Barry Bonds using as many drugs as he could, choosing the advisor he did, and being poked by just the right IRS prick created the most revealing and enduring sports-doping drama of all time

Assemble a cast of finger-pointing egomaniacs, and revealing truths helplessly percolate to the surface amid all the lying. That's just what the producers of "Hall of Shame" did

Below is a review of the new Netflix documentary Untold: Hall of Shame, which I watched last night. The short version is that although I didn’t learn anything new of substance about the people and situations involved, watching a small array of competing egomaniacs speak on camera reinforced for me the gloriously Machiavellian nature of professional sports, and underscored that the enforcers in the arms-race between athletes who cheat using drugs and those attempting to slow or stop the banned-substances trade can be just as deliriously narcissistic and unlikable as the most juiced-up jocks.

I’m filing this under “Competitive Running” because the film features extensive interview clips of U.S. sprinter Tim Montgomery, who set the world record for the 100-meter dash in 2002 (9.78) only to have this mark and all of his performances from April 2001 onward nullified three years later, when he admitted to using steroids and human growth hormone (hGH). The production also mentions various track-folk who declined to be interviewed or comment for the film, perhaps because their reputations have been pockmarked by various levels of ribaldry and disgrace, such as Montgomery’s coach Trevor Graham as well as fellow Graham-guided sprinter and notable The Oprah Winfrey Show guest Marion Jones, the only athlete who served any time in jail prison in connection with the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) scandal.

There’s also brief archival footage of the late Charlie Francis, Ben Johnson’s coach and a man whose only wisdom for decades on end was “Use drugs or you’re wasting your time.” Video footage of Johnson himself from the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games—where Johnson ran a world-record 9.79 in the 100-meter dash that lasted about a week before Johnson was disqualified for testing positive for the steroid stanozolol—reveals a man with unusually yellow eyes, suggestive of liver damage secondary to a few too many trips to the Winstrol Buffet or perhaps common ancestry with Wile E. Coyote.

But the film revolves primarily around the dubious efforts and even more dubious personalities of three uncommonly avaricious turn-of-the century-figures: BALCO founder and teary-eyed turncoat Victor Conte, cartoonishly androgen-bloated and huge-headed baseball superstar Barry Bonds, and cadaverous, dumpster-diving Internal Revenue Service goon-on-a-mission Jeff Novitsky. Bonds of course declined to be interviewed, whereas the other two would have been happy to talk for at least ten unbroken hours apiece provided the main subject was the person talking and his own vast expertise.

Apert from the track and field names, the person most readers are likely to be most familiar with, at least by reputation, is Bonds. The son of Major League star Bobby Bonds, the Pittsburgh Pirates and San Francisco Giants slugger is best known for hitting a record 73 home runs in the 2001 season, although this still-standing mark was not his most or even his second-most ridiculous statistical achievement.

Since it’s been a while since he retired, and because his legal troubles followed his playing days and served as a lurid years-long saga, Bonds is remembered by many casual fans as someone who was only a great player because he used banned substances. While Bonds’ post-age-35 feats were plainly illegitimate, what he had already accomplished before he became associated with Conte and other dope-dealers put him on track to retire as possibly the best all-around offensive player in baseball history.

Now, because he needed to be even better than that, he’ll never be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. And even without the BALCO scandal, baseball reporters would have only grudgingly voted for his inclusion, because no matter the numbers he racked up at the plate, the often-brooding Bonds was hated wherever he went—by teammates and reporters always, and often by even hometown fans.

Conte, for his part, is a complete sack of shit. You can tell that his daughter, a complete babe, thinks he’s somewhere on the ethical scale between a JP Morgan Chase executive and Genghis Khan, but wants to think of him as just one more cog in an unstoppable machine. The best way to summarize him is that he took the Francis-like position that nothing that everyone is doing can be considered cheating no matter the rules, only to then decide to start helping anti-doping authorities catch cheating athletes once the landscape changed.

Look, it’s one thing to declare the whole thing rigged and ride along on the back of the quasi-open scam, making millions and being photographed with all sorts of sports heroes. It’s another to play for the other team when things heat up and the winds change, and monetize that plan, too.

There is nothing likable about Conte at all. Unprompted, he tells the interviewer that most people who have heard of him still think of him as a bass player, because he used to play for more than one band that went on to release albums. If he wasn’t a member of any of those bands at the time their albums were recorded, it says a lot about him—none of it not discernible from other cues—that he would even bring this up. He probably deserves to be knocked on his ass by a 12-year-old girl coming off a Deca-Durabolin cycle or at least carjacked a few times even today just for having the temerity to show his face, especially when it’s behind the wheel of his Bentley.

