Reporter shines light on steroids, By: Lonnie Wheeler
06-26-06
You could make the case that Lance Williams learned about grunt work from Bob Lewis, the legendary football coach at Wyoming High School. Williams didn't have the burst of a running back or the cool of a quarterback, but Lewis figured that the kid was bright enough - he would move on to Brown University - and diligent enough to hunker over the ball and get a play going. He became starting center as a senior in 1967, on a team that went 6-3-1. After he left, the Cowboys went undefeated for two years.
Williams has played a bigger role, though, for the San Francisco Chronicle, in the process opening a hole that baseball commissioner Bud Selig, after refusing to take the handoff for several critical snaps, finally lumbered through with George Mitchell on his back. The former senate majority leader has been reluctantly charged by Selig with looking into the steroids problem that Williams and his Chronicle cohort, Mark Fainaru-Wada, have been writing about for two years.
As Williams explained it the other night as a homecoming speaker for the local Society of Professional Journalists chapter, the whole thing was merely a matter of grunt work. For all the television appearances, all the splash and sales and book signings for "Game of Shadows," the entire big deal was just "the kind of reporting we all do, day-to-day."
And no, it wasn't a crusade to bring down Barry Bonds or baseball or even BALCO. It was simply what happens when journalism's routine happens to trip over a rough spot in society's.
"The feds kicked in the door of what we thought was a vitamin company down by the airport," Williams recounted. "My boss asked Mark to just find out what's going on down there. What Mark did find out was it was a nutritional supplement company, and the nutritional supplements were a cover for banned drugs, and the customers were some of the greatest athletes in the world of track and field and NFL football, as well as baseball. It was just finding out what happened."
It was the government, then, that got the story started, and it's the government, now, that has subpoenaed Williams and Fainaru-Wada to make them tell where, exactly, their information came from. The Justice Department would like to know who leaked to them the secret grand jury testimony of Bonds and Jason Giambi.
The intrepid reporters, meanwhile, have no intention of revealing their unnamed sources, a noble stubbornness that could land them in jail for a longer term, possibly, than the three months meted out to Bonds' personal trainer, Greg Anderson, or the four months served by Victor Conte, BALCO's inscrutable president, or the zero months imposed upon the union officials and baseball execs who permitted the national pastime to be distorted and disgraced.
"What (baseball) tried to do," Williams said in his remarks at the Cincinnati Museum Center, "is ignore it as long as they could. When we wrote our first story based on an investigative report that said Bonds and Giambi and (Gary) Sheffield had all used steroids, Mark and I felt, well, there it is; we got it. And baseball just completely ignored it.
"Later, we had this tape where Bonds' trainer is describing what he's giving to Barry that he can't get anyplace else. Nothing from baseball. Then we had the grand jury testimony in which Giambi was admitting he used banned drugs - in fact, demonstrated for the grand jury how he would inject himself. And there it was. They didn't react to that. Then, finally, the book came out and Mr. Selig ordered an investigation."
There was one other significant event in that sequence. Sports Illustrated excerpted "Game of Shadows," and the frenzy was subsequently fed by news agencies in every conceivable medium. Williams and Fainaru-Wada, family men accustomed to working where the light doesn't shine, became comfortable in front of cameras.
It was, of course, the public spectacle that prompted MLB to tighten its testing program, punch up its punishments, and finally acknowledge the laws of the land. We're talking about a sport so lax for so long on the issue of banned substances that Bonds' remarkable records, while achieved to a large extent by illegal means, will be difficult to invalidate.
"Bonds knowingly took illegal drugs starting in 1998," Williams noted. "I suppose, by baseball rules, that he didn't violate the rules until the 2003 season. But as Mark and I like to say, baseball might think it doesn't live in the United States, but it really isn't a separate government."
Having grudgingly caught up with the legal system, the game's next challenge is to keep pace with the technology of cheating. As attested by pitcher Jason Grimsley in his recent admissions to federal agents, some players have merely moved on to human growth hormone, for which there remains no generally accepted test.
"The danger for the game (if it doesn't beat steroids), is that it will become like pro wrestling, where it's got some people who care passionately and everybody else says, 'Why watch that stuff? It's fixed.'
"We think if they stay after it," Williams said, "baseball is on the road to recovery and we'll look back at this period just as an aberration.''
Meanwhile, the government is staying after the Chronicle reporters, who have weathered the wrath of Giants fans and stuck unshakably to their stories. One of their rewards is the tangible reform that their investigations have occasioned. Another is the intrinsic honor that goes along with grunt work as good as theirs.
"If somebody had told us ahead of time that you'd catch a lot of hell, it would turn into a book, and you could go to jail," mused the old Cowboy, "I would have taken that deal, no problem."
