Barry Bonds is a liar. So are other current, and past, major league baseball players. So are at least a few team trainers, coaches, managers and owners. So are some executives who run major league baseball. So are comparable athletes and those who surround them in other sports, professional and amateur (including former Denver Broncos linebacker Bill Romanowski and various Olympic Games track and field competitors).
Those are the conclusions a careful reader must draw from “Game of Shadows,” a book-length exposé by San Francisco Chronicle journalists Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams.
The book has received so much news coverage already that some may think they already know enough. The news coverage, however, does not begin to capture the breadth and depth of the documentation provided by Fainaru-Wada and Williams about drug cheating. The documentation includes statements made to federal law-enforcement agents, testimony presented under oath in normally secret grand jury proceedings, business documents showing shipping and payments for certain performance-enhancing substances, e-mails never meant to become public, direct observation of changes in the behaviors and physiques of athletes, plus interviews by the authors with more than 200 sources and subjects.
Perhaps other books, including the biography by Jeff Pearlman, “Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Anti-Hero” (HarperCollins), will provide additional evidence. For now, “Game of Shadows” provides plenty, especially when read after the sensational allegations set out in print by former major league baseball player Jose Canseco throughout his 2005 memoir “Juiced” (Regan Books).
Rather than summarizing the evidence in detail, let’s explore the implications of the almost certain guilt shared by so many individuals who appear in the Fainaru-Wada and Williams book.
Of the athletes named, Bonds is the primary character. Before he hooked up with Victor
Conte, owner of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), Bonds had achieved stardom on the baseball field. Most people who placed the same performance-enhancing drugs into their systems as Bonds still wouldn’t be able to hit a 95-mph fastball with a thin piece of wood, make a diving catch of a line drive hit to left field, or throw a baseball hard and far enough and with enough accuracy to thwart a runner at home plate.
What Conte sold to Bonds did not make Bonds a major league baseball player. Rather, it perhaps helped him achieve certain athletic goals more readily. Should that mean prosecution within the criminal justice system? Should that mean disciplinary action meted out by major league baseball? Should that mean invalidation of Bonds’ achievements in a future edition of the sport’s record books? Some readers are quite likely to answer yes quickly to all such questions, some to answer no quickly, some to feel torn, some to say who cares because it is only a game.
In many ways, the ambitious, narcissistic, wily Conte is the key to the book. How did somebody with no meaningful medical or pharmacological training persuade so many athletes to ingest his products while counseling them how to evade detection by drug-testers?
The reporters came to the controversy late, and because of Conte more than Bonds. In late 2003, federal agents raided BALCO, but kept the reasons hushed. Fainaru-
Wada received the assignment to delve into the raid. When Williams joined the reporting effort, he helped develop direct links between Conte and Bonds. Much of their reporting is original and admirable, but they have built on the journalism of others – something they generously acknowledge. The sections by Fainaru-Wade and Williams about the federal criminal investigation, including the direct involvement of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, are fascinating.
A book published last year wrestled with steroids-related questions as effectively as “Game of Shadows.” That book is “Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball” (Viking), by Boston sports journalist Howard Bryant. He focuses less on Bonds, more on the long history of performance-enhancing drugs, examining causes and effects from almost every imaginable angle. Bryant – and to a lesser extent the Chronicle duo – examines the meaning of athletes willing to risk their precious health by using drugs that might lead to personality disorders (‘roid rage), breakdowns of body parts, even premature death.
The authors grapple with the meaning of the messages those athletes are sending to those competing in colleges and high schools of how deeply a cheat-or-lose culture might poison society beyond its spectator sports.
Reading Bryant’s broad book in tandem with the narrower book focusing on Bonds and his enablers would constitute an intellectual home run.
Steve Weinberg is a freelance book reviewer in Columbia, Mo.
Game of Shadows
arry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports
By Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams
Gotham Books, 332 pages, $26
