Irony, Sweet Irony

So I wake up this morning still feeling great about the Tuesday night event with the Upstate Challenger kids, and what happens?

A punch in the gut that snapped me back into reality.

Actually, it was the swing of a bat that did it. Barry Bonds' bat. The one that stroked home run No. 756 into the right field stands in San Francisco late that same evening.

In a matter of hours, two separate events bring to light the irony that is today's sports landscape.

Here, on the one hand, we have the Challenger kids - the mentally and physically handicapped children whose cause I helped take up several years back. To watch them play baseball for our WCCP listeners Tuesday night was, as it always is, a complete joy.

For sheer innocence and love of the game, what could top this group of young men and women interacting with their "buddies" - other children and teenagers, even some college students - on hand to help protect/guide the ones who need it most.

Anyone who has seen them play gets an immediate understanding of why I believe so much in their cause, and why I was proud and honored to accept an invitation to be on the first Board of Directors for Upstate Challenger Sports.

Then to be brought back to the real world and the controversy that is - and likely always will - swirling around Bonds was, for a moment anyway, sobering.

The good news, however, is that though we talk about Bonds when the need arises and - in my position - perhaps cover him up close and personal once in a while, he operates in a world both out of reach and out of reality for most of us.

The Challenger kids?

They're real. They're loving. And they need us.

Bonds, as he has shown so many times before, clearly does not.