SI recently published a fascinating profile of Walter Iooss Jr., who has spent over 50 years photographing athletes and swimsuit models. The man has led an incredible life, and he also happens to be a great storyteller.

In this article, Iooss recounts stories of his favorite athletes and models, like Micheal Jordan, Reggie Jackson, Paulina Porizkova and Christie Brinkley. Sports fans should read the whole article and you’ll get a real sense of the bravado and charisma of people like Reggie Jackson in his prime.

Iooss loves to tell stories of how he had to charm people like Tiger Woods. With Tiger, the swimsuit pictures got his attention right away, and Iooss could then get Tiger to do what was necessary to get the shot.

And then there were the difficult ones like Barry Bonds and the prima donnas like LeBron James. His story about LeBron is very telling:

I first photographed LeBron James in 2003, when he was a rookie in Cleveland. He was pretty raw as a teenager; he didn’t have any of the smoothed edges he has now. When I shot him six years later, in 2009, the difference was amazing. He walked in like a king that day, and he took over that room. And not only physically, although he was massive then. I’ve never seen an athlete look like that. He was muscular, charming, articulate, the prince of hoops. He couldn’t have been more of an ambassador for the game.

Times change, and sadly, LeBron became a villain to many after The Decision. I’ve seen a lot of entourages, but none like his. In July 2010 I got an assignment from Nike to shoot LeBron right after his TV special announcing his move to the Heat. We rented the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, where the Lakers and the Clippers used to play, and there were 53 people on my crew—including hair and makeup artists, production people, a stylist. I had $10,000 in Hollywood lighting. It was huge. When LeBron arrived, it was as if Nelson Mandela had come in. Six or seven blacked-out Escalades pulled up, a convoy. LeBron had bodyguards and his masseuse. His deejay was already there, blasting. This for a photo shoot that was going to last an hour, tops.

This is how crazy it was: I wasn’t even allowed to talk directly to LeBron. There was a liaison, someone from Amar’e Stoudemire’s family. I would say to him, “O.K., have LeBron drive right,” and then he’d turn to LeBron and say, “LeBron, go right.”

LeBron had guards in the portals on the mezzanine level, talking into their hands. Really, what was going to happen? And then at the end of the shoot they all got in the Escalades. My God, I’ve been around Michael Jordan, but with him nothing even came close to this. Unimaginable.

It was obvious that this clown had a problem when he and those around him started referring to him as King James, but this episode demonstrates just how out of control LeBron’s ego had become.

One year later, LeBron is now a punch line after his embarrassing performance in the NBA Finals. He’s gone onto ESPN to discuss how he should have done things differently when he left Cleveland last year and how he made the mistake of embracing the role of the villain. He’s going back to having fun. We’ll see about that. But more than anything he needs to get rid of the obscene entourage, and I don’t see that happening.

I’ve always been a big believer in the theory what goes around, comes around. Every time I hear about how someone lied, stole or cheated, Johnny Cash’s haunting melody “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” plays in my head as I think to myself, ‘You’ll get yours…oooooooooh, you’ll get yours.’ (Sometimes I’ll even throw in a sinister laugh if nobody’s around.)

But after reading about how the prosecution screwed the pooch in the Roger Clemens trial on Thursday, I’m not so sure karma exists now. This turd has lied so many times about his alleged steroid use that somewhere along the line he actually started to believe the crap that was spewing out of his mouth. I hear Clemens speak now and I’m thoroughly convinced that he believes what he’s saying. Dude could take a lie detector test tomorrow and pass it with flying colors George Costanza-style.

You can Google the details on your own, but here’s the cliff note version of how Clemens’ case was declared a mistrial on Thursday:

1. The judge told prosecutors that they couldn’t use testimony of Andy Pettitte’s wife unless it was in rebuttal, since she did not hear Clemens directly state that he had used HGH.

2. Via video, the prosecutors used the testimony anyway.

3. Mistrial.

That sound you just heard was your tax money flushing down the toilet at the hands of well-educated, well-paid men who just produced one of the all-time screw-ups in sports history. It’s not like this happened on Day 45 because someone lost focus and got a little careless. This was the second freaking day of the trial.

What happens next is interesting. If the judge declares double jeopardy, then Clemens cannot be tried for the same crime, which basically means that he’ll get off even easier than Barry Bonds did. Following Bonds, Clemens would be the second liar not to have had to pay the piper, which ruins my faith in karma and karma-like revenge.

Not this time, Johnny.

Quick-Hit Thursday Thoughts:

- I don’t want to make light of the fact that Clemens allegedly lied under oath, but at this point I would rather see the government move on. It’s clear following the Bonds and Clemens’ trials that the government is in over its head and I would like to think that it has bigger fish to fry.

