http://www.ajc.com/sports/content/shared/sports/ap/ap_story.html/Baseball/AP.V6927.AP-BBO-Steve-Wilst.htmlDudes who fought over Barry Bonds\' home run ball end up getting absolutely nothing. Of course the lawyers made a ton.
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NEW YORK (AP)--It was, at its core, a story of greed. Two men, one ball. Millionaire dreams.
It ended as many stories of greed do. The lawyers won.
Alex Popov and Patrick Hayashi scrambled in the stands for Barry Bonds\' No. 73 home run ball, fought in court over it, and walked away from its sale for $517,500 Wednesday with nothing but bittersweet memories.
Beautiful.
A couple hundred grand for each side\'s lawyers, 15 percent off the top in commissions to the auction house, a cut for Uncle Sam and sundry expenses. What\'s left for Popov and Hayashi?
``In the end it\'s probably going to be a wash,\'\' Hayashi said.
Popov put a different spin on it.
``I\'ve gotten 20 months of joy out of the experience,\'\' he said with as much cheerfulness as he could muster.
Really?
Was it a joy to make the catch and get crushed by a crowd at Pac Bell Park, to have the ball in his glove one moment and see it in Hayashi\'s hand the next?
Was it fun to feud for more than a year, then take the case to court and hear the judge issue a Solomon-like order to sell the ball and split the proceeds?
``It wasn\'t about money,\'\' said Popov, a Berkeley, Calif., restaurateur. ``It was about history. It\'s not about greed.\'\'
Sure.
Popov and Hayashi can rationalize all they want, talk about how they started out as adversaries and ended up friends, bound by the journey of a ball launched off the maple bat of Barry Bonds. It\'s a warm and fuzzy tale they can tell to their grandchildren someday.
But the bottom line was that neither of them were quite so magnanimous that they wanted to give the ball to Bonds or the Hall of Fame. They saw dollar signs and tried to cash in. Fine. That\'s the American way. But nobody ought to pretend that this was somehow about the triumph of the human spirit.
Avarice kept them from making a deal at the start and they saw their riches vanish like the windblown gold at the end of ``Treasure of the Sierra Madre.\'\'
Todd McFarlane, a big kid at 42 with a lot of bucks and a compulsion for collecting, bought the ball on the cheap, so to speak. Nothing close to the $3.2 million he paid in a moment of insanity in 1999 when the prize was Mark McGwire\'s No. 70 home run ball. Not even in the neighborhood of the $1 million to $2 million that the Bonds ball was widely expected to fetch.
When the auctioneer\'s gavel fell after McFarlane\'s phone bid for $450,000, plus the commission, Popov and Hayashi seemed stunned. Was it over so quickly and for so little?
The auction lasted just a few minutes, starting with an Internet bid at $200,000 and going up in increments of $25,000 until the only other serious bidder in the room, former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier\'s doctor, caved in. The champ was in the corner, wearing a handsome felt hat, watching Dr. Nicholas De Pac go as high as $425,000 before bowing out.
In San Francisco, Bonds watched from a leather easy chair in the Giants\' clubhouse. He struggled to keep from dozing and had little to say about it afterward.
Why was the price so low, relative to the McGwire ball?
McFarlane had plenty of reasons:
Bonds wasn\'t nearly as likable as McGwire and Sammy Sosa were during their 1998 home run duel in a happier time for baseball, the country and the economy. The Bonds chase never made the front pages in the aftermath of Sept. 11. McGwire broke Roger Maris\' record that stood for 37 years. Bonds broke McGwire\'s record after only three years. Might someone else surpass Bonds sometime soon?
McFarlane had two more good reasons for the disparity between the prices: He overpaid last time--``It\'s obviously worth a fraction of what I paid for it,\'\' he said--and he scared everyone this time.
McFarlane didn\'t plan on going much higher but he was determined to add the Bonds ball to McGwire\'s and nine other milestone home run balls in a collection he\'s shown to more than 2 million people in baseball towns around the country. He had to protect his ``assets,\'\' he said, by acquiring the record ball.
``It\'s tough to say you\'ve got the second-best ball,\'\' McFarlane said.
A toy maker and creator of the Spawn comic strip, McFarlane figured the McGwire ball, as pricey as it was, has already paid for itself by helping him land toy contracts with major league baseball, the NFL, NBA and NHL. Next up is NASCAR.
It opened doors, he said, with the league marketing people and will continue yielding dividends.
``I can count up the profits for the next 10 years, then back out $3 million, and I\'m still way ahead of the game,\'\' he said. ``I can give the ball away for free at that point and it\'s still a winning move.\'\'
Maybe for him.
The two men who once held the Bonds ball in their grasp, victims of their own avarice, will only have their stories to tell.
Topic: Moron Alert - Make that a double (Read 511 times)