Idiots Write About Sports

In order to hype myself up for the inevitable fall of baseball’s all-time home run record, I’ve begun reading “Game of Shadows.” The sixty pages or so I’ve gotten through have been a pretty interesting read, so far concentrating more on colorful BALCO proprietor Victor Conte than on Barry Bonds. Conte is portrayed as a highly effective snake oil salesman, successfully marketing a mostly bogus zinc and magnesium mineral supplement called ZMA while peddling steroids on the side.

Most interesting to a geek like myself is mention that Conte was a frequent poster — spammer is probably a more accurate term — to the Usenet group misc.fitness.weights. “Game of Shadows” inaccurately claims that the group is hosted by Google. Usenet groups aren’t really hosted by any central server or authority, instead residing on a bunch of distributed peers. What Google does provide, however, is an historical archive of Usenet traffic coupled with a search engine, which means that any random schlub with an Internet connection can freely dig through past postings at his leisure.

So I hopped onto groups.google.com and keyed in a quoted line from the book: “You sell a fucking mineral supplement. You groundbreaker you,” as stated by ‘roid guru Patrick Arnold. Sure enough, there in all its glory is an exchange from April 1999, replete with the usual newsgroup wankery, in which Conte and others debate the relative effectiveness of prohormone and magical zinc. From there, it’s but an HGH-enhanced triple jump to the complete list of all Conte postings, which reveals that Victor was not only a spammer, but a Grade A troll as well.

It’s also interesting to watch the tone of Arnold’s postings gradually transition from bitter acrimony to sycophantic agreement, as his real-world ties with Conte and BALCO deepen. By the time of Conte’s last Usenet post in September 2001 (under his own name, at least), the two seem to exist largely to back each other up.

Such a nifty modern world we inhabit.

Post a comment