His back to the wall and his integrity under siege, America's next home run king pleaded for relief from a crush of reporters poised to confront him about his scandal-tainted quest for glory.
Barry Bonds, a symbol of the steroid era's blight on the national pastime, was headed toward Boston, where he will appear at Fenway Park tonight for the first time in his 22-year career when the San Francisco Giants face the Red Sox in a city he once declared "too racist for me."
Bonds will be the first player with 700 or more home runs to compete in Boston since Hank Aaron Sept. 22, 1976.
"You all got to give me some air," Bonds said, raising his voice at a media throng at Citizens Bank Park on a stifling June afternoon in Philadelphia. "I'm serious. I'm panicking right now."
These are difficult days for Barry Lamar Bonds, who turns 43 next month and will arrive on Yawkey Way nine home runs shy of eclipsing Aaron's mark of 755 and seizing the most hallowed record in American sports. A pariah in the game he professes to love, an outcast in baseball towns across the continent, a would-be king without a country, Bonds forges ahead on a lonely odyssey, scorned even by Aaron himself as he closes in on a personal triumph his critics will decry as an act of fraud.
"There's just an empty feeling in your heart, even though nothing against him has been proven," said former Red Sox pitcher John Burkett, who surrendered Bonds's 300th home run and later played with him on the Giants. "You want to celebrate the record, but you wonder what might come out about him after it's all said and done."
Bonds has grown weary of it all: the federal grand jury investigating him for possible perjury and tax evasion charges; Major League Baseball probing allegations he fueled his pursuit of Aaron's all-time home run record with illegal performance-enhancing drugs; hecklers chanting, "Steroids" and "Cheater"; the media hounding him at every turn.
As he barnstorms the country in a virtual bubble, Bonds grants only brief news conferences the first day he arrives in a new city and often exploits the sessions to lash out at the media. He tapes the exchanges with a digital recorder, he told a reporter in Philadelphia, "so I can post you on my website, and if you write anything crazy, it's going to be on there, sir."
In a brief interview with the Globe, Bonds attributed his poor public image to mischaracterizations by the media.
"Everything with me is like that, brother, come on," he said. "I don't even get upset about it anymore."