- NFL Network’s Jason La Canfora reports that the Dolphins “might actually set the market for Reggie Bush.” That’s outstanding: Can he play quarterback?

- The player rep for Randy Moss is claiming that his client “has been working out, two-a-days all spring and summer in West Virginia” and that Moss is going to be a “difference maker” again. I don’t doubt that Moss still has the talent to be a starting receiver in the NFL. I do, however, doubt his willingness to do anything but cash a paycheck and steal more money from a team.

- Mark Maske of the Washington Post is reporting that an agreement in principle on a new CBA could be completed between this Friday and next Tuesday. That’s fantastic. I wonder when the deal could have been in place had the two sides bothered talking to each other at the start instead of directly going to court.

- Maurice Clarett told a radio station in Omaha that colleges should pay football players $30,000 or $20,000 to fix the problems that the NCAA has been facing. I’m all for the idea on one condition: The schools stop shelling out thousands of dollars for this kid’s tuition and room and board. Because given Clarett’s comments and history, it’s clear that some of these players aren’t taking advantage of the free education that is being provided them. So yeah, pay them $30,000 a year so that they can buy all of the handguns and Grey Goose vodka they want. Zing!

In an incredibly gracious move, Barry Bonds has offered to pay for Bryan Stow’s children to go to college according to USA Today. Stow is the Giants fan who was severely beaten outside of Dodgers Stadium on Opening Night on March 31.

Bonds, baseball’s all-time home run leader, has offered to pay for the college education of Stow’s two children, according to Stow’s attorney, Thomas Girardi.

Stow received a visit from Bonds in his Los Angeles hospital room on April 22, just days after Bonds’ federal trial for perjury and obstruction of justice concluded.

Stow, 42, has been moved to a San Francisco hospital but remains in a coma after the March 31 attack at Dodger Stadium; one suspect has been arrested in the case, with at least one more at large. Stow has two children currently in grade school.

There will be plenty of people who will think this is a publicity stunt by Bonds in efforts to shed some good light on his name – and maybe it is. But no matter what his motives are, this is a very generous offer and unless there’s more to the story, it appears as though it was Stow’s attorney who made this news public. Not Bonds or his people.

A couple of years ago I read the book, “Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero.” What blew me away was not the stories about how much of an a-hole he was to people at times (which he was), but how generous he could be when nobody was looking. There’s a soft side to Bonds that people don’t often get to see and since I’m optimistic and positive by nature, I choose to believe that he’s helping the Stow family out of the goodness of his heart (and not because he has alterative motives with the press).

Well done, Barry.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig told the media on Thursday that he won’t consider taking Barry Bonds’ name out of the record books in wake of the slugger’s conviction of obstruction of justice last week. This will make a lot of fans angry, but it shouldn’t.

There was a huge outcry from fans that wanted to see an asterisk next to Bonds’ name in the record books when he broke Hammerin’ Hank’s home run mark in 2006. But that was never going to happen, and neither was Selig striking Bonds’ name from the record books altogether.

But the fact that Bonds hit 762 home runs in his career only has meaning because we as fans give it meaning. If we refer to Bonds as the current home run champ, then that 762 becomes much more than a number. But if we refer to Bonds as the cheater that pumped himself full of drugs in efforts to break Aaron’s record, then that 762 holds about as much weight as the needle that Greg Anderson used to inject the former slugger.

Don’t get it twisted: What Bonds did, matters. How he accomplished what he did, matters. The fact that he cheated, matters. But that 762 number? Means nothing. It’s a question at someone’s trivia night. In fact, I didn’t even know the exact number before I started writing this piece. I had to look it up, which should tell you how much it means to me.

Do true baseball fans wish that Aaron’s number were still at the top of the record books? Yes, but in some ways, it still is. Nobody refers to Bonds as baseball’s all-time home run leader unless they follow it up with a “But…steroids.” And there’s a large contingent that refuse to even mention Bonds’ name when the record is mentioned. They’ll still refer to Hank Aaron as the all-time home run champ and will continue to do so until they take their last breath.

It would be nice if Selig stepped to the plate and made a statement for once. It would be nice if he gave Bonds his middle finger and said: “Not in my record books, buddy.” But he wasn’t and isn’t going to do that. Baseball is run by conservative men who make conservative decisions. Selig wasn’t going to rock the boat with something like this, just like he will never allow someone as flamboyant and aggressive as Mark Cuban to come in and purchase one of his ball clubs.

But as long as we the fans don’t allow Bonds’ 762 to have meaning, then Hank Aaron will always live on as the true all-time home run champion.

Here’s what columnists around the country are saying about the Barry Bonds’ guilty verdict.

