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Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports

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It's hard not to feel a profound sense of disappointment after reading this comprehensive, well-written investigative report on the abuse of steroids by athletes blinded by their need to be victorious in their various fields. While Barry Bonds is the primary subject here, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada are not as interested in sabotaging the star player's legacy-in-the-making as they are in exposing the breadth of impact that Victor Conte, founder of BALCO (an acronym for the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative), had in plying a number of star athletes with performance-enhancing drugs.

The reporters have done a remarkable job documenting the history of steroids, which were used as far back as the 1976 Summer Olympics where the East German women all too handily dominated the swimming events. One revelation for me from the book is how steroids do not directly enhance athletic performance but allow a greater endurance to train harder with a decreasing chance of injury and no need for recovery time. This nuance is critical in understanding how athletes can justify using such risky substances and escape accountability for their actions. This is the moral twist of the book and the one that resonates most clearly as a cautionary tale for future athletes in assessing their options.

Just as intriguing is the detailed chronicle of the rise and fall of the enterprising Conte, who went from being a bass guitarist for Tower of Power to the owner of a holistic health clinic to a highly paid consultant for renowned Olympic and professional athletes. Conte's real fortunes began with his discovery of a means to provide performance-enhancing drugs which would elude detection. At first, he saw the availability of obviously illegal steroids to targeted athletes as an opportunity to get them to endorse his legal nutritional supplements. Demand, however, went beyond his expectations, and he refocused his energy to identify creative ways to get the drugs into athletes, whether by injections, ointments or drips under the tongue.

At the center of the BALCO distribution scandal has been Bonds, who is certainly held up as the highest profile athlete under Conte's spell. The co-authors paint an alternately sympathetic and unflattering portrait of a prodigiously gifted athlete cast under the shadow of his father Bobby. The portrayal doesn't come across so much as exploitative as it does a typical case study into the competitive mindset of a professional athlete. Triggered by Mark McGwire's record-breaking 70 home runs during the 1998 season, Bonds was apparently determined to surpass McGwire by turning to steroids to bulk up his physique in the same way. His constant connection was personal trainer Greg Anderson, and through the next five seasons, Bonds' usage escalated and became more clandestine.

The result has been a stellar performance on the field with a hulking physique to match his superman-like transformation. Off the field, he evolved into a raging egomaniac not above cheating on his taxes or his wife. These are hostile allegations but ones that Williams and Fainaru-Wada support with reams of testimony by intimates and colleagues. In 2001, Bonds beat McGwire's single-season home run record, and he is on his way to beating Hank Aaron's career home run record this coming season. At the same time, Conte and Anderson, thanks to expert plea bargaining, saw minimal prison time for their actions. Whether Bonds is being held up as a scapegoat seems rather moot, as I cannot help but feel this will be an empty victory given the ample evidence the co-authors provide here. With Bonds' evasive responses in the press and the inevitable slander lawsuits, one gets little sense that there will by any abatement on the problem at hand.

"Game of Shadows" is about...well, heck...you KNOW what it's about.

As a baseball fan, I found myself a little sad about the whole thing. So much about the last few years seems kinda bogus. Maris didn't deserve an asterisk. Bonds does, I think.

As a physician, I found myself a little scared. These guys are doing things to their bodies that's gonna kill 'em early, and kill 'em in foul ways. It's sickening to think how their metabolisms have been manipulated to create inhuman athletes; these people are not natural...they were not created by nature. They are artificial. They're Frankenstein's monsters.

As a moral person, I found myself angry. This is cheating, plain and simple, and it's being done in front of the most loyal yet impressionable fans...the kids.

The only problem with the book is the shrill and repetitive Bonds-bashing that gets a little old by the end. It's almost like the authors are really angry with Bonds; you get the sense that their personal feelings and sensibilities were hurt. Listen...I'm with you guys. No way does a basbeball player have not only the best years of his career, but the best years of ANYBODY'S career, after the age of 35, without SOME additional support. But sometimes the tone of the book is like that of a spurned lover out for revenge. A little too vituperative.

But hey...this is an important book. There is no doubt that Bonds' legacy is in question. The question you should have, and the one I surely have, is why hasn't baseball shut this down. Please...they are still punishing Pete Rose, yet this has all happened in front of their noses and they seem to look away. The argument could be made that the public wants the long ball, and this is the way to get it.

I say the public wants to see the game played hard and fair. Cleaning up this business would prove that the baseball administrators really are who they say they are: fans just like us.

Let's get my credentials out of the way. I am not someone that baseball is going to "lose" if they don't solve the steroids problem. However, I take the allegations in "Game of Shadows" very, very seriously, and I'm not going to be celebrating any of Barry Bonds' home runs between now and 756.

