I must ask, what was Barry Bonds thinking? According to a new book, San Francisco Giants player Barry Bonds was not only taking steroids, human growth hormone (which can have the scary side effect of also making your organs grow), PLUS some drug veterinarians use to beef up, well, beef…but even more astonishingly, Bonds was also taking the fertility drug Clomid.
Hm, maybe I should have filed this under “Celebrity Fertility.” Actually “Insanity” would probably be a better category. I already have issues with taking a drug that forces your ovaries (those cyst producing factories) to go into Lucy-in-the-bon-bon-factory overdrive and ripen dozens of eggs at once (Clomid is also the drug they give to the Ivy League egg donors in order to harvest their pricey high-SAT-scoring eggs…without really doing any long-term studies on what this might do to a person).
In the Times article, in fact, they refer to Bonds as the “moody, often belligerent superstar.” Steroids make people go nuts, that’s ‘roid rage. And if you’ve ever seen someone on fertility drugs, they can get a wee bit nuts as well. Is it any wonder Mr. Bonds was a bit hard to get along with?
Sports fans: it’s well known that a number of top athletes will beat themselves up and forego the long-term in favor of the glorious short-term. Football players come to mind. Apparently, they commonly die in their early forties. Is it worth it? That’s an interesting question: glory or a longer life?
And for Bonds, he went from being pretty good to all of a sudden setting the record for single-season homeruns as well as suddenly closing in on Babe Ruth’s all-time record…all the while professing bewilderment at his sudden ability to blast balls out of the park, cheekily telling reporters to “ask God” why he suddenly had magic hitting powers–and why he was suddenly puffing up like some plastic injection-mold doll.
If this is short-term golden glory, it’s gold-plated because it’s not truly earned. If he’s going to be so sneaky and dumb to mess with his health like this (and this begs the question, where did he get the Clomid? Some sleazy doctor? Did he put on the falsetto voice and try to convince someone over the phone that he was an infertile woman?)
He could redeem himself in my eyes if he dedicated his body to science: an interesting long-term case of what happens when a man take a drug that makes women hyper-ovulate.
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