Game of Shadows
The inside story of the steroids scandal.
0.3
I love sport. For as long as I can remember, I've been enthralled by the highs and lows as athletes have tried to outrun each other over 100 metres, or have battered each other in order to get a ball from one end of the pitch to the other. As I've grown up, I've accepted that sportsmen and women aren't perfect, but are human beings, just like the rest of us. Still, I manage to lose myself in the moment when watching, letting my heart rule instead of my head.
I remember the joy at seeing Ben Johnson set new heights for human excellence at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, followed shortly afterwards by the odd sense of disappointment and betrayal when Johnson was exposed as a drugs cheat.
Game of Shadows reminds me of that feeling I had as an 11 year old, watching my hero fall and first casting doubt on the sanctity of sports. It is an uncomfortable read; not because of the way it is written, but because of the revelations within. The book has received a tide of publicity in the US due in part to the fact that the Americans are a nation obsessed with sports, but chiefly because of the book's focus on baseball player Barry Bonds. Baseball has long been dubbed America's "National Pastime" with traditions dating back to the early twentieth century. In baseball, statistics have acquired sacred status. The sport's great figures are almost saintly in how they are revered. Game of Shadows challenges a player already established as one of the greats, even as he nears the milestone that would put him as the greatest ever. This is iconoclasm in the extreme.
I was expecting a book that focused on baseball, Bonds and the allegations of cheating by use of performance enhancing drugs. Having read the pre-publication publicity and followed the Grand Jury investigation into drugs in baseball through the American sporting media, I thought I knew most of the details and that Game of Shadows would be essentially an attack on Bonds.
The Prologue seemed to confirm this, establishing quickly that Bonds is not a nice man. Bitter, jealous, adulterous, even racist. It spares no feelings in its detailing of the widespread use of steroids in baseball and the sport's reliance on the very cheats that would latter shame it to counter the bad publicity from the strike blighted seasons of the late 1990s.
The remainder of the book is divided into three sections; Cheat or Lose, The Investigation, and The Most Wanted Man in America. The first chapter cames as a surprise. Rather than continuing the theme of the Prologue and starting the book with information on Bonds (who graces the cover) it delves into the past of Victor Conte, the man behind the BALCO lab that created drugs too sophisticated to be detected. This was at first a little disappointing. I had expected, and wanted, to dive into an expose of Bonds and the dirty side of baseball. Bonds doesn't appear until chapter 3, finding out that Conte was a failed rock guitarist and a petty dope dealer seemed to be a needless diversion from the real meat of the story.
My initial disappointment evaporated as I read further into the book. Leaving Bonds out of the first chapters allows the reader to gain important perspective on the issues of performance enhancing drugs and their use. Game of Shadows is about much more than baseball and Barry Bonds, although his is the biggest story and the chapters about him are the most interesting. The authors seem to realise that the Bonds story is the most gripping and space it out throughout the book; It makes Game of Shadows read like a crime thriller at times, in a positive way, holding your attention and compelling you to read more. By the time I had reached Part 3, The Most Wanted Man in America, I couldn't put the book down.
The story of how Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery and others happily turned to Conte for the illegal pills, injections and creams that would boost their performance, shatters every notion of level playing fields and the Olympic ideals. These are necessary chapters though, as failed drug tests and confessions have highlighted, the athletes were cheating and Game of Shadows exposes the truth about this in great detail.
This detail is evident throughout the book. It is well researched, with the most up to date and in depth facts on everything to do with the scandal surrounding Bonds, Balco and the others. The authors are the investigative journalists who first broke the story, and the book itself has sparked investigations (an excerpt in Sports Illustrated prompted such action). It is also very well written, with obvious journalistic qualities that engage the reader and present the facts in an accessible manner. When the authors focus on Bonds, it has all the more impact for being carefully spaced out. His assault on baseball's Home Run record is well documented, presented alongside the evidence that he cheated to get there. The reader is left in no doubt the this evidence is fact, not a trumped up collection of heresay designed to sensationalise the issue. Again, this comes from the investigative rather than tabloid backgrounds of the authors. The Appendices and Source Notes show how thoroughly evidence has been gathered and analysed. Reading the detailed measurements that show Bonds's physical growth (attributed to use of Human Growth Hormone) left me shocked.
Reading Game of Shadows will leave you angry and disappointed, but not with the book, rather, you will be angry at how easy it seems to be for cheats to pull the wool over the eyes of the establishment and in doing so cheat the fans. It will disappoint you that a man who seems so obviously to be a cheat can grind his way towards the records of legends of the game of baseball whilst the Commissioner and even a Grand Jury do nothing to stop him.
The afterword on the 2006 season shows how much impact Game of Shadows has already had, and underlines why any fan of baseball, or sport in general, should make it required reading; as Bonds travelled to other cities to play, he was greeted by signs proclaiming him a cheat. One fan even threw a needle-less syringe onto the field in protest. The most telling part is the very last paragraph, where the authors reveal that because they printed Grand Jury testimony and at the time of print had not revealed their sources, they face more jail time than the very drug cheats they helped expose.
Game of Shadows is an excellent book; well researched and written. I only wish it hadn't been necessary.
About This Entry
‘Game of Shadows’ was posted by James on Tue, 10th April 2007 at 22:59:12 BST and filed under baseball, book reviews.
