looky, here, i ain’t trying to prematurely convict nobody (my man ralph wiley already taught me a thing or two about the grace bank — you should be hesitant to deny it because sooner or later you gon’ be in need of some grace your damn self.)

Extreme Makeover?

damn-near everyone whose name has even come up in that balco scandal has subsequently taken a career nosedive. sosa? so-so. giambi? please. marion jones? didn’t she used to run past people on the track? circumstantial evidence, admittedly (and yes, i also remember that old social science adage that “correlation does not establish causality) but dang… it is real curious. barry looked to be the exception to that trend until he turned up lame and starting talking about taking an entire season off.

so we all know that steroids are dangerous, cancer-causing drugs that can make you hot-tempered and cause your testicles to turn into raisins. but my concern for this, truth told, has less to do with that and more to do with my own issues about history and the icons of my youth.

records are made to be broken, but i can’t see watching hank aaron’s record of 755 be smashed by chemically-altered super-athletes — who won’t even merit a maris-like asterisk. back when aaron, mays, et al were playing the game, training techniques were not nearly as advanced as they are now. plus, aaron had to deal with the daily death threats he received as he approached babe ruth’s record of 714 homers. that took all kinds of psychological strength and powers of concentration. his record will fall one day — as well it should — but not by someone who has taken artificial means to boost his performance.

in some ways, though, that might be an even more ironic compliment to aaron — that 30 plus years after his record-setting homerun, the nearest competitors needed an army of trainers and a chemical regimen to even come close to what he did by eating his veggies and keeping his eye on the ball.

read below and weep:

Updated: 05:05 PM ESTBonds’ Accuser Speaks, Putting Him in Peril By MURRAY CHASS, The New York TimesThe scene was typical of spring nights in Arizona. Their work for the day done, baseball people gather in various night spots and restaurants in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area: Diamond Charlie’s, Capital Grill, Marco Polo, Pink Pony, Axis, Radius, Suede.One night in the spring of 2000, Sanctuary was a place to be, and Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi were there. So was Kimberly Bell, Bonds’s girlfriend at the time.”Jason and Barry put their arms together, rolled up their sleeves, flexed their muscles and joked about who was bigger,” Bell recalled. “About 50 people were standing around.”Who was bigger?”They were both huge,” Bell said.According to reports of Giambi’s testimony to a federal grand jury, he was using steroids at the time. According to Bell, Bonds had told her that he was using them, too.Bell said her nine-year relationship with Bonds ended in May 2003. Now she is again a major figure in his life. Bell testified recently before a federal grand jury in San Francisco investigating steroids distribution and, presumably, Bonds, and one of her lawyers said she would be called to testify a second time. Giambi and Bonds appeared before the grand jury in December 2003.Bell’s testimony and the evidence she presents to the grand jury, which subpoenaed her, could trigger an investigation into other charges against Bonds, like income-tax evasion, money laundering, evasion of bank reporting laws and perjury. These issues could lead to far greater consequences than any penalty for steroids use.In a second and third telephone interview with The New York Times on Tuesday and yesterday, Bell talked about various aspects of her relationship with Bonds. She would not talk about what she said Bonds had told her about other players’ use of steroids.”He did make references to other players,” Bell said.Did she believe what he told her? “I believed it to the extent that I knew he would have that type of knowledge because of his own knowledge of what he was doing,” she said. But she declined to name names.”That is the type of material that will be in the book,” she said. “We have to leave a few things for the book.”Bell, who has worked as a graphic artist, and a co-author are preparing a proposal for a book in which Bell plans to write about her relationship with Bonds. The prospect of selling the proposal to a publisher raises questions about Bell’s motives in talking about her relationship with Bonds and about her credibility. Whatever one can tell from telephone conversations, she sounds credible.”I think, all in due time, people will realize that I am, once they see the proof I have,” she said. What type of proof?”I have quite a bit of it,” she said, “including telephone answering machine messages that show the relationship.” There is also a legal fight over a house, she said, adding, “He tried to deny that he knew me at all, that I was just a girl who showed up in several cities.”Martin Garbus, Bell’s lawyer, who monitored the interviews, said yesterday that before he agreed to represent her, he listened to the tapes from her answering machine, heard Bonds’s voice on them and was satisfied they were legitimate.Bell said she met Bonds on July 3, 1994, after a Giants home game she attended with a friend. The next day, she said, the friend took her to a barbecue where Bonds was and later learned that Bonds had asked the friend to bring her. At the time, Bonds was in the process of a divorce from his first wife.The relationship lasted until May 2003, more than five years after he married his second wife, Bell said, ending shortly after an incident in a hotel room in which she felt threatened.Bonds’s lawyer, Michael Rains, did not respond yesterday to the latest of daily telephone messages asking him to comment on Bonds generally and Bell specifically.Bell said she heard from Bonds only one more time after the hotel incident. On the day the Giants were leaving Phoenix, where they had played a three-game series, he called her, she related. “He told me to disappear and change my numbers,” she said. “He said I might have to move.”The relationship between Bell and Bonds had become strained, Bell said, over his refusal to give her money beyond $80,000 for the down payment on a $207,000 house she bought in February 2002 in Scottsdale, Ariz., the Giants’ spring-training home. She said she moved there at his request from the Bay Area, where she has returned.”I shouldn’t feel responsible for keeping his secrets if he can’t keep his promise to pay for the house,” she said. “I gave up a great job and family and support system.”One of those secrets was what she said was Bonds’s use of steroids. She never saw him take anything, but he told her about it, she said.”Before he used them,” she recalled, “I would consider him as being difficult. He went from difficult to downright mean and cruel. He became impatient, intolerant, quick-tempered, quick to snap.”She said she was unimpressed by Bonds’s comments and attitude during a news conference last week in which he said he might not play this season because of a knee operation.”My impression is he still can’t take responsibility for his own actions,” Bell said. “It was a plea for sympathy. I saw a newspaper photo of him at a media event the night before, without crutches and smiling. He was happy.”Bonds, she added, was not happy that she had kept answering machine tapes.”After he got married,” she recalled, “he told me I had to destroy them. He said they can’t exist. I felt there wasn’t something right about that, so I kept the tapes.”03-31-05 08:52 ESTCopyright © 2005 The New York Times Company