Judging Bonds Has Only Just Begun (Tyler Kepner, New York Times)
Barry Bonds’s statistics cannot be erased. Bonds did not get away with his actions in federal court, where he was convicted of a count of obstruction of justice Wednesday. But in his era Bonds was allowed to stay on the field and hit 762 home runs and win seven Most Valuable Player awards. Fans can judge those accomplishments however they want, but they did happen, and they are as historically valid as the 714 homers Babe Ruth hit without ever facing an African-American pitcher. Commissioner Bud Selig said Tuesday that he had already studied the integrity of baseball’s records, with help from Jerome Holtzman, the Chicago writer who was baseball’s official historian.

Exploring the sheer absurdity of the Bonds verdict (Craig Calcaterra, Hardball Talk)
Having slept on it, here’s one more thought about the Bonds verdict that simply blows my mind. Yesterday when I reacted to the verdict, I noted the absurdity of Bonds being convicted on his rambling answer in “Statement C” as listed in Count 5 of the indictment. That “Statement C” was Bonds saying, in response to a question about receiving injections, that Greg Anderson was a friend of his and that Bonds was a child of a celebrity. It was four brief beside-the-point statements. And, importantly, Bonds did eventually say unequivocally that, no, he didn’t receive injections. Take that for what it’s worth, but it was a clear answer to a clear question.

Bonds’ Legal “Dream Team” Loses Big (Randy Shaw, BeyondChron)
After Greg Anderson refused to testify and the trial judge excluded key evidence, few gave the U.S. Attorney’s office much of a chance to convict Barry Bonds on any of the charges. Add to this the high-cost legal dream team working for Bonds—which included such criminal defense superstars as Alan Ruby, Chris Arguedas, and Dennis Riordan—-and the question was not whether if Bonds would be acquitted, but how long the jury would deliberate. Well, jurors often surprise with their common sense. They saw Bonds the way the general public does, and convicted him of obstruction and came within a single holdout juror of a perjury conviction. If anyone is feeling sorry for Bonds, they aren’t talking about it.

In the end, Barry Bonds hurt himself (Lester Munson, ESPN)
The unanimous verdict that Bonds was guilty of obstruction of justice is a major triumph for federal agent Jeff Novitzky and prosecutors Jeff Nedrow and Matthew Parrella. It is also a bit of an upset. The members of the federal team started the trial with two strikes against them. Greg Anderson, Bonds’ personal trainer, refused to testify for the government. If he had testified, its case against Bonds likely would have been overwhelming. But his refusal to testify and his willingness to go to jail to help Bonds left Novitzky and the prosecutors with major obstacles. Without Anderson to identify the positive drug tests, the drug calendars, the syringes and the vials of steroids that the Novitzky-led agents had seized in their lightning raid on Anderson’s house, a powerful case for the prosecutors became a difficult, almost impossible case.

Confused Verdict Means Bonds Will Walk (Jeff Neuman, Real Clear Sports)
The government agreed in the case that the instructions to the jury for the obstruction charge would indicate that it must “agree unanimously as to which statement or statements constitute obstruction of justice.” This is essential if the verdict is to be truly unanimous; if six jurors believe one statement to be an obstruction, while the other six select a different statement, they are not in unanimous agreement. (I am grateful to the legal blogger Jack Townsend for this explanation; his blog often features clear writing and thinking on otherwise impenetrable subjects.) So if the jury couldn’t come to a unanimous vote on any of the perjury counts, on what basis did it reach its conclusion about obstruction of justice? The verdict reeks of compromise, especially with jurors acknowledging that the deadlock on the perjury charge about injections involved an 11-1 vote favoring conviction.

A jury found Barry Bonds guilty of one federal charge of obstruction of justice, but a mistrial was declared on the remaining three counts of making false declarations to a grand jury. It’s unclear as of this writing whether there will be another trial to settle those remaining counts.

According to ESPN.com, Bonds sat “stone-faced” through the verdict, displaying no emotion. His legal team then asked that the guilty verdict be thrown out, although U.S. District Judge Susan Illston did not rule on that request. A hearing for that case will be held on May 20.

The question I have is how can the jury believe that Bonds was guilty of obstruction of justice but unsure that he lied under oath about taking steroids, taking HGH and/or receiving injections of any kind? I’m not a lawyer and my intelligence is questionable at best, but how can you nail him on obstruction of justice but not on the three perjury charges of lying to a grand jury? It seems like if you can nail him on that, you can nail him on anything.

Then again, maybe the jury believes that he’s lying about something, so they nail him on obstruction of justice. But they can’t prove that he’s lying specifically about taking steroids, HGH and/or being injected with anything, so that’s where the hung in “hung jury” comes in.

Either way, it feels like a large amount of the taxpayers’ money just went flying out the window. Was justice served here? Did Barry Bonds “get what was coming to him” like some wanted? Does anyone even care anymore?

