Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports by mark fainaru-wada

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

This book is a grim, cynical, and essential read for any sports fan.

As a huge fan of MLB, I knew the basic facts, but I was a kid when this scandal started to break. Reading the timeline of events laid out like this was shocking. For some reason, I conflated the year Barry Bonds broke the single-season home run record with the year he broke the all-time home run record and didn't realize he was a known PED user for years before he hit #756. As a diehard Giants fan, their blatant enabling of his cheating is inexcusable and arguably no team has had a faster, luckier PR turnaround after such a scandal.

One thing that bugged me about this book is the third-person approach of the authors. I'm sure it's noted somewhere on the cover of the actual physical book, but I listened to this as an audiobook and had no idea they were the journalists who covered this story. It's wild how passively they talk about the grand jury testimony being leaked—they were the ones who published it!

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XENOANIMEHEHE

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

I knew quite a bit about the BALCO/Bonds/Cream/Clear history but I guess I didn't realize what a colossal narcissistic @$$hole Bonds is. Thanks for opening my eyes to that as well.

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Darvus_Laan

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

Great book. So many insights into the Barco scandal, including a full account of Barry Bonds brand of steroid consumption and others. Must read for baseball fans.

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BlackmoreStan

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

It's an impressive piece of journalism from the reporters who got those notorious San Francisco Chronicle scoops during the Balco scandal, but, like many contemporary sports books, it doesn't say much for the integrity of professional sports in the US or abroad. The book works well in its meticulous research and detail about who was using illegal steroids and how, and reading this is certainly not going to renew one's faith in humanity although it does provide some effective moments of schadenfreude watching everyone involved, with the possible exception of Bonds, reap what they'd sown. Bonds, McGwire and the rest of the power hitters who shattered baseball records were cheaters as were Marion Jones and the US and international track and field athletes of the era who set world record after world record.

While this book certainly doesn't excuse what they did, it at least tries to humanize many of the cheaters involved in the scandal, and many of the minor players do come off slightly sympathetic. It doesn't work for Conte, who comes across as the narcissistic bottom feeder he most certainly is, or for Bonds, who never actually paid a price for being a drug cheat. Sometimes the book feels incomplete since it cuts off before Marion Jones's jail term and while much of the scandal was still unfolding, but it's a detailed and fairly definitive document on a low point in US sports history.

What's most interesting of all and what's only alluded to in this account, however, is the story of the writers themselves. They were the first to break many of the details in the scandal, including the involvement of Jones and then husband Tim Montgomery. They were also nearly jailed for six months for refusing to name their sources. Oddly the names of the cheating athletes were redacted from early releases by the department of justice. It's not clear whether this was the Bush White House protecting plutocrat sports owners from a potential loss of revenue or just that administration's typical first amendment abuses, but, if there'd been a little more focus on these behind the scenes aspects, this would be a five-star book.

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floob_

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

Late to the game in reading this one but with MLB locked out might as well start catching up.

Authors break down the emergence of the use of performance enhancing drugs in the major professional sports and Olympic/Track and Field Circuit from the mid-90’s to 2007. Focus is on Balco Industries, Victor Conte, Marion Jones, Barry Bonds and a whole host of creeps.

Excellent work details the rise and fall of Balco and the investigation of those connected to the steroid industry. Interesting timeline of how Bonds’ massive ego went into overdrive as he watched juicers McGwire and Sosa steal the headlines in their 1998 Home Run battle. Bonds was already known to be an egotistical jerk but his entrance into the steroid world took his narcissism to a whole new level.

Who would have ever guessed, in the early 2000’s, that Jose Canesco would emerge as the only athlete telling the truth about the steroid era.

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Sophiie

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

Game Of Shadows is about BALCO and the impact that it had on the sporting world at large from Baseball (Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Benito Santiago, etc...) to Track and Field (Marion Jones) to Football (Bill Romanowski). But the main crux of this book focused squarely on Barry Bonds, detailing his steroid use starting in 1999.

If Hollywood ever decides to make a movie about BALCO, this is the book they will no doubt use as it's blue print. I for one would love to see it happen because this book was a gripping, fantastic read. I could not put this book down for one second and that's saying a lot since I knew pretty much the entire sordid story before even reading it.

With all the knowledge of what's been happening in real life concerning BALCO, the more I read the book, the more I devoured what was happening in the pages here. Knowing how it all ends, it was fascinating watching, er...reading about this group of people and associates that comprised BALCO as they were building their house of cards. A very shaky house of cards at that. It amazes me that the house didn't collapse sooner than it did with Victor Conte at the helm. He is nothing more than a spoiled little child, crying out for attention. He never amounted to anything in life so the only way he could feel like "someone" was to hang on to celebrities.

I can recommend this if you want an excellent read that will have you flipping page after page, even if it is "incomplete" in that Barry Bonds was never convicted in a court of law or that the book came out before his assault on Hank Aaron's all-time Home Run record which is not documented within'.

Highly recommend this book. Check it out.

You can find more of my Book, DVD, TV and Movie reviews at my Forum (Penny Can) at...

http://pennycan.createaforum.com

Feel free to stop by and contribute your 2 cents.

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Acronoss

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

All the details and evidence is in the book. Reviewing it 17 years after I read it seems like it was essential baseball reading at the time, but doesn't seem all that necessary to read in this day and age.

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Tangsan20

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

If I had to choose one word to describe this book it would be "bitter." So much of this narrative is spun by bitter writers that clearly have a personal problem with Barry Bonds. Bonds isn't a person you can be very charitable about. He's made himself a public pariah in many different ways, but there is some clear resentment on the part of the writers. Even the verbiage of this book is bitter. The constant repetition of the term "drug cheat" is extremely telling. There is also a great deal of cherry picking with source material. Everything that potentially discounts the lean of the book is slyly dismissed and the writers try to discredit it. People with firsthand accounts of the investigation that are actually involved have their credibility called into question whereas someone like Jose Canseco is referenced as a credible source. The whole things just felt slimy and weird. From the strange vendettas of the writers, to the fact that they try to glorify their paper, the SF Chronicle, without acknowledging that it's their employer, there's no avoiding the human mistakes in this purportedly non-fiction document.

I would be remiss to not also discuss the entire point of the book. The steroid scandal, in general, is ridiculous. Punishing people for doing absolutely everything they can to excel for others' entertainment is ridiculous. I've never understood the desire to police steroids. Professional sports have always been fueled by drug abuse. Babe Ruth tried every sort of weird testosterone he could get his hands on, players have always taken stimulants, and currently, a professional athlete is preparing for, or playing a game where they are abusing some sort of a painkiller. To cherry pick what drugs players can use so that they can entertain us is foolish.

Also, I don't understand how this writers can discuss the involvement of the US government in 2004 and not once reflect on the myriad other things that these politicians should be focused on. George Bush, John McCain, etc., were signing away the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans so that they could die in a completely unjustified war at the exact moment they were trying to play police officer with the MLB. The hubris associated with the government involvement is out of this world. To threaten legal action against a private baseball league to distract the American public from the heinous and villainous things you're doing around the world is astounding. To be a so-called journalist and not once even acknowledge the waste of time and resources associated with this boondoggle is embarrassing.

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

mark fainaru-wada lance williams

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