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clean out some cartilage; he was supposed to be back within three to four weeks, but then he rushed himself. He tried to get back within two, and he ended up worsening his knee and had to have another surgery. And then his knee had gotten infected, so he had to have a third surgery before the end of spring training. And he was on the D.L. until either late August or early September. He didn’t play until that time. It was one of those things where he might play in two weeks or he might play next week. So it was always this little—I don’t want to say “cat and mouse,” but there’s always this expectation that he’d come off the list. Bristol said to stay with him every day. And it was a difficult season. I remember saying to Bristol, “Are you sure you want to do this? He’s still on the D.L.” Bristol said, “Yes, we still want to be there.”

There were times when it was contentious. There were times when it was actually fairly good, but that’s really the way Bonds is with a lot of people. His mood swings were legendary. Late in the season, when he had only been activated about a week, the Giants were at Dodger Stadium, and I asked him something in the postgame, and he looked at me and said “Pedro, dude. You’ve got issues.” I had to really, really bite my tongue, because it was one of those things where you know how it is with a reporter, you don’t want to become the story. So I didn’t say anything back. I just said, “Okay, yeah, whatever.” But I remember thinking to myself, “I have issues? Me? I have issues?! Have you ever looked in the mirror?”

JOHN SKIPPER:

It was widely reported that Barry Bonds had creative approval—not true. Widely reputed that Barry Bonds was getting paid—also not true.

JOHN WALSH:

Some of that stuff in that show was really, really good. Mike got him to take cameras into a warehouse in San Francisco and took him on a tour of the warehouse where Bonds has videotapes of every home run he’s hit from like 380 on, and he has a storehouse of the socks he wore for each home run, the uniform he wore—they’re all different. He has a whole warehouse of memorabilia. He took us on a tour of it. It was great.

If you really got to know him, you could see what he wanted to reveal, and the insecurity he had over it. I think that show had a shot to do something very special that no one else would do.

Anybody who knew Mike knew nobody was going to tell Mike what to show. Mike was a real diplomat, he knew how to figure things out, and in fact, the show wound up being killed because Bonds said, “You’re going to have to do this,” and Mike said, “I’m not doing it.” And that’s why the whole thing ended.

GEORGE SOLOMON, Ombudsman:

Barry Bonds had his own reality show when he was in the midst of the steroid controversy. And I criticized that a lot. That was awful. They did about six, and I had big problems with that; it would be the same thing if NBC in the last six months of the Bush administration did a reality show with Cheney. You know, you just wouldn’t do it. They have an entertainment division, it was done by that group. They palmed it off on them. They’ve got a million subsidiaries, they can do whatever they want.

JOHN SKIPPER:

We endured a fair amount of criticism about: What are we doing in bed with this guy whom we also have to cover? If that came up at CBS and CBS was doing a reality series about Barry Bonds, nobody would say, “Gee, you can’t do a reality series about Barry Bonds because CBS News covers Barry Bonds.” They have it compartmentalized, so it’s okay. Well, we sort of think we have it compartmentalized. We have our news group—they do the news. We have an ESPN development group—they did the Barry Bonds series. But that isn’t accepted. People look at ESPN as kind of a totality. It’s “You guys have these fun-loving anchors—are they journalists or are they entertainers? You’ve got games, you’re in bed with your partners, with the leagues, but yet you’re covering them as well.”

To me, and I’m not a journalist by trade, the company is remarkably conscientious about separating those ventures. I’ve asked