Let the record show it was not Commissioner Bud Selig who cleaned up Major League Baseball's steroid problem. It was actually two reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle, Lance Williams '72 and Mark Fainaru-Wada.
Williams and Fainaru-Wada co-authored a book titled "Game of Shadows," which will be released on March 23. The book, featured on the cover of last week's Sports Illustrated, details their investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative - known to most sports fans as BALCO - and is the culmination of more than two years of reporting that appeared in the Chronicle.
Williams and Fainaru-Wada interviewed more than 200 individuals and pored over 1,000 pages of documents to learn how Olympic athletes such as Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery and baseball stars Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds used designer steroids and other drugs to gain an unfair competitive advantage.
Though Williams's reputation as a reporter is first-rate, journalism was not something he pursued at Brown until his last year on campus, in the fall of 1971. After spending his junior year abroad in England, Williams was very interested in pursuing a career in English. But, at the time, he fancied himself a professor rather than a reporter.
"While I was at Brown I didn't think I wanted to do what I am doing now," Williams said. "I took a type of expository writing class in my last semester ... taught by a professor named Roger Hinkle. He recommended that I go to graduate school at (the University of California, Berkeley) for journalism."
A friend on campus also recognized his potential as a journalist. Paul Rohrdanz '72 befriended Williams because Williams often spent time visiting friends on Rohrdanz's floor in Slater Hall.
"There was a paper he wrote senior year, it was a review of a play by a Brown professor (of literary arts), James Schevill," Rohrdanz said. "It was performed down at (the Trinity Repertory Company) and it was about the politics of the time. Lance wrote a review for one of his classes, and I said right there, 'This is a guy who wants to publish.'"
When Williams and Fainaru-Wada broke the BALCO story in the fall of 2003, neither writer imagined their work would eventually culminate in a book or even become an ongoing national story.
"We had just begun an investigative reporting department at the Chronicle, and I had a new partner, Mark, who had come over from sports and was interested in new projects," Williams said. "At first, we thought it was just a federal raid on some vitamin company down by the airport that the feds wouldn't talk about.
"Soon, it became clear that we had this story on our hands that nobody seemed to know how to cover, involving illegal supplements and elite athletes. I'm supposed to be good at finding out about people, so that's how I became involved. I had no idea it would become this big," he said.
Coming from a sports background, Fainaru-Wada had experience in covering athletes, including Bonds, from the standpoint of a beat reporter. Williams, on the other hand, was a veteran investigative reporter who had experience in reporting on a variety of controversial and challenging stories. In his time at the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner, Williams covered a wide range of stories, including the downfall of the Black Panthers' political power in Oakland, crack cocaine's journey from Latin America to the streets of the Bay Area and the patent office at the University of California, Berkeley and its unethical practices to generate additional income from copyrighted products.
Fainaru-Wada praised Williams' skill at working with sources as one of the key elements in bringing the steroid scandal to light. Without Williams's ability to get such crucial testimonies from sources such as Kim Bell, Bonds' former girlfriend, the story would have suffered immensely.
"(Williams) is very methodical and smart at developing sources and gathering information," Fainaru-Wada said. "He played a hugely significant role in getting information from Kim Bell. Through her, we ended up with the main story on Bonds, the behind-the-scenes look at when he actually begins using these drugs. He was totally responsible for cultivating her as a source."
Fainaru-Wada stressed that the BALCO case was not necessarily a sports story. The story was mainly a drug case, the type of work that Williams had done for the majority of his career. In fact, it took Williams some time before he was fully comfortable with the sports reporting involved in the case, his background as an assistant Little League coach and a baseball fan notwithstanding.
Focusing mainly on human sources for his reporting, Williams also pointed to Bell as a crucial figure in the case. Bell's extensive description of her relationship with Bonds and her observance of his drug abuse fit with the rest of the evidence the reporters had gathered and was not challenged by Bonds's lawyer.
"At first, I wasn't sure we could even get a story because I assumed that Bonds would just deny the whole relationship," Williams said. "But she had all this documentation. ... The key facts of the case are not in dispute."
Another of Williams' key sources was Victor Conte, the head of BALCO and the scientist behind much of the doping that took place there. Conte, who pleaded guilty to charges that he distributed steroids, was described to Williams by his own lawyer as someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He had a hand in his own demise and that of the athletes with whom he associated.
"He liked, and wanted, the attention of these athletes," Williams said. "Part of the evidence (that led to the grand jury investigation) was things he said to Olympic athletes that attracted the attention of the feds and the people that police these sports for doping. The athletes were appalled that their names were out there."
On the eve of the book's release, Williams and Fainaru-Wada have seen little backlash in terms of the veracity of the book's evidence. Instead, much of the anger has been directed towards the writers for publicizing the rampant doping.
"Originally, those people that were angry with us for the story accused us of making it up," Williams said. "Now, they acknowledge that these players were using performance enhancing drugs, but they say that we should stop reporting on it."
Rohrdanz and Williams often discuss their work experiences during their morning runs, and Rohrdanz said he believes the BALCO story had an affect on Williams that prior stories did not.
"It has been very intense compared to the other stories Lance has written," he said. "He took time off from work and rented an office just so that he could write."
Fainaru-Wada agreed, describing the work as all-consuming. The two were constantly working, gathering as much information as they could before another writer could steal their story, he said.
In the end, both men were shocked and a bit saddened by the extent of the scandal. Neither could imagine the scope of baseball's dirty little secret prior to their reporting, and both were stunned at the way the story evolved.
"It's been an educational process for both of us," Fainaru-Wada said. "With Lance having been a big sports fan who didn't have the background in working with athletes that I had, I think it was perhaps more troubling for him than me."
The story, still ongoing even with the book set to be released next week, is likely to have long-lasting repercussions on Major League Baseball in the near future and on baseball history forever.
"I was a fan," Williams said. "I was completely shocked by what we found out and it took me some time to adjust to the reality (of the situation). As a reporter it's a great story, but as a sports fan I was not prepared for the reality of doping in both Olympic sports and baseball."