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: The biggest punishment that this guy will ever endure is not being allowed induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I’ve found it rather interesting that in the midst of Barry Bonds’ perjury trial and the news that Manny Ramirez abruptly retired instead of dealing with a 100-game suspension for another positive PED test (his second in three years), that some people have developed a rather nonchalant attitude towards steroids as it pertains to the game of baseball.

Whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook or in sports forums, people continue to utter the statement: “What’s the big deal? It’s only steroids. I like home runs! Steroids make the game more exciting!”

Honestly, I have rationalized at least part of this argument in the past. I couldn’t care less if someone wanted to take steroids – including athletes. Do you know what the yearly average is for deaths caused by steroids? Three. As in: three people. For comparison sake, tobacco kills 5.4 million people per year, which is a shade more than three.

That’s not to say I condone the use of steroids. When the day comes where I have children of my own, I’m going to make sure they understand how dangerous steroid use is. The potential side effects of misusing steroids are well known and if a doctor does not prescribe them, the risk just isn’t worth the reward in my eyes. We’re talking about highly dangerous stuff here, especially for those who don’t know what they’re doing.

But if a groan man wants to sink hundreds of dollars into drugs that will make him bigger, stronger or heal faster, then whatever. It doesn’t affect me and quite frankly, this country is dealing with way more pressing issues at the moment.

Read the rest of this entry »

The evidence continues to mount against one Barry Lamar Bonds as his perjury trial rolls on.

On Tuesday, former Giants’ outfielder Marvin Bernard told the jury that he purchased steroids from Bonds’ personnel trainer Greg Anderson – the same Greg Anderson who remains in prison because he refuses to testify. Other former athletes are also expected to testify that they knowingly used steroids supplied by Anderson.

This, of course, puts another hole in Bonds’ shoddy defense. His lead attorney Allen Ruby is trying to convince a jury that the only reason his client took steroids was because Anderson misled him about what the substances were. Granted, just because Bernard purchased steroids from Anderson doesn’t prove without shadow of a doubt that Bonds knew what his trainer was injecting him with. On the other hand: OH, COME ON. Bernard was buying roids from Bonds’ roid trainer and Bonds didn’t know that his roid trainer was giving him roids, too? Please.

Bonds is either lying or he’s told himself so many times that he’s innocent that he has actually started to buy into his lies. Either way, it’s still lying. If his lawyer is a practicing magician and somehow gets Bonds out of these perjury charges, so be it. But in the court of public opinion, the former slugger is still a lair.

Yes, you read that title right and no, I’m not trying to be funny. (Not this time at least.)

Barry Bonds’ former mistress Kimberly Bell is scheduled to testify this week at his trial. Among some of the topics are that Bonds told her before the 2000 season that he used steroids and that she witnessed physical and mental changes that prosecutors will attribute to performance-enhancing drug use. But among the most controversial topics is whether or not Bell saw Bonds’ testicles shrink (which is a common side effect of steroid use).

This is usually when I would draw up a mock conversation between a lawyer and Bell talking about Bonds’ marbles, but my mother reads the site and I have to draw the line somewhere. So grow up, people.

That said, could you imagine what some comedian would do with the transcript from that testimony? Could you imagine what Daniel Tosh would do with it? Or Dave Chappelle? In one of his stand up performances, Dana Carvey managed to make the O.J. Simpson trial hilarious and that was about murder – not steroids, lying and testicles.

I wish Saturday Night Live were still funny because they could have a field day with this Bonds trial.

A key witness in Barry Bonds’ perjury trial testified on Wednesday that he saw Greg Anderson leave Bonds’ spring training bedroom with a syringe in 2000.

From CSN Bay Area:

Steve Hoskins said that when he saw Bonds and his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, coming out of the master bedroom he assumed Anderson had injected the star player with steroids.

He testified that he saw the two disappear into that room “once or twice” at each spring training over three consecutive years beginning in 2000.

He also told the jury of eight women and four men that, a year earlier, Bonds had ordered him to research the benefits and side effects of a steroid after the slugger had undergone elbow surgery.

I wouldn’t think this news will make or break Bonds’ case. In his opening statements on Tuesday, lead attorney Allen Ruby acknowledged that Bonds took steroids but claimed that Anderson misled him about what the substances were. This trial is not about whether or not Bonds took steroids: He did. But it’s up to the defense to somehow prove that he didn’t know what Anderson was giving him.

Good luck with that, by the way. Bonds’ defense team better have some real concrete evidence that their client had no idea what Anderson was giving him. And they better be able to convince a jury that Bonds was actually stupid enough not to question Anderson before ingesting/injecting unknown substances into his body.