Maybe I do care

Published 12:00 am Thursday, July 3, 2008

My giveadamner is broken.

That message was sent to me recently by my friend and former co-worker Lauren Morris. I thought it was one of the funniest things I had seen in a long time.

Today, however, it isn’t just funny, it expresses my mood as I read the front page of espn.go.com.

There were a plethora of stories on the page and one of the leading articles was the account of Barry Bonds’ 756th homerun ball finally making it to the Hall of Fame.

The story details the ball being bought by designer Marc Ecko who then held a contest and subsequently branded the baseball with an asterisk.

From there, it goes on about the last minute negotiations that eventually led to Ecko giving the ball to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame on a permanent basis.

Honestly I’d rather read about two squirrels fighting over an acorn (credit for that southern dialect goes to former News-Herald Publisher Jeff Findley).

Yes, I know the baseball made history and I know that it has had a long and sometimes controversial journey from its introduction into the baseball game through its final resting place in Canton, Ohio. I just don’t care.

There are a million things about baseball that I’m not interested in and Barry Bonds and his record-breaking homerun ball are two of them. I listened to it until I was sick of it last year as Bonds drew ever closer and then broke Hank Aaron’s record.

We had debates about it here in the office and I talked to some people in the community about their feelings as the day approached. All of that was fine and all of it was necessary as the great debate over Bonds and his breaking the record raged all over the country.

Now, I’m just tired of it. Like it or not, Bonds is the all-time homerun king until further notice. Did he use steroids or didn’t he? I don’t know and neither do you. The plain truth is it doesn’t matter because he broke the record regardless.

Maybe I’ve gotten cynical over baseball and the steroid flap. While the steroid scandal doesn’t affect my enjoyment of an individual game, I think it has made me less interested in the sport as a whole.

The result is that I still take time to research the latest game the Boston Red Sox have played, I really couldn’t care less about the stories surrounding the game. It doesn’t make any difference to me who did what to whom and by how much.

The fact is I didn’t like Roger Clemens before and I don’t like him now. I didn’t care one way or the other about Bonds before and I don’t now.

That’s why, when I looked on the ESPN webpage for a column topic, I found that I just didn’t care. Now, I’ve made you sit through a whole column of something I told you I don’t care about.

I guess that means you, my dear readers, can tell your friends you just didn’t care about my column.

Questions? Comments? Snide remarks? All are welcome.

You can reach me at thadd.white@r-cnews.com or call me at 332-7211.

Be careful out there and be good sports.