Mike Celizic

A motorcycle crash would be better than this. Being hit with a falling safe would be better. Almost anything would be better than what’s happening to Barry Bonds right now.

And for the first time in his long and brilliant career, I feel sorry for as prickly and unpersonable a man as any — with the exception of Dave Kingman, who was God’s own misanthrope — I have ever met in sports.

If this is indeed the way it ends, with meniscus-munching microbes destroying his knee, it is a shame. Big and strong men are not supposed to be brought down by microscopic critters that blindly and dumbly destroy from within. And when they are, I, at least, can’t help but think what a pathetic way it is for an assault on immortality to end.

That could be what we’re witnessing right now. It is all speculation, of course. We don’t really know what’s happening with Bonds and his knee, not first-hand anyway. All official news about him is controlled the way everything in his life has been. Whatever the team tells us about him is cleared by him. The rest comes through his own P.R. staff and his Web site, barrybonds.com.

But if there are leaks at the CIA, there are going to be leaks out of Fortress Bonds. And today, ESPN reported that it wasn’t about rehab with Bonds. It was about killing an infection that refuses to die. According to the report, Bonds was hooked up to an IV drip to wage 24-hour warfare against the bacterial infection that has set up housekeeping in the knee.

That prompted a counter release through the team saying that the IV had been removed and Bonds was back on oral antibiotics and continuing his recovery.

Bonds’ personal spin doctor, Rachael Vizcarra, then put the smiley face on a situation that is anything but happy. Her client, she said, is not immobilized “by any stretch of the imagination. Barry’s doing great. The IV antibiotic is very standard. He’s not on it any longer, and he’s progressing very well. He really wants to get back to his teammates.”

What gave that away was the teammates thing. In the clubhouse, Bonds has his own zip code. Even when he’s with his teammates, he’s apart from them. He doesn’t give a hoot about teammates other than needing to have 24 of them so that he can get to the plate every two or three innings to take another hack at Ruth and Aaron.

And it’s not standard to be hooked up to an antibiotic IV drip after knee surgery. It’s standard when you have a persistent infection that requires a separate surgery to clean out and that refuses to succumb to oral drugs.

There’s a word for that kind of infection. Nasty. Given the growing number of drug-resistant bacteria, recovery may be expected, but it’s never certain.

You can bet everything you own or ever will own that Bonds never saw this coming. No one does, especially people who take as meticulous care of themselves as he does. No matter what he may or may not have taken to get bigger and better muscles, he did everything under the same rigorous discipline and control that he showed at the plate, never swinging at a pitch a half inch outside, never letting anyone else dictate the terms of engagement.

His utter self-absorption was what made him so unlikable. It didn’t matter who you were or what your intentions, he treated everyone the same — with contempt. If you were his friend, it was on his terms, not yours. And if you weren’t his friend, he had no use for you. Even a simple “Hello” he treated with suspicion and scorn. And if he didn’t, if he smiled and acted civilized, it was pre-meditated, not natural.

Guys like him are hard to cheer for as human beings. Even as I marveled at his power and unmatched mastery of an absurdly difficult game, I couldn’t cheer for him. I could appreciate his accomplishments, but not him.

I have always assumed he would break all the records, the Ruth would fall and then Aaron after him and when Bonds put the period at the end of his career, no one would stand ahead of him in the record books. Even when he had the surgeries this year, I figured he’d be back, because he was a man on a mission.