I've been a baseball fan since the 1981 strike, when I discovered the game through its absence on TV and radio. I went to my first game at Shea Stadium in 1982 on the day that I turned 8 and a half. Mookie Wilson homered that day. He was not, as far as we know, on steroids. Mike Schmidt did not play for the Phillies that day, due to an injury. Schmidt recently came out with a book denouncing steroids, a book that's selling slightly fewer copies than "Game of Shadows".

Even though I raised myself a Mets fan, a team that a few years later rose and fell at the altar of white powder, I did grow up in a Yankees' household, and always took Roger Maris' record very seriously. I was moved and impressed when Mark McGwire brought the Maris family along on September 8, 1998, and made them such a central part of Number 62. When Barry Bonds later said he wanted to "take" Babe Ruth's record for career homers by a left-handed hitter and then warned us to "don't talk about him no more", I was not quite as moved, and certainly not impressed.

Bonds and Marion Jones are not the only big revelations in "Game of Shadows". Who would have imagined that such Bay Area fringe players as Armando Rios and Randy Velarde were BALCO customers? Then again, we learned from Jose Canseco's book last year that steroids alone do not make one a great athlete.

"Game of Shadows" is a remarkable work of investigative journalism. When I read books like this I always pay attention to the sources and footnotes. "Game of Shadows" is better footnoted than a typical Bob Woodward book, although for obvious reasons reveals fewer source names than a less controversial sports biography like "Namath". The authors make good use of Bonds' pre- and post-steroid statistics in their appendices. They're not able to name all of their sources, but the rest of the reporting has the ring of authenticity so I can accept that they did their best to verify all their interviews with anonymous sources "familiar with Bonds" or "familiar to Conte".

The only part of the book that disturbed me, for a moment, was the blatant editorializing. It's not enough for the authors to document that Victor Conte systematically sought to provide performance-enhancing drugs to an increasing roster of high-profile athletes, and it's not enough for them to prove that Barry Bonds injected himself with the whole range of Conte pharmaceuticals. They do descend to name-calling. Conte's departure from the group Tower of Power is turned into something creepy; his family's own legal problems, which don't appear related to BALCO, are also brought into the light of day. In the brief section describing Bonds' claiming of the single-season home run record in October 2001, his victory speech is described as "rambling".

However, even the editorial comments can be seen as objective journalism. Bonds himself has made increasingly bizarre public statements part of his public persona. And where the authors reprint some of the immature things Conte chose to submit to the Usenet forum, those Usenet posts are public record; anyone can access them even today, and when you do, you'll see that the authors didn't even use the most inflammatory Conte quotes. Conte's online persona, at least, is worthy of scorn.

What happens next? The book's final chapter and its epilogue show how both baseball (Bud Selig, Donald Fehr) and the government (the U.S. Attorney for San Francisco) have attempted to sweep the steroids mess under the carpet. The government seemed more interested in plugging leaks than in punishing lawbreakers. The authors reveal conflicts between USADA, the IRS and John McCain on one hand, and federal prosecutors on the other. The final chapter closes with a San Francisco Giants' flack defending Bonds' achievements, in spite of all the documentary evidence of fraud. This book wants to make baseball fans angry when the government and baseball officials will silently acquiesce to Bonds' history-making.

Hank Aaron's all-time home run record is going to fall one day. It would be nice to be able to root for the man who breaks it. I gave my best to Mark McGwire in 1998, and evidently all for nothing. I am not going to be fooled again so easily.

I love Victor Conte. You know, the way you love the bad guy in a great movie? You don't actually love him, but you love the character, the kind of "best actor nominee" thing.

Two San Francisco Chronicle reporters lay out their case against Conte and his Giant client, Barry Bonds, as Bonds passes Babe Ruth and eyes Hank Aaron for the all-time home run record (Josh Gibson and Sadaharu Oh?). Conte himself is alleged to be the source for much of the material. The investigations continue: in spring 2006, Bonds' ex-girlfriend, Kim Bell, was allegedly asked by the FBI not to cooperate with the investigation Major League Baseball is doing; Greg Anderson, Bonds' trainer, was jailed in July 2006 for refusing to testify to the grand jury.

