LockerRoom: There's a great old Sports Illustrated story written by a guy named Richard Hoffer which focuses on an interview Hoffer did with the baseball player Barry Bonds back in 1993.

Hoffer had first to learn that the time of the professional sports star is far more valuable than the time of an ordinary mortal. He would be summoned to the interview. He would be dismissed.

On one occasion Hoffer is waiting in the clubhouse of the San Francisco Giants as Bonds gets changed after a game.

Hoffer records the childish boasting he hears as he is waiting.

"You should see my house," Bonds says to a team-mate "Major cribbage! Ceiling 40 feet high! Bring you a videotape."

Then Bonds opens his pay cheque and discovers a deduction of $30,000 and assumes the sports-star sulk pose, the default facial expression for so many jocks and sweat merchants.

Hoffer's interview, which has been put off for six days in succession, is about to be postponed again. Still Bonds is uncharacteristically nice about it. He waves at Hoffer and says the words, "Dude, later" before stomping off.

"How good is Bonds?" asked Hoffer later in his 1993 piece. "Good enough to make you suspicious."

Thirteen years later Sports Illustrated found itself running (with some satisfaction, one imagines, Bonds once angrily hurled a baseball at one of the magazine's staffers) an extract from a remarkable new book called Game of Shadows, written by San Francisco Chronicle writers Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams and based on their reporting which broke the Balco (Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative) story.

Game of Shadows is a narrative populated by many characters, most of them unsavoury. Marion Jones pops up in interesting ways. Jones was preceded as a client of Balco by her fellow sprinter Chryste Gaines.

It is an interesting insight into how these things work that Gaines allegedly gave permission to Balco to take Jones on as a client so long as she got paid a cut of whatever Jones paid for her juice. Gaines is serving a two-year suspension right now but got $7,350 out of the deal.

Jones, claims the book, was a ravenous consumer and was at one time on a cocktail of human growth hormone, insulin, the clear (one of Balco's special house products) steroids and erythropoietin. Her former beau Tim Montgomery features too. The white coats at Balco found him to be an "out-of-control juicer".

The gang's all here but the star of the show is Barry Bonds. Somehow Bonds, in the extremity of his arrogance - and such is the nature of his success in bullying the world he operates in - seems to symbolise more the decay which comes with professional sport than almost any other figure in memory.

Bonds could hit a baseball very far. That's a greater skill than it sounds. Baseball pitchers spend their lives perfecting curves and spins and speeds which make the hitting of a baseball very difficult. Bonds always hit it well, though. He got the best out of himself and got ridiculously well paid for it. That would buy most people happiness.

ProSportsworld is a different planet, though. Back in the mid-1990s baseball was recovering from a damaging strike. The gurus of selling discovered (or rediscovered) that sports fans like sensation and in baseball, a game of infinite nuance and subtlety, the lowest common denominator of sensation is the home run.

There's nothing more thrilling than seeing a big guy slug a ball right out of the park.

Fans like it just like they enjoy seeing muscled sprinters break world records. Television has given us an insatiable appetite for sensation. Sport depends on television. Sport responds.

The big guys weren't immediately responsive to this new marketing imperative. So baseball made the parks a little smaller. Bond's own club, who employed a special staff just to keep their big star happy, moved from windy old CandleStick Park to Pac Bell Park, where fans could loiter in the Pacific Ocean behind the outfield stands and race to retrieve the ball when it splashed into the water after a Bonds homer.

By 1998 the big boys had cottoned on. Baseball was resolutely refusing to implement drug testing. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire went on a home-run spree which for the whole summer thrilled America and those of us who rather like baseball. For a while Bonds featured too, but he fell away as McGwire went on to shatter the old single-season home-run record.

Very few people still believe in either McGwire or Sosa but that's another matter. Barry Bonds certainly didn't believe them. He was jealous and he either began taking the juice around then or increased the amount he was taking. He got bigger, he hit farther, everybody said hurrah, and in 2001 he broke McGwire's single-season record.

Some sportswriters asked him, "Ahem, how is this done?" - for by now Barry Bonds was quite old in sports terms and Bonds said that, well, he didn't know himself. "Call God," he said. "Ask him."

By now the whole home-run business stank to high heaven. Bonds had improved faster than an Irish Olympic swimming champion. In the first 13 years of his career he had averaged 32 home runs a year. Then in the six years from the age of 34 to the age of 40 he hit an average of 49 home runs a year.

But hey, customers love the home runs. Television loves home runs. Seeing big guys turning regular baseball seasons into races for home-run records was compulsive viewing and made baseball the great American pastime once again.

Pretty soon it will be Opening Day in the world of major league baseball. The return of the game means the real start of spring in most American cities. Sadly, the grand old game no longer has the innocence which once fragranced its pastoral rhythms.

Baseball introduced some flimsy testing for its stars in 2003. Barry Bonds has never failed a test. When he steps up to the plate for the first time this year he will have a career total of 708 home runs to his name. This is seven short of what Babe Ruth had and 48 away from breaking the all-time record of the legendary Hank Aaron.

Bonds already holds the single-season home-run record.

Where does that leave the game that created Barry Bonds and turned a blind eye to him as he became its Frankenstein? Will there be celebration fireworks when he breaks the record of Aaron? Will baseball continue to besmirch its entire history?

Sometime, someplace some body in sport needs to take a step backward and say that more professionalism, more intensity, more sensation, more of everything isn't necessarily what is best. The game is the thing and the state it's in when we pass it on to the next generation is what matters.

Barry Bonds didn't own baseball. Like every player of a great sport he was just passing through. Every sport can learn from his life and the damage done.