It's a busy time for sport. There's the usual Olympic fervor, the standard consternation over the men's hockey team ("Dave on a roof in Brampton, you're on the Fan"), Ricky Williams' annual positive drug test and the pagaentry of the NBA all-star break.

Amid all that came word that Barry Bonds would be retiring after a final season in the majors. It wasn't a terribly surprising story - Bonds is coming off surgery and is at an age at which he's outlasted everyone this side of Julio Franco. What was surprising was the manner in which the various sports news networks covered the story.

The leads went something like this: "Sportswriters will be crushed that Barry Bonds will call it a career" and other cynical cracks, taking shots at Bonds' personality. Interspersed with clips of home run swings were various interview clips with Bonds at his surliest.

Consider the coverage when greats like Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan announced their retirements (Jordan's first one, anyway). It was major news, as arguably the greatest players the sports had ever known stepped down.

In-depth retrospectives and features on what the sports would be like post-Jordan and post-Gretzky were everywhere.

In Bonds, you have one of the greatest talents in the history of baseball, a sport with a pedigree almost twice as long as hockey and basketball, announcing his plans to retire, and the first reaction is to mock him.

Granted, Bonds is not an easy person to get along with if you happen to make your living with a camera and microphone. He's a private and aloof superstar who doesn't like answering questions, and he hasn't done himself a lot of favours with the press.

He's prickly at best, and looks as though he's sitting on a cactus even when the questions in play are fairly benign. His post-knee surgery press conference had all the markings of your mom's best guilt trip, as he congratulated the media on finally putting him out of the game. Where a "no comment" might suffice, Bonds chooses to be adversarial and insulting.

In short, he's shown absolutely no desire to project anything except a surly image.

The media in turn, has fallen over themselves to oblige. They've quoted Bonds out of context. Following game 7 of the 2002 World Series, he was quoted answering a question with "Back off, or I'll snap." It was only selectively reported that reporters had been crowding Bonds' young son and that the entire quote was in fact "Back off, or I'll snap. I'm not playing around when it comes to my son."

They've turned him into the poster boy for steroids, despite the fact that Bonds has never failed a drug test. Even if he had, there was never a steroid policy in place while he was setting his records.

While his "accidental" use of a steroid cream and his association with BALCO are certainly suspicious, other players with equally bulging biceps didn't have to suffer nearly the scrutiny that Bonds has. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were able to gloss over the taint of andro and its more powerful cousins pretty well, until their dreadful performances before Congress.

McGwire, for his part, was a pretty dour quote during his own home run chase, railing against the petty greed of people fighting for his record baseballs, while making $9 million to hit said baseballs. Then of course, he discovered a happy-go-lucky sidekick in Sosa, and everyone lived happily ever after, and baseball was saved.

Steroids or no, Bonds outpaced his competitors by historic margins while playing under the same rules as everyone else. The responsibility in the steroid scandal falls to baseball's complete lack of a steroid policy for far too long.

As a bright guy with a dislike for the media, Bonds is never a boring quote, and reporters know it. So just how much of the journalism surrounding Bonds is born out of probing insight, and how much is a contest to provoke the next Bonds outburst? It's like the boys at school who tease the kid with anger management issues and then gleefully sit back and wait until he trashes the classroom.

If Bonds had put any effort into cultivating a relationship with the media, he might well be one of the most beloved players in the game today. Instead, he had been content to let his bat do the talking, and let the media cast him as baseball's great villain. Does this mean that the angry soundbyte is doomed to be Bonds legacy?

Thankfully, no. For proof of that, look no further than another superstar who was reviled by the media in his day. In his time, one of the biggest jerks in baseball, booed in every ballpark he visited, was Ted Williams. Williams was acerbic, cocky, and none too friendly with the media. Sound familiar? Williams even one-upped Bonds, once going so far as to spit at some of the Fenway faithful.

Like Bonds, Williams never won a World Series, and so countless trees were killed to print the ridiculous notion that while an exceptional individual talent, Williams was not a winning teammate (strange that no one ever said the same about Tony Gwynn. Of course, he was likeable and friendly with the media.)

Yet, there was Ted Williams in his later years, being honoured with standing ovations at All-Star games, surrounded by adoring current stars. Also a good interview, Williams became a darling of the media in his later years, as baseball's sage curmudgeon, discussing his favourite of the current hitters and what was right and wrong with the game. The same may very well happen with Bonds, who's not terribly shy about giving his own opinions. Given time, his aversion to the media may be remembered as nothing more than a parenthetic quirk in a towering career.

It's easy to envision Bonds getting the Williams treatment at the 2030 All-Star game, as the clips of his press conferences fade, and those of his homers endure.

To their credit, baseball fans have appreciated Bonds. A near full SkyDome stood and cheered after Bonds blasted career homer #589 off then Blue Jay Cliff Politte, and similar reactions have followed him around the majors as fans realize they are seeing a rare all-time great.

Should Bonds retire after 2006, he is unlikely to break Hank Aaron's home run record. Personally, I would like to see Aaron remain the home run champ. This is not a slight against Bonds, but Aaron seems the epitome of an honourable champion. He set his record with grace and dignity in a time when much of the mail he received was hate mail, with many wanting to see the home run crown remain in white hands. He faced adversity of a type that most modern day athletes have to invent for themselves, building up imagined slights to conquer. It would also spare the home run record of the steroid taint. Given the Pete Rose saga, baseball's major records have all the taint they can handle right now.

Alex Rodriguez would be the next logical candidate to challenge the record, and might seem likely to break it, but remember than Ken Griffey Jr. was a mortal lock to shatter the record, before he became simply a mortal.

Since the initial report was released, Bonds has indicated that he may play on after the 2006 season if his knee allows. Whenever he decides to hang them up, the retirement of such a player, while not requiring reverence, should certainly be treated with the respect that his accomplishments deserve.