Barry Bonds waits in full uniform in a hallway at PacBell park, waiting for a man to drop by with an item Bonds has told the guy to rush because he just can’t play without it. Steroids? No, an earring in the shape of a cross that Bonds has worn since 1986. An article in The New York Times today tells the story of the cross that has become one of Bonds’s signatures.
The original earring was fashioned by an Iranian émigré jewelry maker named Shapur Mozaffarian, from a cross pendant given to the ballplayer by his grandfather. When Bonds lost the keepsake in 2000, Mozaffarian was asked to make—and deliver—a replacement before Bonds’s next game. “When he saw the earring,” the jeweler told the Times, “it was like his whole body relaxed.”
Sounds like Bonds should have a little more faith in his God-given abilities, no?