In the early 2000s, a scandal burst across professional and amateur sports. The Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative–better known as BALCO–was revealed to have been supplying performance-enhancing substances to a wide range of athletes, among them baseball’s home run king, Barry Bonds. In Hall of Shame, the latest in Netflix’s UNTOLD series of standalone sports documentaries, we get a rare look inside BALCO from the man behind the headlines, doping-doctor Victor Conte.
The Gist: The center of Hall of Shame–both as subject and as primary narrator–is Victor Conte, the head of the now-notorious BALCO laboratory. His name has been in the news for two decades now–becoming nearly-synonymous with baseball’s steroid-scandal–but we’ve rarely heard directly from him. His take on the story makes up the core of Hall of Shame, but we also get perspectives from former sprinter Tim Montgomery, IRS agent Jeff Novitzky, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, and others orbiting around the scandal in one way or another. (If these names sound at all familiar, it’s because much of this story was told in the 2007 best-selling book Game Of Shadows.)
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?:The closest parallel, subject-wise, is filmmaker Billy Corben’s frenetic 2018 documentary Screwball, which similarly tackled the BALCO scandal, albeit with a different angle.
Performance Worth Watching: It’s interesting to hear from Conte, but it’s even more interesting to hear Tim Montgomery speak openly about his motivations for taking Conte’s drugs, as so many of the other athletes connected to Conte (or other steroid use) either continue to firmly deny it or remain entirely mum.
Memorable Dialogue: “You know, any of these great accomplishments,” Conte says, over footage of Barry Bonds slugging his single-season record-extending 73rd home run, “those are things that I’ll always be proud of.” He’s unapologetic, and now he’s ready to take credit.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: It takes two to tango when you’re doping. There’s the athlete who takes the illegal drugs, and the doctor who supplies them. Hall of Shame gives voice to both.
We hear from Tim Montgomery, the sprinter who broke the world record in the men’s 100-meter race in 2002, earning the coveted title of “fastest man in the world”. That record was stripped in 2005 when Montgomery’s involvement with BALCO was revealed, and–in a rare move for an athlete accused of doping, Montgomery speaks openly here about his motivations. He recalls coming up as a young sprinter, seeing others dope, and assuming that everyone at the top levels did it. Once he reached the top levels of track and field competition, he became obsessed with winning, and decided it was time to do what he needed to get there.
“I told Victor Conte, I don’t care if I die. I want to see what it feels like to be the greatest. At any cost possible. It’s almost like selling your soul to the devil.”
Conte agreed. “That’s when I made that decision to help Tim Montgomery become the world’s fastest human, and I took it as a challenge.”
BALCO wasn’t a doping lab from the start, Conte insists. He claims that for the first 16 years of the lab’s existence, he never supplied anything illegal to athletes–sticking instead to permissible performance enhancers like zinc. But he knew how much doping there was in sports, and–much like the athletes obsessed with success–he knew that he could do it better.
“When I realized the hypocrisy of all of this, I decided it was time to start playing by the real rules of sport, and the rest is history, as they say.”
Looming over this story, of course, is the specter of Barry Bonds, Major League Baseball’s single-season and all-time home run record holder, a player who went on the greatest offensive stretch of all time from 2001 to 2004, a time when he was working with Conte and BALCO. It’s widely speculated that Bonds began doping after seeing the 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, a theory voiced by New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt.
“It completely captivated the country,” Schmidt recalls. “Bonds saw what Sosa and McGwire had done. At that point in Bonds’ career, he was already a Hall of Famer. He said to himself, ‘I know I’m better than these guys. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be performing at that level. But he was at an age when most players’ careers are on a downtick, when they’re retiring from the game.”
Bonds’ trainer, Greg Anderson, brought Bonds to BALCO, which–in Conte’s telling of the story–provided him with legal nutritional supplements only. Conte, for his part, firmly denies supplying Bonds with “the cream”, “the clear”, or any of the illegal substances he’d developed in his so-called ‘Project World Record’ with Montgomery. Still, he was making huge headlines, and that drew the attention of investigators.
Enter Jeff Novitzky. A former college basketball player, Novitzky’s NBA dreams never materialized, and so he became an IRS agent, drawn to the notion of being “an accountant with a gun.” Novitzky recalls being advised early in his career to “make cases of things you see around you,” of running the plates of Lamborghinis to see who’s driving and if they were involved in anything illegal. Novitzky heard of BALCO–a laboratory practically in his Bay Area backyard–and began digging into it.
“The investigation was all about Barry Bonds,” Conte recalls.
On paper, Novitzky’s the good guy here, but it’s hard to root for an IRS agent, and it also seems clear that his motivations weren’t about the purity of sport–he saw Bonds’ connection to BALCO, and saw it as a career-making investigation, one that soon found him digging through garbage for any dirt he could find.
Bonds might be the big figure here, but hearing from Montgomery here is what differentiates UNTOLD: Hall of Shame from previous documentaries on the subject. It’s rare to hear a first-person account of why someone chose to begin doping, and it turns a story that’s been largely one-sided into something more three-dimensional.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The BALCO scandal is one of the most salacious stories of the current century in sports, and UNTOLD: Hall of Shame gives a rare chance to hear about it from some of the primary figures in it.