The authors present extensive evidence about the use of steroids in track and field, provided to Olympic athletes by Conte under the cover of his nutritional supplements company, and the increasingly sophisticated efforts to mask such use. But it is the Barry Bonds allegations (along with the accompanying details on other Major Leaguers, and efforts to explain Mark McGwire's glory as Bonds' motivation) that sell the book. This book makes Bonds look much worse than I thought it would, and I was no fan already. The reader learns, for example, about his being a "control freak" with his teammates, women, staff and "friends." My own judgment is that the authors easily surpass "preponderance of the evidence" and probably "beyond a reasonable doubt", even if they don't have video of Bonds with a syringe labeled "The Clear." On the other hand, there is no video, and no (public) record of Bonds ever failing a steroids test. The authors try to explain why. In appendices, the authors detail the Bonds' remarkable statistical achievements from age 35 to 39, alongside those of other greats who by that age are in decline.

They got Al Capone on tax fraud, Alger Hiss on perjury, Martha Stewart on obstruction of justice and O.J. in civil court. They may never get Bonds on steroids, but whether or not he breaks Aaron's record, these authors have written Bonds' epitaph.

I don't know how anyone can read this book and retain a shred of respect for the athletes who pumped themselves up with steroids and an array of other illegal substances, in order to best their competition. The authors call them what they are: not champions, but drug cheats. Bloated hulks like Barry Bonds- who continues to lie about his steroid use- should have been thrown out of baseball years ago. Where is Judge Landis when we need him?

The book also details the drug cheating in other sports, and the athletes' justification that, if they didn't use steroids, they would have no chance to excel in any professional sport- that's how rampant steroid use is. The authors also detail how government officials, in thrall to the business of professional baseball and reluctant to do anything that might damage the sport, continued to protect even those athletes who had admitted in closed testimony to steroid use, by refusing to make their names public.

But despite the momentary furor this book caused when it first came out, nothing has really changed. MLB's drug testing procedures are a joke. Bonds has been allowed to go right on hitting his drug-cheat home runs, and will no doubt eventually break the all-time home run record set by Hank Aaron- a disgrace if there ever was one!

The picture the authors paint of Bonds is appalling- what an arrogant, obnoxious, over-privileged SOB! Dislike of Bonds has nothing to do with his race, although he likes to think that it does. People dislike him because he's not only a drug cheat, but a liar, an abuser of women, a serial adulterer, an insulter of fans, teammates, and reporters, and a generally worthless human being. But I guess that's of no importance to Bonds' blindly loyal fans.

This is a birlliant piece of investigative reporting!

In an interview I heard on KNBR, the local sports talk radio station here in the San Francisco bay area, Barry Bonds' lawyer railed against the authors for publishing the grand jury testimony, so I of course had to go and read the book. I didn't want to actually buy the book, so I swung by the local Barnes and Noble to skim through it. Well, I started reading the book and literally could not put it down. I eventually had to leave the store, so I bought the book despite my original intentions and finished it two days later. As a lifelong Giants fan, I didn't want to contribute any royalty money to the authors, but I couldn't help myself.

The book has the narrative flow of a good crime story, which in fact it is. One thing that surprised me though is the pervasiveness of steroid use. Bonds is on the cover of the book, and he's clearly the primary target of the federal investigators, but so many people were implicated in the book, it's hard to put all the blame on Bonds.

I came away from the book feeling more sadness than anything else. I exulted in Bonds' amazing accomplishments knowing that I was seeing a performance of historical magnitude. To borrow a phrase that Bill James used in a different context, Bonds' numbers ranged "from the excellent to the surreal", and I felt an immense sense of privelege to be a fan seeing it all first hand. Now that I've learned how it was chemically induced, I feel disappointment and emptiness, but at least I know the truth.

First things first: this is essentially a term paper, or a series of articles strung together. While that's not a bad thing, you shouldn't expect great *writing* here. That said, it's adequately done, and exhaustively researched... which is disturbing because there is no doubt that Bonds, and the rest of these guys cheated. No doubt at all. And they make no apologies for it either, essentially claiming since everyone else was doing it they had to do it too in order to compete (an excuse for bad behavior I hadn't heard since grammar school). Yes, this book takes an especially hard look at Barry Bonds, and for good reason. Inexplicably, yet luckily for him, he was the only one of dozens to not outright admit steroid use in his grand jury testimony, even though the extent of the evidence was essentially the same for all the athletes involved. And although the authors put forth a steady stream of facts, interviews and other hard evidence that Bonds is in fact guilty, we need only the very public "evidence" that at age 36, when every other human on the planet's body begins breaking down, Barry Bonds put on 40 pounds of pure muscle and increased his stats in every area of the game by an incredible margin. After reading this book I firmly believe that he, Palmiero, McGwire, Giambi, Jones, et all should have asterisks by their records. And the argument that "we don't know what Babe Ruth was injecting!" is a weak argument: the other thing this book does well is act as a steroid primer, and the modern drugs and techniques are simply no match for whatever those old timer could get their hands on. So, even thought it will make you mad, and maybe even sad, if you're a fan of baseball, or sports in general, you need to read this book.

