Major League Gentleman

I played catch with Bobby Bonds. I've always loved the sound of that statement, and the fact that I can honestly make it. Not because I ever played baseball professionally (my one Pony League season as a teenager consisted of largely unsuccessful attempts to avoid successive humiliation), but because I was lucky enough to count Bobby Bonds as a friend ever since chance brought our families together nearly three decades ago. For me, a game of catch we played way back then revealed something basic about the character of one of baseball's great stars and, not incidentally, the father of today's megastar Barry Bonds. Bobby, who died Saturday at the age of 57, was as graceful with his friends as he was on the field. Since I attended my first baseball game at the age of seven or eight in New York's Polo Grounds, I grew up a fanatical Giants fan. When the team moved from New York to San Francisco, I wasn't as crushed as I might have been since my family had moved out of New York by then, too. I followed the Giants from my father's diplomatic postings overseas, and, in college back in the U.S., I monitored Bobby's incredible fast start in the majors (his first at bat: a grand slam). When the Giants traded Bobby to the Yankees at the end of the 1974 season, I was disappointed that the team would lose this outstanding player--but thrilled when I heard that he was moving into the same new building in Riverdale, N.Y. where I was moving with my family.

It was as a fan, not a beginning journalist, that I hoped that I'd be able to at least catch glimpses of the already legendary player in the lobby. To my surprise, things turned out very differently. Bobby and his wife Pat, who always was armed with a smile and never wore an ounce of pretension, quickly struck up a real friendship. To my Polish-born wife Christina, still relatively new to the U.S., they couldn't have been more welcoming. The four of us were in our 20s, with five children between us. Our daughters, Eva and Sonia, raced around the building and danced at birthday parties with the two older Bond boys, Barry and Ricky, while little Bobby Jr. looked on. Barry taught Christina how to play ping-pong. And Bobby invited us to games at Yankee stadium, where we sat, sometimes with Pat, behind home plate. Back in our apartments or at the pool, we talked baseball but also about everything else from bringing up kids to politics.

So back to that day when Bobby asked me to play catch. He was playing in the evening and said he wanted to loosen up his arm--as if he wouldn't be doing that in practice later. I grabbed my old glove, and felt as nervous as I was elated. We walked to a field nearby, and he quickly put me at ease, establishing a distance between us I could comfortably handle. He played just long enough to make it feel good, and not so long that my arm would flag. I quickly realized that Bobby had asked me to throw because he knew what it would mean to me.

Then, after only a year, our families went separate ways. Bobby was traded again and again after that one season with the Yankees--to the Angels, White Sox, Rangers, Indians, Cardinals and Cubs. I moved too; I was assigned to various foreign postings--Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw and Berlin--for NEWSWEEK. But we kept sporadically in touch. On our way to Hong Kong in 1978, we stopped in San Francisco. Bobby was playing ball elsewhere, but Pat and the boys had returned to the Bay area. Pat picked us up to take us to their house. On the way, we stopped to get Barry, who was just returning from his high school's sports awards' ceremony where he'd garnered another clutch of trophies. Pat joked she didn't know what to do with them anymore.

After a long spell when we lost contact, Bobby tracked us down during our stint in Washington between my foreign postings. In 1990, I went to pick him up in Baltimore so he could come back to our place for a few hours. Unprompted, he mentioned all the pain he lived with as he found himself shuffled from club to club in his final playing years. He had been struck by a pitch on the hand, and every subsequent at bat hurt. The fact that he talked about this at all, even in his usual low-key manner, meant that this must have been a far more difficult ordeal than he ever let on.

Three years later, I got in touch with Bobby when we were returning from Warsaw for a vacation to the U.S. He quickly offered tickets to a Giants game in Philadelphia, which would be preceded by an old-timers' game. Thus, both Bobby and Barry would be playing that day. I arrived with my 13-year-old son Adam and, a moment after we reached our seats, someone arrived to escort us into the visitors' locker room. There, Bobby met us and led us to Barry's locker. Since he was born later, Adam had only heard about our friendship with the Bonds', but both men did their best to put him at ease as they posed for pictures with him. It was as if the time we'd been apart had just evaporated. Barry signed a ball for Adam, and I asked Bobby to sign it as well. For all my love of baseball, I've never been wild about memorabilia. But I told Adam this is one of my proudest gifts to him.