The Game In The Shadows

Rodriguez 1 

Aaron Rodriguez
Calver
American Literatue: Period 5
May 12, 2014

The Game In The Shadows 

"Some who were close to him thought his drive to be acknowledged as the premier flowed from an intense sense of rivalry with his father, a baseball player whom Bonds seemed to emulate and resent in equal measure. Indeed, many of the quirks in Bonds' complicated personality-including the impulse that led him to use banned drugs that would transform him" (Fainaru-Wada and Williams 24). Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, two writers for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an investigative narrative, Game of Shadows, on the case of Barry Bonds and the upbringing of BALCO. BALCO is a nutrition company who was founded by Victor Conte. Victor Conte was a self-proclaimed nutrition expert who convinced athletes into taking steroids and other performance enhancing drugs without any concrete evidence on the effects of the drugs. In the book the author's focus is on the case of Barry Bonds and how Conte got his claim to fam. Conte was a former musician who saw a business in tricking athletes into believing they needed his help and injecting them with steroids. Conte had many famous athletes buy into his concept the one highlighted in the book is Barry Bonds. Barry Bonds was a former baseball player and son of a legendary ball player in San Francisco. At the time Bonds was an all-star player who was striving to be elite, he turned to performance enhancing drugs which got him the fame he wanted, but this decision later gave him a plethora of trouble. The case of Barry Bonds is the most recent one of many cases in the history of sports where athletes have been caught cheating. The trend of the modern athletes who cheat is the use of performance enhancing drugs.