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If you haven't despised Barry Bonds up to now, just read the cover story in the latest Sports Illustrated: "The Truth: Barry Bonds and Steroids," by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. After that, you'll probably find "despise" too mild a word.

The cover story is an excerpt of Game of Shadows (due out March 27), a book grounded in more than a thousand pages of documents, as well as interviews with more than two hundred people. The authors obtained secret grand jury testimony of Barry Bonds and seven other prominent professional athletes. They studied confidential memoranda that detailed federal agents' interviews with other athletes and trainers who had direct knowledge of BALCO—a small Burlingame, California, nutrition company that has supplied performance-enhancing drugs to athletes.

To put it briefly, "Barry, you're busted." Though Bonds has repeatedly denied using, or knowingly using, such drugs, the book shows that he gulped as many as 20 pills at a time, and injected himself with a syringe, placed drops of liquid under his tongue, and spread a cream on his body. In his first 100 days of combining drugs with a rigorous weight-training regimen, he put on 15 pounds of muscle. He would have had to have been a complete moron to not know that he was using steroids and drugs.

Then again, Bonds has for some time been an emotional moron. He's been surly with the public, the press, and his teammates for years—using the F-word liberally to make his point when he wanted to intimidate. His relationship with women is hardly enlightened. The excerpt shows him sexually using and verbally abusing women (holding a girlfriend by the throat while threatening her death), cheating on his new wife days after their honeymoon, and casting lovers off at will ("You have to do something for me," he told one woman. "You need to disappear").

The excerpt also shows Barry's virulent reverse racism, a deep-seated prejudice that pushed him over the steroid edge. In 1998, he was furious that the white Mark McGwire was getting so much press attention for merely hitting home runs, while the full-package Bonds (who could hit for power and average, steal bases, and play defense) was hardly given the time of day. He would show them. The winter after McGwire's home run extravaganza, he began his drug and workout regimen.

So for very good reasons, in the coming days and weeks, there will be lots of venom directed at Bonds in sports magazines, on cable TV, and especially on sports talk shows. There will be talk of heads rolling and reform and banning Bonds from baseball—all of which desperately need to be done. There will be incisive analysis of "What went wrong with baseball?" and "Will it ever be able to recover from this?" and "Who's really at fault?" And everyone—from the owners, with their insatiable appetite for revenue, to the fan in the third deck, with his insatiable appetite to be entertained—will be indicted. I will join in the dance of righteous anger, and I, too, will gladly point the finger at a number of the guilty.

But I hope I have the honesty to not cast the first stone. Because I am the fan who relished watching McGwire chase Roger Maris's record in 1998, and marveled at Bonds when he demolished that record just a few years later (and didn't stop to think how this massive power suddenly became possible). I'm the white guy who occasionally wonders if an African American or Hispanic got the job merely because of his race. I'm the father/husband/friend who has lost his temper and said intemperate things. I'm the taxpayer who wonders about claiming that cash honorarium as income. I'm the journalist who is tempted to cut corners or sacrifice my family on the altar of getting one more thing published so my star might rise a tad higher than the fellow next to me.

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March (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50