Following are excerpts from Lance Williams' '72 talk Tuesday night. The investigative journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle spoke about his experiences reporting on the steroid scandal in professional sports. He described his role in cultivating sources from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative and the involvement of athletes such as Barry Bonds and Marion Jones. The event was sponsored by The Herald, Alumni Relations and Campus Life and Student Services.
On how the BALCO story started ...Sometimes, especially in San Francisco, people asked us, why did you guys at the Chronicle decide to target the Home Run King - Barry Bonds, the greatest star in San Francisco in the era? How did you guys set out to expose him, what was the grand scheme here? It just wasn't like that at all.
This was the most organic and least planned newspaper project I've been on in a long time. It started because Chuck Finney, who was my partner (at the Chronicle) decided he wanted to be an editor and in the summer of 2003 transferred to the city desk. Mark (Fainaru-Wada) was a sports writer ... and wanted to do (investigative) projects. There was a slot on the investigative team and he joined before there was anything going, before the (federal agents) raided this place.
Our boss put Mark on the story not to get a project, not to "get" anybody, not to expose anybody. Mark didn't have an assignment and our boss wanted to know what the feds who raided this nutritional supplements company were doing. They won't tell what they're doing, the city desk can't figure out what's going on - why don't you see if there's a story there? That's how (Mark) got in on it. ... When we went, we pulled documents at first and then we heard separately that Bonds was implicated. We got the impression that we could print that some day.
On Bonds' ex-girlfriend, one of the key sources in the story ...Many of the people we talked to we promised confidentiality to, and I have not ever been relieved of the responsibility of keeping that promise.
I spent a long amount of time with a person on the record, Bonds' ex-girlfriend Kim Bell, who I came to respect and like in a way. She's a young woman ... who started dating this multimillionaire sports star. At first it was great, then it went south, then he got married and she stayed with him anyway. She wound up financially wiped out and she got mad at him, didn't know what to do. It was in that context I met her.
The thing I liked about Kim was she came with documents. In her case, she had kept all kinds of memorabilia from her relationship with Bonds. Even better, she had thought about suing Bonds and with a lawyer she wrote a series of letters to Bonds' lawyer, and Bonds' lawyer would come back with responses. And they weren't challenging any of the factual assertions you would expect would be an insurmountable problem in trying to sort out a swearing contest between an aggrieved ex-lover and a wealthy athlete.
When I met her, I thought this was great but we would never be able to release any of this because Bonds would never acknowledge that this was his girlfriend. But she not only had documented it, she had more than one letter from Bonds' lawyer acknowledging the relationship that went on for many years. That is what made Kim so good as a source - she came with material to back up what she said.
On BALCO founder Victor Conte ...Mr. Conte was an accounting major at a junior college. He then played bass in a rock 'n' roll band in the '70s. He reinvented himself as a nutritional guru. His business plan was to sell a supplement called ZMA.
The supplement industry is a multibillion-dollar, completely unregulated industry. To differentiate his product, he needed endorsements. The way he got endorsements from celebrity athletes was providing them with a regimen ... of powerful and probably undetectable steroids that would make you bigger and stronger and help you recover from injuries. He could guarantee you that you would not get you busted. Some athletes paid (for the drugs). Some athletes didn't pay a nickel.
What he did get was publicity in the muscle magazines. He had a cover story with Bonds in Muscle and Fitness. He got an exclusive interview with Marion Jones, the track star, when at the time Vanity Fair was begging for her to be on the cover. For Muscle and Fitness, he got basically an advertorial from Marion (because) he was providing her with powerful, effective banned drugs.
The thing could have gone on forever, but Mr. Conte is a guy with ego-gratification issues. He insisted on telling each athlete what he was giving to the other athletes. Inevitably ... coaches from rival athletes heard about what he was doing. He was busted when an elite track coach, Trevor Graham, before the national meet at Stanford in 2003, scored a syringeful of one of his drugs ... and gave it to the U.S. anti-doping agency.
I studied a course at Brown called "Nature and Tragedy," and one characteristic of the tragic hero is hubris. I think that was Mr. Conte. He just couldn't keep his yap shut. He had to take credit for the wonderful achievements of the athletes.
On the impact of his reporting ...I think the effect of the story was the public reaction ... partly because we care so much about our amusements in the United States. There are guys out there that just die to have something to talk about on the radio and if you blow a story up, they go nuts. There was a megaphone effect that would bring attention to the story and eventually bring officials in. We thought our stories, combined with Jose Canseco's book ("Juiced"), got those congressional hearings going. ... We think that we helped to bring about steroid policies in prep schools in 38 states. And I guess the biggest impact of all is we got sentenced to federal prison.
On the athletes ...I have tremendous sympathy for the athletes. I think the emphasis in the doping clean-up of sports is to put too much of the blame on people who are basically young and ultra-competitive - people who are put in an almost Darwinian situation with their jobs. Sometimes a coach will even tell (a player) to juice. ... Then they get busted and it's all on them.
I never thought that was fair. I think the proprietors of sport always have a great deal to answer for. In baseball where guys are showing up in spring training who put on 15 pounds of muscle since you saw them last, you gotta know something is going on. (Baseball officials) would ignore it, not talk to the players about the health issues. The guys who did it, benefited. The guys who resisted often ended up out of the game.
On the prospect of going to jail ...I assumed we would right from the get-go. I was saying, "I can see where this is headed," because I'm a pragmatic person. But then you get used to it. I never like to dramatize this because I know so many people who have had really bad things happen to them in their life. ... People get through much worse stuff than being thrown in jail.
