One of my favorite games with internet columnists is to look at the headline of a Ralph Wiley column and try to guess (1) how far into the column until he makes a veiled reference to race and (2) how far into the column until he comes right out and starts talking about it. This one, I guessed it would be pretty early. I was actually a bit ahead of the game, but after a brief detour to bash New York, Wiley didn’t disappoint: number 7 on his list rips “Media gets some steroid phoniness by then smearing the likes of Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, but never questioning the likes of, say, Bret Boone,” to which my response is, Ralph Wiley and I are reading different media. Didn’t, like, every single article about Boone discuss how suddenly and inexplicably he had bulked up? Yeah, Rick Reilly beat a dead Moral High Horse into the ground with his assault on Sammy Sosa, and as much as I hate Bonds it’s unfair to move from the guy in the bar saying “Bonds fits the steroid profile” to the guy in the newspaper saying “I bet Barry didn’t get that way eating his Wheaties.” But really, most of the speculation I seem to see about ‘roids focuses on white guys in their mid-30s.
Then he gets to OJ . . .