But that's not today's fake. That's old news.
Today's fake: Barry Lamar Bonds.
A single statistic in today's Chronicle story tells the whole sad truth. Barry hit a home run every 16.2 at-bats during the first 13 years of his career. Beginning in 1999 -- when he turned 25 -- he began taking steroids, and nearly doubled his output, hitting a home run every 8.5 at-bats.
Big cheater.
This passage from a TV review in today's NY Times by Ginia Bellafante is pertinent:
If reality television can be said to be about anything at all, it seems to be about impersonation and the odd and increasingly tenacious hold it has on the American psyche. The crooked-nosed are made over and play the genetically good-looking. Heiresses get out of their $200,000 sports cars and enact the habits of the agriculturally inclined. A vegan mother from Boulder trades houses with an evangelical wife in Mobile, is encouraged to care about scripture and breakfast sausage, and essentially tries to pass.
Reality television, as we know it, in fact, could exist only in a culture infatuated with passing -- a world where white suburban boys dress to look more like Nelly and Punjabi girls from Queens wear blue contact lenses to link them closer in appearance to someone who might trace her lineage four generations in Laguna Beach.
And where a legitimate baseball superstar, jealous of the success and fame of a white player who cheated by using steroids, takes steroids himself to double his home run output and surpass the white player's figures and fame.
Too bad it was all a fake.
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