If Bonds Took Steroids What Drove Him To Do So?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
How can someone who already has everything want more?
That’s the question at the heart of baseball’s steroids scandal, and if you care at all about the answers you really ought to pick up the copy of Sports Illustrated that will be hitting newsstands today, which features an excerpt from a new book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle. Fainaru-Wada and Williams are the reporters who broke open the story about shady doctor Victor Conte, his Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, and the doping of American sports. Their exhaustive, meticulous work has been some of the very best reporting done in any area over the last few years.
Because the excerpt deals with Barry Bonds, one of the two or three most controversial players in baseball history and the living symbol of the chemical corruption of the game, it already has received sensationalist treatment by talk radio hosts and callers, posters on Internet forums, and on the barstools of at least one establishment in Park Slope. This is unfortunate; there’s nothing in the least sensationalistic about the work Fainaru-Wada and Williams do, and one of the most impressive things about the excerpt and the accompanying material posted yesterday on Sports Illustrated’s Web site is its clinical sobriety.
To get the obvious question out of the way: Yes, the reporters have established beyond any doubt (were there any doubters?) that Bonds engaged in the systematic, controlled, and knowing use of various performance-enhancing drugs. They appear to have had nearly complete access to the legal materials related to the Balco case, including secret grand jury testimony, sworn affidavits, and the like, as well as to tape recordings, e-mail records, and other primary source materials relating to Bonds’ drug use.
What they found, essentially, is that, motivated by rage at the attention given to Mark McGwire as he broke Roger Maris’s home run record, Bonds began using a crude steroid called Winstrol after the 1998 season, put on 15 pounds of sheer muscle in his first 100 days of use, and then tore the tendons right out of his elbow during the 1999 season, as he’d put on too much bulk too fast. He soon began a more sophisticated program, and by 2001 was using designer drugs called the Cream and the Clear along with insulin, human growth hormone, and Deca, as well as a variety of agents meant to counteract the negative effects of the drugs. Apparently, he wasn’t always cycling on and off these drugs, but was using them nonstop, and against the explicit advice of experts whose counsel he’s discreetly sought.
None of this much affects Bonds’s legacy. No one who’s been paying attention at all had any doubt that Bonds was doing this sort of thing, and no one but someone playing the radical skeptic could really doubt the connection between the use of all these drugs and Bonds’s transformation from one of the 10 or so best players of all time into a hitter the likes of which the game had never seen. The gory details are interesting, but shouldn’t change anyone’s basic views on the matter.
What’s fascinating is the insight the less immediately relevant material gives us into Bonds’s world. There’s plenty of gossip about his treatment of women, his rages, fits of pride and self-doubt, conflicts with his ballclub, apparent tax evasion, and much else that at first glance seems merely embarrassing, and beneath the dignity of the reporters. Realistically, though, there’s no honest way to get at the story without detailing all of this, because what people really want to know is how and why a player as great and uniquely gifted as Bonds – had he retired after the 1998 season, he’d have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer – could have risked his health and reputation in the prideful pursuit of more greatness.
That is the essence of the steroids scandal, and why Bonds’s story resonates so much more than those of less gifted but equally guilty players. Ultimately, the simultaneously grandiose and prosaic answers (to oversimplify, it’s in the nature of greats to never be satisfied) are probably best dealt with by a different kind of writer than Fainaru-Wada or Williams entirely. Until the great Bonds novel is written, though, the clear telling of the facts about his life and his downfall is what we have to go on. They’re sad enough on their own.
