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Robinson's Widow Says Too Soon to Condemn Bonds

Written by USA Radio Network

Thursday, 06 December 2007

It was too soon to know whether home run king Barry Bonds should be condemned for steroid use or defended as a victim of overzealous focus, the widow of Jackie Robinson said on Wednesday.

"I certainly don't want to ever hear of athletes using drugs of any kind," Rachel Robinson told Reuters on Wednesday ahead of a ceremony for the California Hall of Fame which has inducted her husband, who integrated Major League Baseball in 1947 and became one of the symbols of racial progress in the United States.

"But I'm not going to say anything negative about Barry because he has been indicted but he has not been tried," the 85-year-old added.

"I don't know how much of it is something that he got himself into or is it that the media got into it and he got to be the victim."

A federal grand jury last month indicted Bonds, who broke the career home run record this season, on charges of lying during a federal probe of steroids in professional sports. In 2003, he told a previous grand jury that he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs.

Some of Bonds' supporters have claimed he became a focus of the investigations because of his race, but prosecutors say the evidence and nothing else led to his door.

Bonds, who has continuously denied using steroids, is scheduled to make his first court appearance in the case in San Francisco on Friday.