Ask pretty much anyone who followed Barry Bonds during his playing career about his behavior and you’ll probably get similar answers. He was regarded as arrogant, standoffish, difficult, and generally unlikable as far as his personality went. His fall from grace, the fact that he became the center of federal perjury charges, and the constant cloud of steroid speculation haven’t garnered him much sympathy from the general public.
It turns out Bonds regrets all that, and he knows he has nobody to blame but himself.
“Me. It’s on me,” Bonds told Terence Moore of SportsOnEarth in an interview posted Wednesday. “I’m to blame for the way I was [portrayed], because I was a dumbass. I was straight stupid, and I’ll be the first to admit it. I mean, I was just flat-out dumb. What can I say? I’m not going to try to justify the way I acted toward people. I was stupid. It wasn’t an image that I invented on purpose. It actually escalated into that, and then I maintained it. You know what I mean? It was never something that I really ever wanted. No one wants to be treated like that, because I was considered to be a terrible person. You’d have to be insane to want to be treated like that. That makes no sense.
“Hell, I kick myself now, because I’m getting great press, and I could have had a trillion more endorsements, but that wasn’t my driving force. The problem was, when I tried to give in a little bit, it never got better. I knew I was in the midst of that image, and I determined at that point that I was never going to get out of it.
“So I just said, ‘I’ve created this fire around me, and I’m stuck in it, so I might as well live with the flames.'”
Bonds said the pressure of being a young star in Pittsburgh helped shape his behavior.
“The expectations on me at a young age is what got me,” Bonds said without hesitation. “During the Pittsburgh days, when we were starting to win a little bit, it was like it was all my fault that we didn’t win.”
Bonds shared a story from his days in San Francisco where some teammates pulled him aside and asked him to soften up a little bit. He did, and proceeded to go into an 0-for-21 slump, after which the Giants players asked for the old Barry back.
“As far as my attitude and the way I handled things, I just didn’t do it the right way,” Bonds admitted. “There were times during my career when I really did try, but I wasn’t given the benefit of the doubt, because I had already created the monster.”
It’s kind of disputable how much Bonds has really changed judging from stories like this. Still, it’s a level of self-awareness that the former MLB star never really displayed during his playing career, which is something, at the very least.
