The furor over Barry Bonds swinging for 755 rises in tenor and tenacity, Babe Ruth left in the steroid slugger’s wake and a nation rushing to reject this countdown to the toppling of Hank Aaron’s record. This is such a sad, sad thing for Aaron and America to witness, goes the outrage, a pursuit of baseball’s home run perch that comes without redeeming value.

The sentiment for Aaron is sweetly understandable and long overdue, but it is unnecessary. After all these years, people are going to surprise Aaron, because the beauty that comes out of Bonds’ blight on baseball will accomplish something that nothing and no one else has been able to do: Remember Aaron.

Bonds is going to bring the light onto Aaron’s legacy, the way he did Ruth’s. Only, Ruth didn’t need it. The Babe was The Babe: a part of mythology, bigger than life, a part of a nation’s vernacular that has become synonymous with all things biggest and best in life. Ruth never needed the renaissance that Bonds brought him with the chasing that ended over the weekend with the Giant’s 715th home run.

Ruth has been as big in death as he ever was in life. He deserves it all, but Aaron has long deserved much more.

“Occasionally, I speak to kids in elementary schools and ask them, ‘How many have heard of Babe Ruth?'” said Tom Stanton, author of the well-received book, “Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America.”

“A majority of the hands are raised. Ask about Hank Aaron and the hands diminish to a great degree. Not many know him. For several reasons, Aaron has never gotten his due. … I think he will now.”

All this starts to change now, bringing a most private, dignified man and his important American life out for a curtain call and a tip of the cap. If it takes Bonds, the juiced up anti-hero, to make it happen, so be it. Aaron never hit 50 home runs in a season, and never brought much attention to himself except with his relentless consistency, a line-drive hitter who made history over the long, consistent run of his career.

When everyone is so desperately searching for grace and dignity in sports, for a true baseball hero, these times will welcome Aaron, maybe the way that his own never fully did.

In ways and depths worse than the public never knew, that Aaron never shared until years later, his was a public life fraught with a most private torment. The death threats and hate mail had been vicious beyond belief. And unlike Bonds, Aaron couldn’t count on his hometown and home park to be a refuge. Atlanta was never as good to Aaron as San Francisco has been to Bonds. Aaron did nothing to invite the disparage, except being a black man born to the wrong time, wrong place, in American history.

A lot of Southerners had no use for the so-called Yankees in the South, but they made an exception for the memory of Ruth. He was the big-living, big talking New York character too many still preferred over a reticent, dignified son of the segregated South.

Aaron was selling out stadiums arNo, the ghost of Babe Ruth never needed Bonds, but the living soul of Hank Aaron does. Just watch the way that Aaron handles it all, the way that greatness and grace resonate with a man even when something as disposable as a statistic no longer does.