Even Supervillains Have Nobility

As anyone who read comic books as a child knows, it takes three things to create a compelling supervillain. First, the villain needs a secret origin. Dr. Doom, for instance, was the genius scion of a royal family who, after being expelled from college for destroying his dorm in a misguided experiment that left him horribly scarred, traveled to Tibet to learn the black mystic arts. Second, he needs to have grand ambitions. Galactus, for instance, is not content with mere power. Instead, he eats entire planets to fuel his ravenous appetites. Third, he needs a certain nobility. Magneto seeks to cleanse the world of normal humans not so much because he's a monster as because he wants to make the world safe for mutants.

Barry Bonds, at least as he's popularly understood, scores well on the first two of these tests. Being the driven son of a great ballplayer who failed to achieve his Hall of Fame destiny because of a combination of his own personal failings, racism, underappreciation in his day is a reasonably good secret origin. Seeking to redeem one's father's name by claiming all of baseball's most important records for oneself, ensuring that none will be able to deny the greatness of the family name, is a fine grand ambition. Sadly, Bonds fails the last test, by a huge margin.

The report in yesterday's Daily News that Bonds not only failed a test for illegal stimulants last year but somehow managed to blame the failure on teammate Mark Sweeney, who denied any blame in the matter, points to how far he falls short of the cosmic supervillainy many would like to ascribe to him. He's a sad and pitiable figure, less like Galactus than he is like Radioactive Man or some other third-tier villain.

We can separate this from any indignant moralizing over Bonds's test failure. The substance in question could be anything from crystal methamphetamine to cough syrup, and most likely falls within a range of drugs that many people use for purposes ranging from staying awake while performing open-heart surgery to studying. On the merits, Bonds, even having tested positive, has failed miserably at wreaking galactic vengeance on his enemies or coming close to enslaving humanity. He's more like a juvenile delinquent snorting Ritalin for kicks.

What he hasn't failed at, though, is miring himself once again in a petty bit of business unworthy of his reputation as one of baseball's great bad men. Whether being accused of taking speed like a member of a biker gang, of hiding a few tens of thousands of dollars from the IRS, of being mean to scrub teammates, or being known as someone capable of claiming with a straight face that he mistook steroids for flaxseed oil, Bonds is no Shoeless Joe Jackson, Ty Cobb, or even Pete Rose. What ties this latest business to most of his other scandals is that they simply seem beneath the dignity of a supposed arch-evildoer. Maybe with this scandal we can stop treating him with grave seriousness and simply begin laughing at him. The moment can't come too soon.

tmarchman@nysun.com