"Game of Shadows" is a book written by two men who are investigative reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle and who have been following the steroid sport scandal for several years. Mark Fainaru- Wada and Lance Williams are responsible for breaking the story in 2004 about the steroid use of baseball players Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds. They wrote this book to summarize their (and others) investigative findings into the steroid use scandal presenting the evidence against Barry Bonds and other athletes who tuned to drugs as a means to gain a competitive advantage.

Sports fans and others who have been following the steroid investigation in Major League Baseball are already fully aware of Victor Conte, his BALCO business, and the selling of drugs to different professional sports players. For those who have watched the events unfold, much of what Game of Shadows talks about will be old news. It presents the known facts along with the evidence that has been offered from other athletes who participate in the same sports as the alleged "juicers". It also lets the reader know who has come forward and admitted using steroids and who has not; placing the known evidence in front of the reader and allowing him/her to make a judgment. This doesn't mean the authors take a neutral stand because they do not. They are on the side that feels Barry Bonds is a drug cheat and they have assembled together what they feel is more than sufficient evidence to prove that Barry Bonds used steroids to gain the competitive advantage he desired and to ensure that he earned a place in baseball's record books.

Like many sports fans, I had already read plenty of stories about the problem with steroids in baseball and the Olympics and I had already watched several commentators on television talk about the issue before I picked up this book. Most anyone with an interest in the subject already knows that Mark McGuire, Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, and other players have come forward and admitted using steroids. These facts are presented in the book as further proof that Barry Bonds was also using these drugs and there are quotes from several other players who admit that Barry Bonds was a regular user of steroids and that the drugs were responsible for his record breaking season in 2001 when he hit 73 home runs. But even though many of his fellow Major League stars have come forward and admitted using steroids, Bonds has decided to play ignorant and pretend that he wasn't using any performance enhancing drugs at all or that if he was, he was unaware of what he was taking. This book talks about Barry Bonds cover- up techniques and it even includes some of the actual quotes from the courtroom when Barry was forced to take the stand and answer questions. Bonds answers to these questions were vague, evasive, and sometimes stupid, offering further proof that he did use steroids and is doing all he can to hide his sins.

One thing about this book that surprised me is that it isn't a book about Barry Bonds as much as it is a book about the overall problem of steroid use in sports. Barry does get his share of attention in this book and he is talked about more than any other athlete. But the book also spends a fair amount of time talking about Olympic athletes like Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, and others. Based on the book's title, I was expecting an investigative piece about Barry Bonds, Victor Conte, and the BALCO Company. But plenty of other professional athletes have used these same drugs and many of them were supplied by Victor Conte, earning these athletes a place in "Game of Shadows".

An important aspect of any investigative/condemnation book is how objectively the authors present the facts and how respectfully they treat the people under investigation. The authors of this book approach the issue in a mostly objective manner, but at the same time they feel almost 100 percent certain that Barry Bonds is a juicer. In other words, the two reporters try the best they can to present the known evidence and let the facts sink into the reader's brain. However, they come across as biased because according to all the facts, Bonds appears to be guilty beyond any doubt. And while they are generally respectful toward the men and women they condemn, they come close to crossing the line when they talk about Victor Conte. Of all the individuals responsible for the steroid scandal, the authors seem to have the greatest bone to pick with Conte, probably because he was the businessman behind the creation of these drugs and the man responsible for selling them to so many different athletes.

As far as the evidence against Barry Bonds and the other athletes, Fainaru- Wada and Williams have assembled together a very convincing amount of evidence that points to the almost certain fact that Barry Bonds used steroids to gain the edge he felt he needed to break records and win the attention he craves. When you read the known facts, listen to the allegations from friends, girlfriends, and former players, and look at the dramatic improvement in Barry Bonds hitting statistics after he got to know Conte, there is almost no way to draw any other conclusion than guilty as charged. This has to be a grave disappointment to old fans of the game who have held professional athletes in high regard and admired them as heroes from afar. Barry Bonds isn't the most likable person, but there is still a certain sinking feeling in the stomach when you realize that yet another professional athlete has succumbed to the temptation to cheat. Barry Bonds isn't the first and he won't be the last athlete to get himself/herself embroiled in scandal. But it is still a disappointment any way you look at it. I like to see records get broken but it would be nice if the record breaker was achieving his/her goal through sheer talent and not through added muscle mass from steroid injections.

