grinninfoole

From a Jeff Passan column from Yahoo Sports:

LOS ANGELES – The 8-year-old girl stood a few feet from the man mocking her father. She seemed somewhat oblivious, and considering the situation's flammability, that was probably a for the best.

Because were she just a few years older, how would Aisha Bonds, daughter of Barry Bonds, have reacted to the Caucasian man who painted his face brown, wore matching latex skin over his head and stuffed a muscle suit beneath his authentic No. 25 jersey?

"You look funny," she said, according to the man who played the imposter, 22-year-old Scott Keighley Jr., and his father, 47-year-old Scott Keighley.

"It's no big deal," Keighley Jr. said Wednesday about the scene that had played out a night earlier. "We're just trying to have some fun."

En route, he and his father overstepped the line between fun and moronic. The elder Keighley sported a white lab coat, playing BALCO founder Victor Conte to his son's Bonds. They wore costumes for the first two games of the San Francisco Giants' series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, sitting in the third row behind home plate, which gave them postgame access to the area about 15 feet from the Giants' clubhouse entrance.

Aisha Bonds had waited for her father there among the Dodgers fans streaming out Tuesday.

I must commend these gentlemen on finding a way to turn my sympathies against their protest of his steroid use and towards Barry Bonds, but in resorting to minstrel show makeup, they have. Really, I don't feel so bad for Bonds, so much as his daughter. And I concede that they appear to have been mocking Mr. Bonds for his steroid-altered physiognomy, rather than his race. Still, though, black face? What's next? "Bonds" doping up to enter a watermelon eating contest?