Dunks, Doubles, Doping – earns its way onto my book case
A couple of weeks ago, I reported that Gregg Valentino’s new book was available on Amazon.com for pre-sales. In that post I admitted that I had no idea who his co-author – a guy named Nathan Jendrick - was. Nathan, it turns out, is the guy who co-wrote Victor Conte’s (*yet unreleased) book, and another book in the steroid genre, called “Dunks, Doubles, Doping: How Steroids are Killing American Athletics.” That book, which I purchased, new, from Amazon.com for a recession-friendly price of .65 cents, recently earned a highly-coveted spot on my book case. You can get your own copy (new) for .14 cents. Had I waited only another week before purchasing the book, I would be .51 cents richer today.
I quickly found out that the title – which is tragic – was the only thing I could really attack. The book has almost nothing to do with “Dunks” (it barely scratches the surface of anything related to basketball), and it doesn’t do much to prove that Steroids are Killing American Athletics. To be perfectly honest, if you forget the fact that the title of the has nothing to do with the actual book, and you can give proper credit to me for avoiding the obvious book/cover judge-saying, it’s a very good read.
In some of the earlier chapters he pays lip-service to the idea of athletes influencing kids to use steroids, and a bunch of other stuff (fans will stop going to games if steroid use continues), but he doesn’t really explore (or prove) these concepts too well…he gets into the idea that maybe steroid use is wrong because they’re illegal, but he seems pretty half-hearted about that idea, and he more or less abandons the thesis-paper feel of trying to prove his title by midway through the book. We should cut the guy a break because at the age he wrote this book, most of us were still writing thesis papers ourselves…if my math is correct, he was 19 or 20 years old when he had this published.
Early in the book the author states that the book is neither pro- nor anti- steroids, which is considerably odd because the title is viciously anti-steroid. KILLING AMERICAN ATHLETICS! The book could properly be termed “anti-media-hype” or “anti-steroid-law” or anti-a-lot-of-other things, but the fact remains that the title is anti-steroid, and the book just isn’t. The book presents both sides of the debate equally and the pro-steroid side clearly wins. Seen as a thesis kind of book, it fails to prove its title. But that doesn’t mean the book is all bad, or even half bad…as I said, it’s quite good.
When I started reading the portions about bodybuilding and steroids, it actually took me aback slightly. I suspected that this guy was probably a bodybuilder…and I was right. He competed in the NPC, where he placed 6th in the Novice Men’s division of the 2006 Washington Iron Man Bodybuilding, Figure, and Fitness Championship, and 16th at the Emerald Cup 2005 Bodybuilding Junior Mens 20 and Under division. The portions of the book where he talks bodybuilding + steroids + the IFBB/NPC are right on the money. It’s impossible to read his views on these topics without realizing, almost immediately, that this guy is an insider.
My other complaint, and this isn’t really a huge deal to me, is that he doesn’t seem to enjoy writing. Out of the 221 pages (not including the index) that comprise the actual book, nearly 100 of them were interviews with someone else, or reprints of other people’s previously published articles, charts, or tables. I already have Rick Collins’ book, I don’t need to re-read 10 pages of it when I purchase a new one. He basically copy/pasted the entire “Steroid Detection Chart” right off the Internet and included it in his book. Is this a huge problem for me? Not really…when I buy a steroid book, I’m looking for a chapter, maybe two or three at most, that give me new information. If you’re familiar with Rick Collins, Gregg Valentino, John Romano, etc…you can skip their interviews and the republishing of their articles.
By Chapter three, I was enjoying myself enough to finish the book in the first day that I purchased it, and by Chapter 13, I got my money’s worth: I had no idea about China’s “missing medalists” and the entire shell game that went into hiding Chinese swimmers from testing authorities. That chapter alone is absolutely devastating, and worth the (cover) price of the book alone. What does that chapter have to do with “Steroids killing American Athletics?” Nothing. It’s got nothing to do with Dunks or Doubles either. But it’s easily the best chapter of the book, and that’s no surprise: Jendricks is an accomplished swimmer and married to an Olympic Gold Medalist swimmer. If he ever writes a book on performance enhancing drugs in swimming, I’d be the first to buy it…and reading this book was enough to make me curious enough about the upcoming Victor Conte book to (maybe) check it out (if Victor’s self -aggrandizement can be kept to a minimum by Mr. Jendrick), and certainly gives me good reason to think the upcoming Valentino book will be worth my while.
we recommend
