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Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports Paperback – March 1, 2007

by Mark Fainaru-Wada (Author), Lance Williams (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 333 ratings
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In the summer of 1998 two of baseball leading sluggers, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, embarked on a race to break Babe Ruth’s single season home run record. The nation was transfixed as Sosa went on to hit 66 home runs, and McGwire 70. Three years later, San Francisco Giants All-Star Barry Bonds surpassed McGwire by 3 home runs in the midst of what was perhaps the greatest offensive display in baseball history. Over the next three seasons, as Bonds regularly launched mammoth shots into the San Francisco Bay, baseball players across the country were hitting home runs at unprecedented rates. For years there had been rumors that perhaps some of these players owed their success to steroids. But crowd pleasing homers were big business, and sportswriters, fans, and officials alike simply turned a blind eye. Then, in December of 2004, after more than a year of investigation, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams broke the story that in a federal investigation of a nutritional supplement company called BALCO, Yankees slugger Jason Giambi had admitted taking steroids. Barry Bonds was also implicated. Immediately the issue of steroids became front page news. The revelations led to Congressional hearings on baseball’s drug problems and continued to drive the effort to purge the U.S. Olympic movement of drug cheats. Now Fainaru-Wada and Williams expose for the first time the secrets of the BALCO investigation that has turned the sports world upside down.

Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid Scandal That Rocked Professional by award-winning investigative journalists Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, is a riveting narrative about the biggest doping scandal in the history of sports, and how baseball’s home run king, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, came to use steroids. Drawing on more than two years of reporting, including interviews with hundreds of people, and exclusive access to secret grand jury testimony, confidential documents, audio recordings, and more, the authors provide, for the first time, a definitive account of the shocking steroids scandal that made headlines across the country.

The book traces the career of Victor Conte, founder of the BALCO laboratory, an egomaniacal former rock musician and self-proclaimed nutritionist, who set out to corrupt sports by providing athletes with “designer” steroids that would be undetectable on “state-of-the-art” doping tests. Conte gave the undetectable drugs to 28 of the world’s greatest athletes—Olympians, NFL players and baseball stars, Bonds chief among them.

A separate narrative thread details the steroids use of Bonds, an immensely talented, moody player who turned to performance-enhancing drugs after Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals set a new home run record in 1998. Through his personal trainer, Bonds gained access to BALCO drugs. All of the great athletes who visited BALCO benefited tremendously—Bonds broke McGwire’s record—but many had their careers disrupted after federal investigators raided BALCO and indicted Conte. The authors trace the course of the probe, and the baffling decision of federal prosecutors to protect the elite athletes who were involved.

Highlights of Game of Shadows include:

Barry Bonds

  • A look at how Bonds was driven to use performance-enhancing drugs in part by jealousy over Mark McGwire’s record-breaking 1998 season. It was shortly thereafter that Bonds—who had never used anything more performance enhancing than a protein shake from the health food store—first began using steroids.
  • How Bonds’s weight trainer, steroid dealer Greg Anderson, arranged to meet Victor Conte before the 2001 baseball season with...

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Previous page
  1. Print length
    384 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Avery
  4. Publication date
    March 1, 2007
  5. Dimensions
    5.24 x 0.8 x 7.98 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1592402682
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1592402687
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A sober, skillful and utterly damning account of not just the Bonds fiasco but the pervasive influence of steroids in sports."—Los Angeles Times

"Devastating. . . . groundbreaking. . . . Necessary reading for anyone concerned with the steroids era in baseball and track and field and its fallout on sports history."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A compelling portrait of conspiracy. . . . Fascinating."—The Boston Globe

"Scorching. . . . A testament to baseball’s failure."—Newsweek

"Superb. . . . Important and disturbing."—San Francisco Chronicle

"The evidence is detailed, damning, and overwhelming. . . . It’s a growing bonfire of controversy. This book is one of the matches."—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"[Fainaru-Wada and Williams] have got the goods and they reveal them methodically. Everything is well-sourced and meticulously explicated."—Chicago Tribune

“A shocking exposé of the seedy side of pro sports that underscores just how easy it is to cheat.”—Entertainment Weekly

About the Author

Mark Fainaru-Wada is an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. After fifteen months of covering steroid use in sports, in December 2004 they reported in the Chronicle on the secret grand jury testimony of pro baseball players Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds, making headlines around the world. Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams won the Dick Schaap Excellence in Sports Journalism Award, the George Polk Award, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Edgar A. Poe Award for their reporting.
Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada are reporters on the investigative team at the San Francisco Chronicle. Together, they broke a series of exclusive stories on the BALCO scandal and earned a string of national honors, including the George Polk Award, The Edgar A. Poe Award of the White House Correspondents’ Association, The Dick Schaap Excellence in Sports Journalism Award and The Associated Press Sports Editors award for investigative reporting.

Williams has written on subjects including the California cocaine trade, Oakland’s Black Panther Party and the career of San Francisco mayor and political power-broker Willie Brown. His journalism also has been honored with: the Gerald Loeb Award for financial writing; the California Associated Press’ Fairbanks Award for public service; and, on three occasions, the Center for California Studies' California Journalism Award for political reporting. He was the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California Journalist of the Year in 1999.

