Book Notes: Game of Shadows

Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams (2006)

The latest bestseller! Wait, it's been out for nearly a year. Sorry, but it takes me a while to get to all the books I'd like to read. Part of the delay is due to the fact that this is not the kind of sports book I usually like to read, so I put it off.

I would divide sports books into four categories, in no particular order.

Category 1: The sports autobiography, often ghostwritten, which I never found interesting, except when I was a kid. They can be okay, as long as the reader totally suspends disbelief and absolutely adores the player. (As a kid, I read every book on Bobby Orr.) Hagiography.

Category 2: The next category I'd call sports biographies, written with or without the subject's permission, and usually by a researcher/journalist. These can be very good. (I just finished Kenny Moore's excellent biography on Bill Bowerman, legendary Oregon track coach and, by the way, one of Nike's founders.) But even though I'll read one or two of these every year (usually over the winter holidays when I'm not grading exams), biographies are simply not to my taste. Some people find the life stories of others endlessly fascinating, but for me, most lives look pretty much the same (except for TSLP's life, which is a thrill a minute; like most law professors, I lead a life of constant danger). I don't care to learn about Lebron James' childhood, whereever it took place. I don't even care about what he does once he walks off the court. Athletes aren't celebrities to me. I enjoy watching the games, but that's it.

Category 3: These are reporter's books, and I'd put Game of Shadows in this group. Investigative books, behind-the-scenes books, follow-a-team-for-a-season books, and so on. These can get pretty tedious, especially when the book ends up reading a lot like a series of newspaper accounts of the previous day's action. These books better have a big payoff in terms of insight or inside information if I'm going to wade through all the game recaps. They rarely do. John Feinstein's tedious A Good Walk Spoiled may have ruined this category for me forever. I was thinking of buying Jack McCallum's book on a season spent with the Phoenix Suns, but I'm afraid to be disappointed again. But I do like how the Suns play basketball, and Steve Nash is a passing genius. By the way, I'd also put inside accounts written by players in this category (George Plimpton's Paper Lion, Phil Jackson's and Charley Rosen's More Than a Game, etc.).

Category 4: Here we are, the sports books I love (and that I'll soon write) and where I do most of my sports book reading and on which I usually blog. I think of books in this category as offering "perspectives" on sports, such as where a game is going (Moneyball) or why it has evolved (The Blind Side) or how it should be understood (The Wages of Wins) or to what it bears significance in a broader sense (How Soccer Explains the World). I find books in this category stimulating. Often they're written by academics on a busman's holiday (I'll be taking mine soon), so I guess it's no surprise I like them.

Category Simmons: Since Bill Simmons, ESPN's "Sports Guy," writes columns, and since he's put together some of those in his book (title too long to type in), and since I read it, and since it's about sports, I guess I have to put his book somewhere. In my view Simmons is re-creating sports writing, probably ruining it for ever. If you haven't read his stuff (you should), think Hunter S. Thompson covering a Red Sox game, from his sofa, and substitute coffee for cocaine. Simmons' writing is fun, slashing and veering wildly from complaints about his dog, wife, and friends, to thoughtful paragraphs on what makes a competent baseball pitcher an ace. Now everybody's starting to write in his style, talking as much about one's personal reaction to what's happening on the field as about what is actually happening on the field. Simmons' articles are the journalistic equivalent to philosophical idealism, the view that says that everything we know is in our heads, only. Simmons doesn't really write about sports, he writes about Simmons, and it just so happens that the Simmons he writes about is the Simmons who watches and writes about sports, and a few other subjects. So he gets his own category. As much as I admire his work, for the sake of the nation let's hope he remains this category's exclusive inhabitant.

Oh, about the book:

1. Really, the authors should be in jail. As I've argued previously, there are some pretty significant reasons that grand jury testimony must be kept secret. The writers had a source leaking that information to them, and it appears to me that the source didn't just provide a few generalities. The writers appeared to have had significant access to the testimony of several witnesses, including Bonds, Giambi and Santiago. The reporters can argue all they want about journalistic privilege, but they were breaking the law when they elicited this information, and from the sound of things, they knew it. Maybe it's ironic that the reporters go to prison while Bonds goes to the outfield; on the other hand, maybe the reporters' wrong was more serious.

2. Got to love the ban on performance-enhancing drugs. By the way, in most sports, when players are tested for performance-enhancers, they're also tested for other drugs (marijuana) which do nothing to enhance athletic performance, and in fact hurt it. (Golf may be an exception here, I'm told; being high on marijuana might help even out that putting stroke. Are PGA tour pros smoking weed before putting on their plaid slacks? Now that would be a Category 3 book I'd read.) Some problems with the ban on performance enhancers: (1) it doesn't make a lot of sense, given that all kinds of non-pharmeceutical substances can enhance performance: are they any different in principle?; (2) are genetically engineered enhancements (the coming thing) any different? Given that all of us differ genetically anyway, if an athlete's very genetic makeup can be altered, in what sense is this enhancement non-natural? We can be born weak and yet lift weights to make us strong, so why can't we undergo gene therapy to accomplish the same alteration?; and (3) baseball's ban does drive drug use underground. This is the big story of Game of Shadows.

3. On this last point, the book's lasting image (much like the revelations I hear were in Jose Canseco's book, a Category 3 book too, by the way) was the vivid accounts of the relevant portion of the life of Barry Bonds. Not his life as a superstar baseball player, but his life as a druggie. Really, this account reads a lot like other stories of drug use: the shady characters, clandestine meetings, covert deliveries, secret injections in the bathroom, and so on. Not a pretty sight (especially when the boys share a bathroom stall to inject each other in the buttocks). The health risks to steroids are debateable and controllable (hey, most of these substances, as well as human growth hormone, are prescribed every day). But here's a bunch of ballplayers, track stars, and football linebackers getting health advice and, for all purposes, medical direction from this lab-owner who was a charlatan, a community college dropout, huckster and salesman whose medical training results from the frightening methodology called trial and error. How much better if Bonds and his ilk could be administered drugs in a sterile environment under a physician's supervision?

4. Don't read this book if you like your sports superstars unblemished. This account of the scandal of steroids looks at just one little corner of it, just one lab servicing a few athletes. Undoubtedly there are many, many more. The one quibble I have with the book is with its subtitle: it refers to the steroid scandal that "rocked" sports. Wrong tense. As I've said here, the steroid era is just beginning. Look for a lot more shadow games before it ends.