Aaron is right to avoid Bonds circus

? Good for Hank Aaron, who says he won’t be in the park when Barry Bonds breaks his career home-run record.

“Uh-uh. No, no. I’m not going to be around,” Aaron told Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Terence Moore last week.

“I’d probably fly to West Palm Beach to play golf. Again, it has nothing to do with anybody, other than I had enough of it. I don’t want to be around that sort of thing anymore. I just want to be at peace with myself. I don’t want to answer questions.

“It’s going to be a no-win situation for me anyway. If I go, people are going to say, ‘Well, he went because of this.’ If I don’t go, they’ll say whatever. I’ll just let them make their own mind up.”

From someone who’s already made up his mind, Aaron is taking the noble bypass around this circus. Why should this man of unimpeachable dignity and class lend his presence to what will be one of the most awkward moments in baseball history?

It is Bonds who needs the credibility Aaron’s company would bestow on the otherwise strained proceedings. Bonds has even sent out private feelers to Aaron in hopes he might attend, and is said to be hurt that Aaron wants nothing to do with what will no doubt be a muted celebration anywhere outside the Giants’ home park.

“I’m sorry Barry feels that way, and I don’t have any resentment toward him whatsoever, but I have no intention of trying to get in contact with him or doing anything with him in regard to his (chasing the record),” Aaron told Moore. “Nothing.

“Why should I? It’s really not a big concern of mine. I don’t know why I should have to do anything. I might send him a telegram, and that would be the extent of it. . . . I’m 72 years old and I’m not hopping on a plane and flying all the way to San Francisco for anybody.”

Again, good for Aaron, but there is a way to make this event less about Bonds and more about the man who really matters.

In anticipation of Bonds’ No. 756, the Great No. 44 could come to his adopted home of Milwaukee, the place he played the majority of his career, was unconditionally adored, won a World Series and hit his last home run.

We’ve even gone to the trouble of finding the spot where No. 755 landed back on July 20, 1976, and soon a plaque surrounded by brickwork out in a Miller Park lot will forever commemorate the power of quick wrists and an indomitable spirit.

Hank could be there by his monument when Bonds eclipses the record, secure in the knowledge – not that Henry Aaron should be insecure about anything – that Bonds really cannot take a thing from him.

Better yet, Aaron could spend the time here in town with his longtime friend, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, who has his own reservations about being there when Bonds breaks the record. They could talk about their half-century together, the intense love affair between a city and the Milwaukee Braves and how a spindly Aaron once drove balls into the right-field gap before he learned how to pull toward history.

Aaron and Selig could enjoy the commish’s preferred meal of New York strip and a fine bottle of champagne and get so lost in reminiscing that they wouldn’t even know the moment when No. 756 finds its way over some distant fence.