The great myth

Title or no title, Bonds has established his place in history

Even before Barry Bonds scorched a screaming home run in his first World Series at-bat on Saturday, you got the feeling that his history of struggles in the postseason was about as relevant to this Fall Classic as Bud Selig's shoe size. Whatever he might have been in the past, Bonds is no choker now. When he steps to the plate, everything in his manner indicates total confidence, even serenity. It's as if he knows that on those rare occasions when a pitcher, any pitcher, throws him something hittable, he will give it a ride longer than the last NASA launch.

It is the kind of locked-in calm that Bonds has shown for the last two seasons, the kind that -- with the exception of Tiger Woods -- we haven't seen so consistently from an athlete since the best days of Michael Jordan. That's ironic, since it is Jordan who has, in a sense, made things more difficult for other great players like Bonds. Jordan's six rings won with the Chicago Bulls raised the bar for star athletes to a greater height, an unfair height, by convincing us that any player who fails to win a title can't be truly great, that he must have some shortcoming that keeps him from leading a team to a championship.

There's only one problem with that notion -- it's illogical. Championships are mysterious things, the result of talent and circumstance and hard work and luck, and though they may be every player's ultimate goal, they are not the only standard, or even necessarily the best one, by which to measure individual greatness. We used to understand that, which is why ringless stars like Ernie Banks were always seen as sympathetic figures, not as flawed ones, like Bonds.

But now the conventional wisdom is that athletes have to win a championship to validate their greatness, that John Elway, Derek Jeter and Hakeem Olajuwon, champions all, are on a higher level than Jim Kelly, Nomar Garciaparra and Charles Barkley, who have no titles on their resume. The championship standard has become a crutch, a lazy way to measure individual players against each other. When a high-profile player falls short of a title, it's not because his team had a weak bullpen or a bad offensive line or a slow point guard, it's because the star couldn't inspire his team to the top. We hear so much about how great players make their teammates better that we expect them to do so literally, with a wave of their wand. After all, Jordan did it, didn't he?

But the truth is that a great player can only do what he can do, that the failure to win a championship shouldn't necessarily doom an athlete to a second-tier level of greatness. It makes no sense that a handful of mostly unsuccessful postseason at-bats were enough to overshadow more than 600 homers and saddle Bonds with perhaps the worst reputation of all -- a star who didn't know how to win.

Bonds is playing for his first World Series title, and the hunch in this corner is that he'll get it in seven hard-fought games. But he's not playing to shake a bad rap or somehow confirm his greatness. Win or lose, he's already done that.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor writes about a Hot Button issue every Monday on CNNSI.com

 

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