of two ball park workers who were killed in a car accident on their way to work and the money was needed to pay for funeral arrangements and other things because the two guys had no medical insurance. Barry Bonds rudely declined to participate in this project.

In addition, the allegations of steroid use are something that I already knew. Many people have asked Bonds about it and it has been in many newspapers, so I think that this book didn’t tell really anything that I didn’t already know about Bonds and steroids. I am more interested in a book that might be written about Bonds impending legal trouble and the resolution of that. If Barry Bonds goes to jail for tax evasion and perjury, that will probably make a better book that this book. However, this book seems to teach a very import lesson. The lesson is that society needs to be careful who it labels as a hero.