Holding course in a sea of fishy stories

LockerRoomYou have to keep the faith. You have to keep on keeping on. You have to be innocent when you dream. It ain't easy. A few years ago we brought les misérables, who were then too young and defiantly girlish to appreciate such things, to Pac-Bell Park in gorgeous San Francisco.

They played in the little playground within the stadium while their oul fella looked out into the little bay behind, where men in little skiffs bobbed on the water hoping Barry Bonds would knock a home run out of the house and into the water. A man willing to get wet could make a small killing on eBay.

It was a beautiful late summer's evening and there was a nice, near-symmetrical romance in watching the men in their little bobbing boats drinking and hoping to catch a crumb from the rich sportsman's table. This was San Francisco after all, and these were the same waters Joe DiMaggio's father, Giuseppe, worked as a fisherman. A part of what propelled Joe DiMaggio into the big leagues in baseball was the desire to free himself of the chore of having to clean his father's boat. The smell of dead fish turned Joltin' Joe's stomach.

And it was hard, looking out at the sea, to think of DiMaggio and not to think of that slender novella we all read back in school, Hemingway's last half-decent work, The Old Man and the Sea. Poor old Santiago, working the Gulf in a time before eBay, trying to break a long, dry streak. He was on the trail of a giant marlin and what kept him going as he fished and yarned with Manolin, his young apprentice, were the fabulous and distant deeds of the great DiMaggio.

In school, of course, the none-to-light- handed metaphors and allegories escaped us altogether. I thought it was a book about fishing, but sometimes it's just grand to take things at face value and not to have to think too much. The romance of that evening spent hard by the Pacific a few years ago was trespassed upon by the nagging thought that Bonds was juiced and the whole scenario was a work of fiction.

Last week, Barry Bonds, who since that night when he was dignified by our presence has achieved his ambition and become baseball's career-home-run leader, was indicted on five felony charges - four for perjury and one for obstruction of justice.

The charges all relate to testimony he gave before a federal grand jury back in 2003. Back then, Bonds, as has been his wont in the face of an alpine range of contrary evidence, insisted he never used anabolic steroids or human growth hormone.

The indictment excitement came exactly 100 days after Bonds took away the old home-run records of one Hank Aaron, an eminently decent and dignified human being who accepted the larceny with a cool resignation and a polite congratulatory phone call to Bonds.

While Aaron was shunted away to the sidelines of history the investigation into Bonds was ongoing, yet the yahoo element made up of the usual suspects and cheerleaders jumped up and down and imagined themselves in the presence of greatness and surfing the wave of great historical events.

Even since the whole Balco house of cards fell in, Bonds had been the giant marlin the investigators were reeling in. To date, seven people have copped guilty pleas in the Balco case, the most recent and most celebrated being Marion Jones, who, hoping to save her skin, finally told the truth.

The US government contends it can prove a positive steroid blood test result seized in connection with the Balco sting belonged to Bonds. While all this was unfolding, Wada (the clumsily named World Anti-Doping Agency) were gathering for a pow-wow in Madrid and the agency's departing president, the bumptious Dick Pound, was reflecting ruefully on the fact that baseball being a professional sport and thus eager to sell ratings boosters like home-run-record chases had been a little lax over the years in its drug-testing regulations. Pound had also to consider the fact that Marion Jones had been tested 160 times in her career without testing positive. These were discouraging things to be ruminating on.

But you have to keep on keeping on. You have to trust that sport, the essence of it and the ideal of it, will win out against money and ego and the primordial desire for short-cuts and cheats. You have to dream the integrity of sport will win out in the long run and the things you hope every kid learns from sport will never become redundant - but you know it ain't easy.

Marion Jones and Barry Bonds are interesting cases. Jones' Olympic medals have been handed back. Bond's home-run record has a large asterisk tattooed into the record books beside it. Still. How must Hank Aaron feel? How must all those whose dreams were toppled in a domino effect by Jones' misdemeanours be feeling when they look back on those races.

A personal history of being fifth gets revised to a fourth placing? Did they feel encouraged retrospectively? There is as little fulfilment in their belated elevation as there was for Jones in her wins, knowing she was dirty.

One of the great pieces of writing on the entire process of cheating and the effects it can have appeared in Sports Illustrated 15 years ago in a piece written by Kenny Moore. It was the story of Kornelia Ender and Shirley Babashoff. Ender was East German. Babashoff was American. In 1976 in Montreal, Ender, deep-voiced and impossibly bulky, became the first female swimmer to win four gold medals at a single Olympics. All were won in world-record times. In doing so, Ender consigned Babashoff to a series of four silver medals and a reputation for being a bad loser.

Many years later, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, Ender was forced to confront the likelihood she had been administered performance-enhancing drugs as a teenager in the GDR. It was an idea she had great difficulty in coping with.

Ender had been 13 for the Munich Games in 1972 and in the years afterwards on the road to Montreal she set 23 world records. She was forced now to consider the fact that in her heart she would never really know what she had been capable of.

Babashoff, who gave everything she had back in Montreal, had been emotionally filleted by that trauma.

When Ender and Babashoff met, neither could honestly confront their interleaved back stories. For Ender it was tough to even entertain the thought her life, which had brought so many medals and world records, was an empty sham. For Babashoff, who had absorbed her many disappointments into her life and personality and just moved on (she became a post-office worker), the past was almost as difficult. Nothing could retrospectively give her back the feeling of having won.

The sad story of Babashoff and Ender is the best hope really. Marion Jones and Barry Bonds have their money and they've had their adulation and their laps of honour.

Are those things, those memories, worth a weasel's fart to either of them? What will they tell their children? When they look back on their childhoods and the big dreams they betrayed do they not feel a little sick?

Wada are genuine people doing the best they can in a distorted universe. They can always be the police force, but until we reassert the innocent joy of sport over the primacy of money and ego they will always, sadly, be the Keystone Cops.

Hemingway hadn't got Bonds in mind when he laid out a story so open to many easy interpretations and readings. In essence, Santiago caught his marlin, but never got to enjoy the benefits. His fish left a trail of blood in the water as it was being hauled back to the shore and sharks ate its flesh, leaving the fisherman with nothing more than useless bones and the memory of the chase.

Bonds hauled in the marlin and now feels much the same except the chase was dishonest too. That he feels that way? That's no bad thing.