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Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds,
BACLO, and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports. Gotham
Books, 2006. 269 pgs.. $26.00.
Baseball history is constantly being written. For the most part, since the later part of
the nineteenth century, it has been written for what has transpired on the field. Baseball
has been documented, memorized, and treasured as no other sport in America.
The Baseball Encyclopedia is the Bible for baseball fans because baseball has always been
about statistics. What has always been fairly pellucid has now become translucent.
Baseball history is still being written, but now it is more and more about what happens off the field due to the issue of steroids. First, there was Juiced by Jose Canseco,
which was, initially, cursively dismissed as a memoir by an embittered former ballplayer.
Now there is Game of Shadows, which might be the most important book that sports
has seen in a decade. It literally takes down our heroes from Olympus and forces us
to re-evaluate our entire perception of contemporary athletes, especially with baseball
and, most notably, with Barry Bonds.
Game of Shadows details how Victor Conte and his company BALCO began distributing drugs to world-class athletes in the 1980s. The athletes linked to BACLO came
from track and field, swimming, professional football, and also baseball. Bonds' apparent willingness to start doing illegal performance-enhancing drugs began in 1998
when he watched Mark McGwire break Roger Maris' single-season home run record:
"They're just letting him do it because he's a white boy." Due to Bonds' fanatical desire
to be recognized as the best ballplayer, he began working out with a personal trainer
named Greg Anderson. Before long, Anderson (who started taking steroids as a shortstop at Fort Hays State University) was providing steroids to Bonds (and later to Jason
Giambi and Gary Sheffield). When the need arose to find drugs that were even better
and theoretically undetectable, Anderson then contacted Conte and BALCO. Conte, a
former musician, was getting designer drugs from Patrick Arnold who, as a renegade
chemist, was dubbed the "father of prohormones." Conte likely gathered additional
steroid information from the former Communist bloc country of East Germany. As
an Oregon psychologist stated about Conte: "I'm absolutely convinced he stole many
pages from the GDR handbook."
Through this twisted network, Bonds physically transformed himself. As ayoungman
he "was long and lean, with a build like a marathoner"; however, by his mid-thirties, he
suddenly "resembled an NFL linebacker." Just looking at the photos in the book should
make anyone wonder about the veracity of Bonds' frequent denials of drugs. There is
a plethora of incriminating evidence against a number of athletes (Marion Jones, Tim
Montgomery, Bill Romanowski, etc.), but the focus, for the most part, is on Bonds. By
the time one has finished reading this book, most readers will be convinced Bonds is
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the biggest jerk and racist (move over Ty Cobb) in the history of sports. Consider the
following comments about Barry Bonds, the human being:
—When his father was dying of cancer, Bobby Bonds would fall asleep on the couch
after chemotherapy. Barry told a friend that this was the time in life his mother should
be getting out and traveling and enjoying herself "and he's there sitting on his ass."
—In 1984 while at Arizona State, manager Jim Brock kicked Bonds off the team due
to a curfew problem. Brock later told Bonds' teammates he could be voted back on the
team: "But Bonds was so unpopular that his teammates voted to kick him off the team
for good." Brock had to request a second vote to get Bonds reinstated.
—Bonds on his grandmother: "My grandmother wants me to get her some wheelchair that drives like a car. Why do I need to get some wheelchair when she's gonna
die anyway?"
—In the 1992 National League championship game, teammate Andy Van Slyke (whom
Bond referred to as the "Great White Hope") suggested Bonds move in and to his left
for the batter Francisco Cabrera. Bond ignored the advice and didn't move. Cabrera hit
the ball in the vicinity that Van Slyke had suggested; Bonds then failed to throw out the
notoriously slow-footed Sid Bream, who scored the winning run.
—Bonds divorced his first wife (a beautiful Swedish woman named Sun) and then
had a lengthy affair with Kimberly Bell. He told Bell he would never remarry, but later
married an African American named Liz Watson. Bonds' excuse to Bell was that he had
to marry a black woman because he had taken "too much shit" from the media for
previously marrying a white woman. After the honeymoon, Bonds continued to take
Bell with him for games on the road.
When the government busted Conte and BALCO, Bonds was given immunity at a
hearing based on his telling the truth to the grand jury. Bonds constantly denied taking
any kind of drugs except for flaxseed oil and a balm administered by Anderson during
his workouts. There is no denying the physical attributes of Bonds and his fanatical
regimen of weightlifting and working out; yet consider the following statistics:
—Pre-steroids 1986-1998 (age 22 to 34): Bonds averaged 32 home runs, 93 RBIs,
and a .290 batting average per year.
—Post-steroids 1999-2004 (age 35 to 40): Bonds averaged 49 home runs, 105 RBIs,
and a .328 batting average per year.
—Over the first 13 years of his career—before steroids—Bonds averaged a home run
every 16.2 atbats. From 1999-2004, Bonds averaged a home run every 8.5 at bats—nearly
doubling his home run frequency.
—For the years 2001-04, Bonds averaged nearly 189 walks per season. If you take
out the 2003 season, Bonds averaged over 202 walks per season! The previous all-time
record for walks in a season was 170 by Babe Ruth in 1923.
Perhaps the best commentary, whether Bonds took steroids and how many home runs
he might have hit if pitchers hadn't walked him so much, comes from Hall of Famer
Reggie Jackson: "Henry Aaron never hit 50 home runs in a season, so you're going to
tell me that you're a greater hitter than Henry Aaron? Bonds hit 73 and he would have
hit 100 (italics mine) if they would have pitched to him. I mean, come on, now. There
is no way you can outperform Aaron and Ruth and Mays at that level."
The book concludes with a staggering amount of evidence against Bonds for using
illegal performance-enhancing drugs. (Bonds is also facing possible tax and perjury
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charges.) The book concludes with an Epilogue that says in order to "finally put the
steroid era behind it, the game also had to confront the issue of tainted records." This is
the crux of the issue for many fans—tainted records—as Bonds began the 2006 season
with 708 home runs and on the threshold of surpassing Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron.
Fainaru-Wada and Williams, reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle, have presented
a thoroughly researched and well-written account of the ballplayer many consider the
greatest of his generation. Just like Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, it is tragic to
look upon any of our great baseball players whose names are forever tarnished. Yet
unlike Jackson and Rose, Bonds and other players of the steroid era have committed
an egregious sin of which there is no forgiveness: they have diminished and brought
into question what is at the very core of baseball: statistics—because baseball, first and
foremost, is a game about numbers.
Allan Vorda
University of West Florida