With the writing itself, this book is very direct and to the point. Fainaru- Wada and Williams are not going to win any awards for creative writing with Game of Shadows. The book is about the facts and allegations against the professional athletes and the people responsible for running the BALCO business. There really is no room for creative writing in a book like this one and the authors waste no time looking for humorous quips, metaphors, or anything else to lighten up the mood. This is a serious issue and the authors are serious about bringing the people involved in this scandal to justice. Reading this book is, in many ways, like reading the script to a documentary.

Overall, "Game of Shadows" is a good, although somewhat depressing, work of investigative journalism. Many baseball players and Olympic athletes have already admitted to taking steroids and many of these people got their drugs from Victor Conte and BALCO. Bonds has decided to play ignorant and pretend he didn't know he was taking steroids, claiming instead that he only took the ZMA supplement from Conte's business. Justice hasn't been served yet, and it is possible that Barry Bonds could walk away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. But any way you look at it, the issue of steroid use in professional baseball and in other sports is something that needs to be dealt with and specific policies need to be defined.

Game of Shadows shows how easy it is for an athlete to fall for this type of artificial enhancement and it offers solid, convincing evidence that Barry Bonds did, indeed, take steroids in his efforts to improve his personal performance on the baseball field. Barry Bonds is already in the record books and he will likely add more records before his career is over. But if Bonds is declared guilty as charged, there will always be a footnote next to his name, explaining how he broke these records through the use of performance enhancing drugs. The situation doesn't look very good for Bonds and Game of Shadows wastes no time explaining the known facts about one of the greatest scandals ever in the world of Major League Baseball.

Before reading 'Game of Shadows' I had pretty much already formed an opinion on steroids in baseball. Watching Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire crush the home run record and then seeing Barry Bonds make a joke of said "untouchable" records only a scant 3 years later, I was not surprised 1 iota when it was revealed that abuse was rampant in the major leagues. Seeing the physical changes in players such as Barry Bonds and the aforementioned athletes only solidified that opinion, and to be honest, I really didn't care. Why did I not care? Simple, because baseball ITSELF didn't care. MLB had been promoting the cartoon-like statures and performances of these players for some time, and the long ball had become the #1 selling point of the entire sport. So when I read about the evidence that was dug up on Barry Bonds and all these other players, I said to myself that baseball was the exception, not the rule.

WRONG.

After reading this book, the saddest thing that stands out is how prevalent illegal drugs are in all sports. Basically, if there is a way to cheat, people are going to find, abuse it, and keep doing it. It's a continual game of cat and mouse, where the Tom can never catch Jerry. It doesn't matter if you are male or female, it's quite clear that the human desire to get ahead by any means possible will always be in existence, and who knows how many records have been tainted because people just cannot play by the rules.

Baseball, the NFL, Olympics, it doesn't matter what sport/league, because in any physical competition, there is always a pro in becoming bigger, stronger, faster. As long as that desire and need is around, there will always be cheats, and this "success" of Victor Conte and Patrick Arnold will only spur more business people and scientists to create the next designer steroid, just probably without as much flamboyance as Conte sought which helped lead him down a path of destruction.

If you want to learn more about the history of illegal drugs in this business and how good investigative work is done, you owe it to yourself to read 'Game of Shadows'. Unless you are a total mark or blind, it is QUITE clear that more than enough evidence exists that ignores Mr. Bonds' denials and paints a bright picture that not only has he used steroids, but he has for quite some time.

An entertaining read that is well structured, researched to a tee, and in my opinion just a sliver of things to come in the future as it relates to using performance enhancing drugs in all sports.

**** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The sad truth is that baseball is no longer about talent, achievement, or hard work. Major League Baseball is a multi-billion dollar corporation that provides entertainment for fans who pay inflated prices to see something memorable, something thrilling, to get their money's worth. Who cares that the memorable events they see before their eyes are the achievements of pharmacists and steroid distributors? As long as the fans are hard up and happy, they will keep opening their wallets and spending dollars.

I am so glad this book was written to expose the sham that our favorite pastime has become. This book looks deep into the world of BALCO, Victor Conte, and the investigation of his pharmacological mill. Along the way, it exposes the athletes who ran from exposure while breaking records - Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, etc.

Several fans will discredit this book believing it is based on speculation and rumor. Yes, there is no hard drug test that (insert athlete's name) failed (because such tests did not exist). But after reading the book through, it is not hard to draw conclusions based on the evidence the authors investigated. And it is not flimsy evidence either. The government has thousands of documents it retrieved from BALCO's dumpsters, computers, lab reports, ect. not to mention witness testimony and admission by several athletes. It paints a grim picture. I feel sorry for fans who want to believe Barry Bonds is innocent simply because they want to believe it.