Bryan Burwell

SAN FRANCISCO - Even in Mudville, there is conflict and confusion.

On the surface, the Barry Bonds loyalists put up a good front, trying to convince the rest of the sports world that they were fully on board with the nightly Bonds lovefest that goes on throughout this city.

Bonds finally eclipsed Hank Aaron’s magical 755 home runs Tuesday night, and Giants fans were thrilled it happened here, where everyone drinks the Bonds kool aid and at least on the surface believe the rest of the world is unjustly persecuting their hero. But recently, a few miles from the ballpark, we got a more honest peek into the fan psyche, and it was full of just as much contradiction as the rest of us seem to have.

The hecklers were smiling now.

For more than an hour and a half on national television, these die-hard Bonds lovers had gathered in the Palace Hall of Fine Arts for an ESPN town hall meeting that examined the celebrated and controversial home run chase, and they pretty much booed and hissed anyone who dared to say that the record chase wasn’t on the up and up.

But now the cameras were off, the klieg lights were shut down and the animus was replaced by some surprising honesty.

“You do know that we really think he cheated, don’t you?” asked one guy wearing a cream colored Giants jersey, who had just spent the better part of the last 90 minutes heckling me mercilessly.

“Well I would hope so,” I told him.

“I mean, we all do know that he cheated, but he’s still our guy so it’s like our duty to cheer for him,” he said. He stood there surrounded by three or four of his buddies, each one wearing some jersey or t-shirt or black or orange ball cap with a Giants logo on it, and all of them also nodding their heads and sheepishly shrugged their shoulders in agreement.

Slide show Giant among men A look back at some key moments in the amazing career of Barry Bonds more photos

And there you have it. This is what our modern sports world has been reduced to, ambivalence and ambiguity. Does anyone really know what we were supposed to do with Bonds when he broke the record? Is there truly some proper way to acknowledge his achievement while somehow remaining properly circumspect of its legitimacy?

Isn’t this what we have been forced to do with everything we watch nowadays in sports?

When was the last time you were able to comfortably watch a great moment in sports without fear that somewhere down the line the integrity of that greatness would end up exploding like an ink pack in a bank heist money bag?

While everyone easily refers to Bonds with cross-eyed indignity, we keep watching televised Tour de France updates that tell us we can’t believe anything that is going on over there, either. Two men in 24 hours have been kicked out of a race that used to be one of the most significant international sporting events, but now has been exposed as nothing more than a shameful exhibit of cutting-edge sports mad science.

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We keep looking at what Bonds did as invalid, yet this week we welcome the opening of NFL training camps as if it was a national holiday (it is in my neck of the woods) knowing that if someone ever came up with a legitimate test for human growth hormone in pro football, the only guys left playing in the NFL would be some pencil-necked place kicker from Croatia.

So tell me what great achievements in sports over the past 10 or 15 years can we not look at without a raised eyebrow or two?