'Roid Ragers

Two macho men and the bitchy bodybuilding world that surrounds -- and, perhaps, spawned -- the BALCO steroids case

A A A Comments By Tommy Craggs Wednesday, May 5 2004

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AP Wide World Photos

Victor Conte, founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), outside the federal courthouse in San Francisco.

Christopher M. Smith

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Very, very, very tough. Maybe this isn't just a scandal's margin, after all. Maybe, in some ways, this is its source. Is there anyone involved in the BALCO case -- cops, athletes, defendants -- who didn't work out in the same nexus of Gold's and World Gyms and Powerhouses? Consider: An agent from California's Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement goes undercover with a $300 Bay Area Fitness membership, hoping to latch onto trainer Greg Anderson, and what's his first concern, according to Playboy? That he'd run into another cop. Where else could a case like this have come from -- a weird, unwieldy case, so full of rivalries and jealousies and eccentricities -- if not a place like this, where middle-aged men fart at the entrance, and guys puke in the locker room, and a 51-year-old with the hormones of a 25-year-old pushes a couple hundred pounds skyward, over and over, until he can find pleasure in the pain; where everyone -- the cop, the IRS agent, the ballplayer -- comes so he can look better than the next guy. The enclosed world of the gym, demimonde of macho, land of the very, very, very tough.