it’s too bad that the inaugural post to this blog is an obit, but i’ve learned enough to know that life doesn’t really care about your own individual sense of timing. i learned yesterday that harold cruse, the critic, playwright, essayist, activist, professor and intellectual curmudgeon had passed.

i first encountered him on the far wall in the “politics” section of a pyramid bookstore in washington, dc. this was back in the late 1980s when that entire canon of stuff — ben-jochanon, john henrik clarke, cheikh anta diop, etc. — was all new to me and i had set out to methodically devour all of it. cruse was not of that ilk — even tho he and clarke had been friends back in the 1950s and 60s. he was travelling a different road and i passed over the massive “crisis of the negro intellectual” in favor of some other now-forgotten piece of afrocentria.

i came across the book years later, in my mid-20s and the flair, originality and straight-up acidity of his prose left my head spinning. like a cat had took the dozens and applied them to intellectual discourse. communists, liberals, muddle-headed race officials of all political stripes — it didn’t really matter what they were calling themselves ‘cause cruse analytically gin-su’ed them anyway.

i think cruse was probably one of the primary reasons that i wound up writing a doctoral dissertation on african american anticommunists. when i was researching that project, i came across a cache of cruse materials that had never been published. i wrote him a letter and asked if he would consider me as editor of a harold cruse reader. i really didn’t expect him to agree, but when he did it was probably the best day of my grad student career.

the thing that cruse brought to the table was a commitment to resolving the issues that he saw as undermining black leadership — and thereby black people — for decades. and unlike a whole lot of other cats who were that mantle of public intellectual, cruse actually laid down a blueprint. crisis of the negro intellectual was — along with “wretched of the earth” and “the autobiography of malcolm x” the required reading for black powerites.

he followed crisis with “rebellion or revolution?” and then, in the mid-eighties, “plural and equal” both of which elaborated on the themes he had put down with crisis. a few months ago he gave me a call and told me that he was working on a book that would respond to his many critics and that he might need my assistance in researching it. and, man, he had some cats in his crosshairs.

even then he was in poor health and i didn’t know if he was physically strong enough to see the project thru to completion. but i tell you, there’s some degree of comfort to be had in the fact that his life expired long before his willingness to start an intellectual brawl ever did.