Review: Steroid exposé hits hard, lacks perspective, By: Edward Iwata

May 5, 2006, USA TODAY

Many sports fans are deluded about their larger-than-life icons. As long as their heroes are winners, some major league flaws can be ignored.

Luckily, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, authors of Game of Shadows (Gotham Books, $26), a hard-hitting exposé of steroid use among athletes, are not cheerleaders in denial about famed superstars.

Before their book's recent national acclaim, the authors — investigative reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle— were respected in California media circles. Williams is a cops-and-courts reporter who excels at criminal investigations, while Fainaru-Wada is a former sportswriter who took sharp aim at hapless sports teams and figures. (This reviewer is a former co-worker of the two at the old San Francisco Examiner but has no close ties to them now.)

Citing 200 sources and thousands of pages of legal documents, the writers shed light on alleged steroid users Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi of baseball fame and Olympic gold medalist Marion Jones, and Victor Conte, the pseudo-nutritionist who supplied the drugs to world-class athletes.

Since the late March publication of Game of Shadows, Major League Baseball began investigating steroid use in its sport. A federal grand jury also is looking at Bonds for alleged perjury in his earlier grand jury testimony in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative steroid investigation, according to several media reports.

The book's pluses? It's a spare, fast-moving narrative and critical inside look at a dark side of the sports world that is rarely exposed.

The book's main flaw? It lacks broader social, political and historical analysis that would put the steroid scandal into perspective. In this sense, it falls short of the finest work of acclaimed journalist-authors, including Seymour Hersh, Ken Auletta, Randy Shilts, Stanley Karnow and others.

Steroids or not, Bonds likely will soon pass Babe Ruth and become the No. 2 home run hitter of all time.