Turn a blind eye to steroids? We can’t do that now

THE greatest performance I ever saw on a baseball field came courtesy of Barry Bonds. It was the final Friday of the 1993 season, and the San Francisco Giants were at Dodger Stadium with the National League West title on the line. The Dodgers had a four-run lead in the early innings -- until Bonds took control. He hit two homers and a double, driving in seven runs and single-handedly keeping his team alive.

That game has always loomed large when I think of Bonds, for it illustrates what makes him great. Most obviously, there’s his skill with the bat, but even more is his sense of the moment, his ability to occupy center stage. This was a larger-than-life performance by a larger-than-life athlete, the kind that should define him in our minds.

Yet after reading “Game of Shadows” by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the San Francisco Chronicle writers who, in late 2004 and early 2005, first reported the grand jury testimony by Bonds and other major leaguers implicated in the BALCO (Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative) steroids scandal, I can’t help seeing Bonds’ performance through a tragic filter, as an emblem of everything that he -- and baseball -- has lost.

“Game of Shadows” is a sober, skillful and utterly damning account of not just the Bonds fiasco but the pervasive influence of steroids in sports. Beginning with Victor Conte, the Bay Area self-promoter who founded BALCO, the book is less about personalities than the culture of athletics, where winning is the bottom line, regardless of cost.

Fainaru-Wada and Williams track steroid use through a variety of sports, from football to track and field. Especially in the latter, they write, performance-enhancing drugs are epidemic: One runner “suggested that six out of eight sprinters in any given elite 100-meter final were on the juice,” while another “said it was more likely all eight.” In the book’s most chilling comment, sprinter Tim Montgomery reportedly tells Conte in the wake of the 2000 Sydney Olympics that he wants to win Olympic gold so badly that “it would not matter if I died on the other side of the finish line.”

What’s more, many athletes are sophisticated users, avoiding detection by balancing substances including human “growth hormone; erythropoietin, or EPO, the oxygen-boosting drug that helped athletes train harder and longer; the diabetes drug insulin, which also was particularly potent when cocktailed with other substances ... norbolethone, a.k.a. The Clear; a testosterone-based balm Conte called ‘The Cream’; and the narcolepsy drug modafinil, a powerful stimulant athletes took directly before competing to pump themselves up.” Many apparently share Conte’s “sincere belief that he was providing a basic and essential service to the elite athlete.... Cheat or lose.”

This moral relativism is what’s most disturbing about the BALCO scandal, and nowhere more than in regard to Bonds. (Bonds has consistently denied knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs.) In Fainaru-Wada and Williams’ telling, he is spoiled, self-absorbed, insecure -- thuggish and abusive. When he breaks up with girlfriend Kimberly Bell (who would later testify that as early as 2000 he told her he was using steroids), it’s with a phone call: “You have to do something for me,” he says. “You need to disappear.” Once he starts using performance enhancers, the authors write, he gives his supplier, Greg Anderson, free run of the Giants’ clubhouse, hiring him as a conditioning coach and even buying him a 2002 World Series ring.

It’s a heartbreaking portrait: Bonds, perhaps the most gifted pure player of his generation, a five-tool guy who won three MVP awards before age 30, turns to steroids out of envy over Mark McGwire’s homer chase of 1998.

“As McGwire’s pursuit of the home run record became the constant topic of the nation’s media, and as McGwire was celebrated as the best slugger of the modern era and perhaps the greatest slugger who had ever lived, Bonds became more jealous than people who knew him well had ever seen,” the authors write. Although “Bonds himself had never used anything more performance enhancing than a protein shake,” McGwire’s success, they suggest, convinced him that he had no choice.

I’ve long had doubts about the effects of steroids in baseball. Sure, they make you hit the ball harder, and farther, but you still have to connect. What about Bonds’ concentration? His eye? His bat control? With “Game of Shadows,” Fainaru-Wada and Williams put such questions to rest. In cogent, methodical prose, they describe how steroids mask fatigue and pain, how they build not only muscle but (in the short term) stamina. They deconstruct Bonds’ statistics, noting that his seasons from 2000 to 2004 are “the greatest five consecutive seasons of any hitter in baseball history” -- and all while he was in his late 30s, well past what is considered a player’s prime. They describe the physical cost of steroids, arguing that Bonds’ 1999 elbow injury was the result of putting on too much muscle too fast.

More to the point, they evoke the damage to the tattered psyche of the game. Among the villains here are the sport’s ruling figures, from Commissioner Bud Selig and player’s association head Donald Fehr to the Giants’ management, who have consistently looked the other way.

I agree with the Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell, who called Bonds’ single-season home run record “a steroid lie.” Without the juice, Boswell notes, “there is no reason to believe Bonds could have approached, much less broken, any of the all-time marks for which he lusted so much that he has now ruined his name.”

As for what this means, in the short term it’s a baseball problem, as Bonds gears up for a run at Hank Aaron’s career home run record. What will Selig do if he breaks it? How will the Giants celebrate? On a larger scale, the steroid scandal speaks to the pumped-up nature of our culture, where from Washington to Wall Street the ends seem to justify the means. In that sense, BALCO is the tip of the iceberg, a reminder of what happens when we let ourselves be corrupted by our most selfish desires.

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David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.