I didn't see it live. In fact, after Barry Bonds connected for his record-tying 755th career home run, I had been purposely avoiding the world of baseball news.
I had made my dislike of Bonds quite public, despite the poster of him still hanging on my bedroom wall alongside childhood heroes Kirby Puckett, Paul Molitor and Ken Griffey Jr. He was definitely a fallen hero in my eyes, and yet the poster was still there, still proof that at one time I had looked up to the bloated, self-serving monster that all of San Fransisco somehow loved and the rest of America somehow hated.
One of my friends made mention of the poster, and we talked about taking it down, but to this day I can still look over and see the somewhat slimmer lefty's follow-through on one of his earlier homers, with a background full of fireworks.
I was sitting in this very chair, watching season 4 of Friends when the text message came. It said one word. BONDS. And I knew it was over. Like most average college students I went straight to facebook, to express my feelings over the incident, but something, curiosity more than anything, drew me to the Major League Baseball website.
Waiting for a full ten minutes for dial-up to load the video, all I could think of was how the biggest record in the baseball world had just been made a mockery of, but just as I was about to decide to not watch, I saw Mike Bacsik, returning to the majors for the first time since 2004 after gracing us with terrible stints in Cleveland, New York and Texas, heave up a gopher-ball. And I watched Bonds crush the ball and just stand there to get a glimpse of history for himself.
Then there it was. The kid inside of me, who thought Barry Bonds was one of the best, the kid who I had suppressed after realizing that his hero was a fraud, finally got the best of me. And I watched the events unfold in awe, witnessing history through the eyes of that 10-year old who used to hide a radio under his pillow to listen to the west-coast games when he should have been asleep.
It was for that kid that I changed my profile status, acknowledging Bonds' achievement for the first (and probably last) time, and causing several of you to mock me for my temporary turnaround.
If you were to ask me of my opinion of Bonds today, I'd tell you he's a criminal, a thief, a traitor, among several other choice words.
But if you would have asked the 10-year old kid watching from this very chair that fateful night, smiling along as Barry Bonds broke into a ear-to-ear grin while rounding first base, he would have told you: "He's the best. He's my hero."
