Game of ShadowsAuthor: Fainaru-Wada, Mark and Williams, LanceGenre: Sports Publisher: Gotham Books Released: 2006 |
A Review by John Nesbit
05/20/2006
Barry Bonds has remained one home run behind Babe Ruth's career mark of 714 for over a week, and many anticipated the tying blast to take place in the homer-friendly confines of Houston's Minute Maid Park. But fans witnessed something else when journeyman relief pitcher Jeff Springer deliberately threw at Bonds four consecutive times before plunking him on the shoulder with his fifth delivery. Astros fans rose en mass to give Springer a standing ovation when he was then ejected for throwing at the Giants' slugger.
That would not have happened a few years ago; baseball fans are generally respectful of superstars who are approaching significant milestones. Granted, Barry Bonds unquestionably has "earned;" his reputation as baseball's most arrogant and self-centered asshole, but even that doesn't engender the kind of vehement hatred that has been universally heaped upon Bonds. Rumored as a steroids user ever since he bulked up and began belting balls out of the park at unprecedented rates after age 35, Bonds has found it virtually impossible to deny his chemical enhancements ever since the San Francisco Chronicle broke the story about the Bay Area Lab Co-operative in December 2004. The tiny nutritional supplement company located in a strip mall near San Francisco International Airport was supplying athletes like Marion Jones and Jason Giambi with illegal drugs. But the biggest name involved was Barry Bonds.
Heckling and booing Barry has risen to new heights in visiting ballparks with BALCO drug cheating scandal revelations. Rocking the baseball world even further are investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, who have expanded their initial newspaper breakthrough coverage into a full-length book, Game of Shadows. It's a book that Major League Baseball wished had never been published, and this is the book that Barry Bonds himself attempted to suppress through the courts. Thankfully, the first amendment prevailed.
While Bonds supplies the "star power," the text paints much broader strokes—outlining how performance enhancing drugs invaded the sports scene, tracing how Victor Conte promoted himself into a big time steroids supplier, how BALCO outmaneuvered Olympic drug testing procedures, how money laundering leads to IRS investigation and discovery, and how Bonds eagerly joined the scene. Fainaru-Wada and Williams spin a real page-turning tale, rounding out the key characters with anecdotes that come from copious research, interviews, and from leaked grand jury testimony.
Conte comes across as a real scumbag. His involvement with questionable drug enhancements is well documented through a vast email trail and a plethora of message board postings. If you've ever encountered a veteran of the old newsgroup forums, you've seen his like—and Conte was often the target of flames himself for his continual practice of frequenting Internet body building message board communities to advertise his products. The authors quote a few nasty exchanges that remain in Internet archives.
The most boorish character, of course, is Barry Bonds. Why such a highly regarded superstar would resort to injecting steroids and other drug enhancements late in is career is puzzling, but the authors present an insightful perspective in the preface that makes sense ... and seems derived from Shakespearean tragedy. A supremely talented athlete who has issues with his famous baseball playing father, Bonds resented the adoration fans would give "lesser" players—so the great home run chase between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire really grated on him. Given his surly personality, the jealousy that raged during that season led Bonds to change his life:
"To Bonds, it was a joke. He had been around enough gyms to recognize that McGwire was a juicer. Bonds himself had never used anything more performance enhancing than a protein shake from the health-food store. But as the 1998 season unfolded, and as he watched Mark McGwire take over the game—his game—Barry Bonds decided that he, too, would begin using what he called 'the shit.'"Many of the key points have been published previously in newspaper accounts—particularly the Grand Jury testimony that contains Bonds' laughable claims that he had no idea that "The Clear" and "The Creme" were anabolic steroids. But Game of Shadows expands the arena to give us a much more vivid picture of the scene, granting us an inside look into the major players and illustrates how many minor characters also took part. No where else will you find detailed accounts, like the descriptions supplied by Bonds' former girlfriend Kimberly Bell that establish what an arrogant ass the Giants slugger is. Bell began dating Bonds during the 1998 season, so she witnessed the rapid transformation firsthand. (By the way, she asserts that his testicles have indeed shrunk since he began using steroids) The public was first alerted in March 1999, as described by the writers:
"The change in his physique was startling. His weight had increased from 210 pounds to perhaps 225, and almost all of the gain was rock-hard muscle. When he was with the Pirates, Bonds's body had been lithe and wiry, a muscular version of a marathon runner's build. Now he had the physique of an NFL linebacker, with broad shoulders, a wide chest and huge biceps. Among the Giants, players began referring to Bonds as 'The Incredible Hulk,' joking about the 'gamma radiation' that had transformed him into a muscle-bound superhero. When Bonds took bating practice, he was driving the ball farther than he ever had in his life.San Francisco fans by and large continue to believe in Bonds, and cite any revelations as circumstantial evidence at best. They can believe what they want—people still have a right to believe in Santa Clause and the Easter bunny as well. But there is very little doubt that the investigative reporters that uncovered the BALCO scandal have crafted a noteworthy and provocative book—one that has already made history since it compelled baseball commissioner Bud Selig to undertake the unprecedented move of investigating baseball's dark steroids using past. That doesn't mean that MLB will or should punish the players who set incredible power records in that recent era, but at last they are acknowledging that they need to seek the truth. This book points out the proper direction.
To teammates, writers, and fans in Scottsdale that spring, and especially to Giants management, Bonds's appearance and performance raised a fundamental question: What in hell had he been doing in the off-season?"
© Copyright ToxicUniverse.com 05/20/2006
