“Nothing is enough to the man for whom enough is too little.” Epicurus
“Envy is the adversary of the fortunate.” Epictetus
The Barry Bonds’ trial for perjury began this week with the prosecution saying to the media, that it was “an utterly ridiculous and unbelievable story” that Bonds did not know he was taking performance-enhancing drugs during the years he broke home run records. There is little doubt that Bonds used PEDs, but he could have avoided the serious trouble he finds himself presently in.
In 2003, Bonds was called to testify before a federal grand jury and was granted immunity to encourage him to tell the truth. No doubt his lawyers at the time informed him of the perils of lying to a federal grand jury. Yet, when questioned about using PEDs, Bonds claimed that he thought the substance he was applying to his skin was only a mixture of flaxseed oil and arthritis cream.
Bonds’ lawyers might manage to convince the jury that he is innocent of lying because he believed naively, despite the measurable, physical evidence (his head size grew from 7 1/8 to 7 1/4 and shoe size from 10 1/2 to 13) that his astonishing surge of power after the age of thirty-five was engendered by this miraculous elixir of flaxseed and not by PEDs. But why did he need to lie? And why did he lie when no harm could have come to him for telling the truth in the first place?
As reported by Ben McGrath in The New Yorker, Bonds felt envy’s sting when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were dominating baseball headlines in the summer of 1998 as they blasted their way through Roger Maris’s 1961 home run record of 61 home runs in a season. Already considered baseball’s best player, Bonds revealed himself to be also the man “for whom enough [recognition] is too little.” Ego and envy driven, he plunged himself into a regiment of maniacal weight lifting while spreading steroid laced cream over his body to chemically transform his natural talent into a muscle bulging home run recording breaking machine.
Too bad Bonds didn’t experience the kind of envy William Hazlitt once described:
“Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than deserved good-fortune”
This variety of envy might have led him to state publicly what most in baseball already knew: that both McGwire and Sosa had fraudulently achieved their records through steroid fueled power. By telling this first truth, Bonds could have exposed these cheats and punctured the praise being lavished on them by the media. Perhaps at the time he felt that such action would have been disloyal and dishonorable for him to do to fellow ballplayers. But they would have gotten a justice they deserved; instead, Bonds, whose fortune it was to possess without steroids a talent the whole league envied, succumbed to an “Envy [that] is the adversary of the fortunate.” His envy induced him to cheat, compelled him to lie in 2003 and now has branded him as no less a fraud than those whose shabby conduct he imitated to garner a recognition synthetically won and a disgrace naturally deserved.
“Envy is the adversary of the fortunate.” Epictetus
The Barry Bonds’ trial for perjury began this week with the prosecution saying to the media, that it was “an utterly ridiculous and unbelievable story” that Bonds did not know he was taking performance-enhancing drugs during the years he broke home run records. There is little doubt that Bonds used PEDs, but he could have avoided the serious trouble he finds himself presently in.
In 2003, Bonds was called to testify before a federal grand jury and was granted immunity to encourage him to tell the truth. No doubt his lawyers at the time informed him of the perils of lying to a federal grand jury. Yet, when questioned about using PEDs, Bonds claimed that he thought the substance he was applying to his skin was only a mixture of flaxseed oil and arthritis cream.
Bonds’ lawyers might manage to convince the jury that he is innocent of lying because he believed naively, despite the measurable, physical evidence (his head size grew from 7 1/8 to 7 1/4 and shoe size from 10 1/2 to 13) that his astonishing surge of power after the age of thirty-five was engendered by this miraculous elixir of flaxseed and not by PEDs. But why did he need to lie? And why did he lie when no harm could have come to him for telling the truth in the first place?
As reported by Ben McGrath in The New Yorker, Bonds felt envy’s sting when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were dominating baseball headlines in the summer of 1998 as they blasted their way through Roger Maris’s 1961 home run record of 61 home runs in a season. Already considered baseball’s best player, Bonds revealed himself to be also the man “for whom enough [recognition] is too little.” Ego and envy driven, he plunged himself into a regiment of maniacal weight lifting while spreading steroid laced cream over his body to chemically transform his natural talent into a muscle bulging home run recording breaking machine.
Too bad Bonds didn’t experience the kind of envy William Hazlitt once described:
“Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than deserved good-fortune”
This variety of envy might have led him to state publicly what most in baseball already knew: that both McGwire and Sosa had fraudulently achieved their records through steroid fueled power. By telling this first truth, Bonds could have exposed these cheats and punctured the praise being lavished on them by the media. Perhaps at the time he felt that such action would have been disloyal and dishonorable for him to do to fellow ballplayers. But they would have gotten a justice they deserved; instead, Bonds, whose fortune it was to possess without steroids a talent the whole league envied, succumbed to an “Envy [that] is the adversary of the fortunate.” His envy induced him to cheat, compelled him to lie in 2003 and now has branded him as no less a fraud than those whose shabby conduct he imitated to garner a recognition synthetically won and a disgrace naturally deserved.
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