Novitsky, for his part, is eager to explain what a constitutive asshole he is without realizing how much of an asshole his words show him to be. For example, he mentions how excited he was when he learned that being an IRS agent meant he could be “an accountant with a gun,” and he boasts of looking to “create cases” by doing things like looking for expensive cars with drivers who don’t appear capable of legitimately having earned the money to purchase these vehicles. This authoritarian prick claims to abhor cheating on principle, but you can tell he’s lying at numerous points, especially when he claims he wasn’t the source of a leak to the media about in impending raid on one of Conte’s properties.

Montgomery comes across as by far the most humble, and sincere, person afforded significant air time in Hall of Shame. He admits with a genial laugh and without reservation that what he did was cheating, but he just as joyfully admits that he will never forget savoring that 9.78 in the moments after that September 2002 race—the dizzying power and triumph in the immediate aftermath of having claimed the title of the fastest human on Earth. No one was ever going to call him “Tiny Tim” anymore. (“I hated that nickname,” Montgomery says at one point, thereby distinguishing himself from all of the undersized boys named Tim throughout history who have been tagged with the same moniker. Come to think of it, I bet a lot of men 5’ 7” and under named Tim out there absolutely loathe Charles Dickens.).

I’d like to credit the producers of the documentary for giving everyone who consented to being in the film just the right amount of rope to allow each primary dirtbag to at least partially hang himself on his words in his attempts to throw accusatory nooses around the claims of the other dirtbag(s). But all Conte and Novitzky needed was for someone to start recording them and occasionally interjecting with the equivalent of “Oh yeah? The other guy says you’re the pants-on-fire motherfucker.”

They’re all, to be sure, pants-on-fire motherfuckers—including some of the documentary’s fringe or incidental characters. On Valentine’s Day in 2004, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft held a presser to announce that Conte and Bonds’ trainer, Greg Anderson, had been indicted and charged with a variety of ominous-sounding federal crimes. Before long, U.S. President George W. Bush, looking and sounding like even more of a warbling dipshit than usual, also threw in some public condemnation of drug-cheats.

I remember watching this and wondering, “Why are the feds and even congress so suddenly interested in steroids in sports?” Now it makes more sense, because the U.S. had invaded Iraq ten months earlier under blatantly sham pretenses (“Weapons of Mass Destruction”). With that story beginning to fall apart, the American government needed to distract the public with something that absolutely did not fucking mattet to anyone, even if it was tawdry and fun to consume remotely. And for someone like Bush, at the time the biggest and most dunce-yawping crook alive, to be homing in on the morality of people paid to take steroids and hit 450-foot line drives into the heads of popcorn vendors in the upper decks of Major League Baseball stadiums was a bit much even then.

One of the most interesting takeaways was the reaction of the media to Johnson’s disqualification from the 1988 Olympics. Tom Brokaw, who looked and sounded far better in 1988 than he does now, called the news “shocking,” a sentiment his peers in the news business generally echoed. Contrast this with the American media’s current insistence—over thirty years after Johnson’s travails, with Francis’ dictum reaching everyone who mattered in the interim— on pretending that Shelby Houlihan never actually used drugs on purpose.

Sure, Johnson was Canadian, but that’s not why the media isn’t “shocked” by reports of athlete cheating anymore. They at some point resigned themselves that it was pointless to make a continual issue of the sport being dirty at every level, since this was never going to change. And now that the media are completely under the control of major corporations such as Nike, they’re obligated to treat positive doping tests as resulting from either mistakes by testers, problems with the labs’ analytical-chemistry and general protocols, or the fraudulent outcomes of conspiracies.

When you see how intent on being big and famous and a part of something both Conte and Novitsky are, and how elated Montgomery is to recall having been a 9.78 guy whatever it took, it reveals everything you need to know about every bullshit story like Houlihan’s and the people who try to provide cover for such athletes no matter how ridiculous they know their stories look to those with half a clue. People who want to win—be the prize Olympic gold medals or court convictions of famous athletes—will always use the same methods to use them, and when an athlete is caught, this just as arguably represents a failure of the system as it does a success of that system.

Athletes can’t have a clean playing field, so they don’t bother desiring one; meanwhile, most sports fans don’t even care about doping, including quite a few who used to. The game is the game. To this day, Bonds, Jones, and Graham—despite their punishments, the government’s receipts, what everyone who knew these people and were willing to yap said about them, and what the public conclusively believes—deny having ever knowingly used or distributed banned substances, and even Conte says he never gave anyone steroids or advised anyone to use them.

The game is what it is and will always attract the kind of people and personalities who ensure that its posted rules and its real rules are divergent. Integrity never bought anyone a $400,000 car, at least not as quickly as sales of VMA underwriting a vast underground designer-steroid business did.