Why Trevor Graham Now?

By: D.K. Wilson

Like steroid distributor Angel Heredia, Justin Gatlin, according to Jeff Novitzky, worked undercover for the government in 2000 and recorded phone calls with Trevor Graham. The testimonies of Heredia and Gatlin are particularly damning to Graham’s claims of altruism in conjunction with anonymously sending a syringe full of a designer performance-enhancing (PED) growth hormone drug, THG, to the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) allegedly created at the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) for testing:

In an 2004 interview with federal agents, Graham downplayed his relationship with Heredia and denied being involved in banned drugs. Two years later, after Heredia became a government informant and secretly tape-recorded phone calls and a meeting with Graham, the coach was indicted on three felony charges of lying to federal agents.

Graham’s lawyer, William Keane, says the coach told the truth when he denied providing drugs to his athletes. In court, he accused Heredia of testifying falsely about Graham to avoid being prosecuted for steroid dealing himself.

In court Thursday, Pettigrew, Young, Mitchell and Ellenwood corroborated major portions of Heredia’s account. But it was clear the athletes were reluctant to implicate Graham - and themselves….

It was also revealed that Olympic sprint champion Justin Gatlin worked undercover for authorities investigating doping in sports.

In a comment from yesterday’s “Notes” the thought was floated that, like Jose Canseco, perhaps Trevor Graham “found religion.”

That notion needs to be addressed.

Graham was simply attempting to keep the doping trail off him and shift it elsewhere. He despised Conte and saw the BALCO chief as a non-track person who was an interloper on “the track game.” Chemists were supposed to stay out of the limelight while coaches reaped the glory for “developing” stars.

However, Conte, being a former entertainer (one-time bassist for the funk band, Tower of Power) understands marketing. Since he had developed a powerful zinc-magnesium compound (brand name, “ZMA”) that many high-profile athletes used, he could get his name and face in places traditionally reserved for track coaches.

Additionally, some of Conte’s crew had been trained at some point by Graham but Conte had his own track coach connections. Some of Graham’s former charges shifted allegiances to Conte and his connections, which allowed Conte to keep tabs on his track-and-field ZMA and designer PED users. This move acted to keep everything in-house and close to BALCO.

Graham hated that.

So this sordid tale, for Graham, hinges on professional jealousy; a jilted track coach snitching on a PED and nutritional self-made “chemist.”

What is more important here is not to get bogged down in peripheral matters of the case. That track-and-field stars are again the focus of testimony and news regarding BALCO-related incidents has more to do with the U.S. government putting on a good show before the coming Olympics than it does being a truth-telling mission. Novitzky has had the goods on Graham for years and any of the more recently-compiled evidence against the former coach to track stars is more icing on the cake than it is meat of the case.

What will more than likely go underreported or unreported is that the timeline of track-and-field athletes working in conjunction with IRS agent Jeff Novitzky clearly shows his bias in pursuing one Barry Bonds. The timeline aids in substantiating the claim that Novitzky had a pre-existing animus toward Bonds in which he indulged himself at the expense of taxpayers purse-strings to the tune of somewhere close to $7 million by now.

Trotting Graham out now, before the Olympics and during the presidential election season is telling. That Novitzky was urged by the FBI to stop pursuing Bonds and continued to do so is equally telling. It was April 25, 2004, almost exactly four years ago to the month, when The San Jose Mercury News dropped the bombshell report detailing a government memorandum from the previous September that included the name Barry Bonds. The BALCO investigation began in 2002 and laboratory was raided, terrorist, SWAT-style September 3, 2003.

Now it is May 2008 and with the Bonds case marching inexorably toward an in-court showdown, the specter of the BALCO investigation was beginning to spin toward the memory hole.

And suddenly, during another presidential election and Olympic season, Trevor Graham and the entire cast of famous-infamous world record having, PED-abusing, Olympic medal earning, track-and-field star-crossed stars from the past decade have been trotted out to once again do the perp walk for the public. Now it is up to the sports media to make the public care; probably by juxtaposing these “heinous cheats” with today’s squeaky-clean (hopefully) American Olympians.

But if Graham represents a back to the future return to the nexus of this case, will the “means” for the Bonds case be re-examined? Will anyone ask why there wasn’t more scrutiny on Graham than on any other name in the BALCO investigation? Will anyone ask why the pursuit of the man who was responsible for the outing of BALCO was shelved, who was as dirty, or dirtier than anyone else involved with the case, including Barry Bonds and Victor Conte, was relegated to the back burner for all these years?

Do the means justify the ends?

The “ends,” that Bonds might be stripped from baseball’s record books, that Bonds might by forever banned from inclusion into baseball’s Hall of Fame, that Bonds might have to serve a prison term, that Bonds might act as patron devil for all of baseball’s PED abusers —— might just not happen. All of this might just end up as a government-instigated exercise in futility.

What would we do then?

What would we do?

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D.K. Wilson is a freelance sports writer. He is better known on the internet as "DWil," and writes for Sports On My Mind.

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