A New Light

In their landmark book, Game of Shadows, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams describe how Giants slugger Barry Bonds, pumped full of steroids and arrogance, reacted when his inner circle failed to respond quickly enough to his demands. "Did I f------ stutter?" Using cold facts instead of a cold snarl, Shadows returns the treatment to Bonds and other scoundrels in the Golden Age of Cheating in sports. The book is in-your-face reportage. It does not stutter.

In a lawyered-up world, Shadows's dead-solid certainty and its disdain for shopworn "allegedlys" may be the most remarkable of its many virtues. Fainaru-Wada and Williams's dismantling of Victor Conte's BALCO empire produces the richest catalog of performance-enhancing drug use ever, and the account is rendered in the clear voice of a history treatise. In fact, that's essentially what it is. Like it or not, it is the story of our times.

That history is unkind to its subjects. The reputations of the athletes in Conte's orbit--Bonds, the sprinters Tim Montgomery, Kelli White and Marion Jones, the baseball players Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi, the football player Bill Romanowski--were devastated by Shadows. Their public ruin began Sept. 3, 2003, when federal agents raided BALCO, the Bay Area lab run by Conte, who played the scheming villain right down to the expertly trimmed mustache. Two weeks later a tipster told Fainaru-Wada, an investigative journalist working on a campaign-finance project, and Williams, another investigative reporter schooled on police and court beats, that the raid concerned a link between steroids and athletes. The Chronicle, making what has become a too-rare commitment to investigative journalism, put Fainaru-Wada and Williams on the story for the next two years.

The reporters rewarded their paper's initiative with the kind of relentless work that produced Watergate. Fainaru-Wada and Williams exposed a cheat-or-lose program that, while perfected by Conte, wasn't unique among elite athletes. In asking the questions that pro leagues, fans and much of the media dared not ask, the reporters also nailed how drugs have changed our games and exposed the seemingly insurmountable gap between the cheaters and the testers. The braggadocio of Greg Anderson, Bonds's trainer, who is caught on a 2003 recording saying that Bonds's drugs go undetected in baseball's tests, is the voice of sports' soulless generation.

President Bush called the reporters' work "a service." The irony is that it may land them in jail. The reporters, upon refusing a judge's request to reveal the source who provided them with grand jury testimony, were found in contempt and sentenced to as long as 18 months in prison--more than the BALCO felons served cumulatively. (They're free pending a Feb. 12 appeal.) The unfortunate legacy of Shadows: Cheaters do win; those who expose them sometimes suffer.