Born in Ohio, he graduated from Brown University and the University of California-Berkeley and attended University College, London, U.K. Before joining the Chronicle, he worked as a reporter at the Hayward Daily Review, the Oakland Tribune, and the San Francisco Examiner. He was a University of Michigan Journalism Fellow in 1986-87.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Avery; Illustrated edition (March 1, 2007)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1592402682
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1592402687
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.24 x 0.8 x 7.98 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 333 ratings

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  1. Lance Williams

    Lance Williams

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
333 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Jordan I Taylor
5.0 out of 5 stars In-depth look at the now famous scandal.
Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2006
Verified Purchase
I intially bought this book becuase I am an avid baseball fan and expected the book to be about Barry Bonds and his use of steriods in the past. What I got what not what I expected. Bonds is the centerpiece of the book, but the authors also dig into the formation of Balco and the personal lives of Victor Conte and Greg Anderson as well as other people and athletes who were associated with Balco.

I thought the authors did a terrific job of setting the events in precise order, from Victor Conte's humble beginnings to the recruitment of various track stars like Marion Jones and then into Barry Bonds. The book was detailed and well written, giving the reader a clear understanding of Balco and the men behind the scandal.
13 people found this helpful
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Dan McKinnon
4.0 out of 5 stars The BALCO Scandal
Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2006
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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
6 people found this helpful
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PatTX
5.0 out of 5 stars Husband loved this book.
Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2021
Verified Purchase
My husband, an all around sports fanatic, rated this book 5 stars. He reports the investigative work was very deep and presented in a good chronological order so as to better understand the information. He’s shared this book with many of his serious sports lover friends.
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Emmanuel Archie
5.0 out of 5 stars It was a great book
Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2022
Verified Purchase
Barry bonds fool everybody. I don't know he did it but people think he say did. Barry did get big that 2001 season
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CT
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and thorough
Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2020
Verified Purchase
Very interesting book that provides the backstory of the major characters in this scandal from the distributors to the players. My only regret is that I didn’t read it sooner. Perhaps the authors could write a new prologue about what these characters are up to now
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Boraxo
3.0 out of 5 stars Insightful, easy read on the steroid scandal but a little too preachy
Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2006
Verified Purchase
Let me start off by admitting that I am a lifelong SF Giants fan and a huge Barry fan. So naturally I ordered this book the first day it was available. I was not disappointed, and you won't be either.

The authors do a great job fleshing out the balco story from beginning to end. I also enjoyed reading about all of the great track and field stars from the last 10 years were juiced. Clearly we should asterisk every record in every sport from that era. Which brings me to my main criticism of this book.

So why only 3 stars? The authors are obsessed with Barry Bonds and baseball's failure to condemn steroid use. Perhaps they are buddies with SI's Rick Reilly, who can't seem to write a column without slamming Bonds. Yes, it appears that Barry was juiced, but so were hundreds of other major league stars including Big Mac. So if you are going to criticize Bonds, you should be going after all the stars from that period. Similarly, the authors whine about the lack of outrage from the public. Clearly they don't get it. The public wants home runs and really doesn't care if their stars self-medicate, even at risk to their own health. Sports stars are adults, if they want to take drugs (Dwight Gooden), alcohol (Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle) or steroids (which were not prohibited until recently) why should we care.

In sum, this is a great book that any sports fan will enjoy. But the authors should have stuck to reporting rather than preaching a tired tune and hacking at Barry but not his many juiced colleagues.
6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

russellrob
5.0 out of 5 stars Good book
Reviewed in Canada on June 1, 2015
Verified Purchase
A real good look at the steroid scandal. Enjoyed this read
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CRL
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Good
Reviewed in Germany on December 22, 2013
Verified Purchase
Interesting book. Very quick delivery, Book is almost as new, Seller is highly recommendable, Very good price. Both seller and book recommended.
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Niall
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 1, 2013
Verified Purchase
Sports drug-testing really was a mess at the turn of the century and this book shows how easily a chancer like Victor Conte could subvert the system and assist athletes like Marian Jones, Dwain Chambers and most famously (allegedly, of course, should his solicitors be reading this) Barry Bonds to cheat their way to success.

Aside from his general unpleasantness, this fantastic book (written by two good old-fashioned investigative journalists) strips Bonds down to the insecure, bullying thug who will forever have an asterisk against his name. Hall-of-famer? Please, no. Anyone who thinks otherwise should read this great book.
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Bazzarooney
5.0 out of 5 stars More compelling than The Da Vinci Code
Reviewed in Japan on May 19, 2006
Verified Purchase
You don't have to be a baseball or track and field fan to enjoy this read. The American athletes have this holier than thou attitude with regards to doping, but they're just as guilty as the former East Germans! The journalists who wrote this book deserve a medal for exposing the athletes that cheat and for turning me into an informed skeptic. Barry Bonds will probably never be prosecuted, but on the basis of the evidence presented in this book, he is obviously a cheat.
One person found this helpful
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Birdieeagle
4.0 out of 5 stars Informative
Reviewed in Canada on July 31, 2020
Verified Purchase
You get to know the world of PED's and those that took them.
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