Dispute Over Bonds Demonstrates Latest White/Black Division

BALTIMORE Polls over whether baseball slugger Barry Bonds should break Hank Aarons major league record of 755 home runs expose a racial gulf wider than the Atlantic Ocean.

A poll by ESPN/ABC News found more than twice as many Black fans as Whites are likely to be pulling for Bonds to break the mark (74 percent to 28 percent). More than three-fourths of Whites 76 percent think Bonds used steroids, compared to only 37 percent of African Americans.

A sports fan observed on one sports blog: If there is racism involving Barry Bonds chase for 758, it cuts both ways. Is it that a majority of White people are coming down on Barry bonds because he is Black? Or is it that a majority of Black people dont find fault with a fellow Black person?

Complicating matters on both sides of the divide, there are many reasons to dislike Bonds that have nothing to do with race.

Away from AT&T Park, Bonds is viewed mostly as a pariah, someone who has tainted the game and made its most sacred statistic meaningless, wrote Tim Dahlberg, a columnist for the Associated Press. He explained, People liked Henry Aaron. They still do. Bonds, by contrast, wasnt a popular player even before his body grew large, his head ballooned to cartoonish size and his home runs started splashing in McCovey Cove. From the beginning of his career, he treated fans and the media with contempt, and they responded with growing contempt for him.

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