Victor Conte (1950-2025): A Remembrance by Thomas Hauser

Five months ago, Victor Conte was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. Almost always, that’s a death sentence. He died on November 3 at age seventy-five.

Conte is best known as the mastermind behind one of sport’s most famous PED scandals. In 1984, he founded the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) which was at the vortex of misdeeds that tainted multiple superstar athletes. He spent four months in prison in 2005 after pleading guilty to charges of illegal steroid distribution and tax fraud. Later, he became a sincere, forceful, formidable advocate for clean sport.

Conte was born into a working-class family on July 10, 1950. At age ten, he began taking guitar lessons. One year later, while in fifth grade, he played guitar in a talent show at the Wishon Elementary School in Fresno, California.

“I played a surf song called Pipeline,” he told me years ago. “And it brought the house down. I thought it was the coolest thing.”

When Conte was thirteen, he and three of his cousins formed a band called Immediate Family. Victor played lead guitar while his cousins played bass guitar, saxophone, and drums. Two years later, one of his brothers joined the group as lead guitarist and Victor switched to bass. At age nineteen, he founded a group called Common Ground that played a neighborhood club in Fresno six nights a week.

Then, in search of bigger things, Conte dropped out of Fresno City College and moved to Los Angeles where he joined another group (prophetically called Pure Food and Drug Act). One of his mentors in Los Angeles was Ray Brown, the legendary bass player who had once been married to Ella Fitzgerald. Brown taught Conte the ins and outs of playing the upright bass. Eventually, Pure Food and Drug Act signed a contract with Epic Records. “I was on top of the world,” Victor later said.

Meanwhile, one of Conte’s cousins had become part of the rhythm-and-blues band Tower of Power. In May 1977, Victor joined the group as its electric bass player. He stayed with Tower of Power until 1979, when he and his cousin started another group called Jump Street. Then he toured as an electric bass player with Herbie Hancock’s Monster Band, an experience that he called “the height of my musical career.” One night, he experienced the joy of playing onstage with the band and legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

“But it was getting harder and harder to keep going,” Victor later recalled. “I loved playing. But by then, I was married with three kids. And being on the road is difficult. You kiss your kids goodbye and say, ‘I’ll see you in six months.’ So I left the band in 1983. And in 1984, I founded BALCO.”

In the decades following his release from prison, Conte was a positive force for education and reform with regard to performance enhancing drugs. He worked with numerous athletes as a nutritionist and conditioner at a facility in San Carlos, California, called SNAC (an acronym for Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning). Terence Crawford, Devin Haney, Jesse Rodriguez, and Claressa Shields are among the fighters he counseled.

He was extraordinarily generous in sharing his knowledge with any anti-doping agency or member of the media who sought him out. He did not found VADA (the most effective PED-testing entity in boxing). Nor did he have a financial stake in it. Those were fictions advanced by people who were seeking to somehow tarnish VADA’s work. But Victor was always willing to share his expertise with VADA, urged fighters to sign up with VADA, and otherwise supported VADA’s mission. His knowledge of how the PED game is played made him a particularly valuable asset for those who are fighting to stem the use of illegal performance enhancing drugs in boxing.

Conte leaves a complicated legacy. But on balance, it’s a positive one. His many good deeds over the past two decades speak to the sincerity of his conversion. And there’s another reason that I believe he was sincere in his transformation.

One day before Victor reported to prison, he visited his mother.

“I’m embarrassed that you’re my son,” she told him. “You’ve disgraced the family. I wish you had a different last name so people would stop asking me if we’re related.”

“I went home that night and cried and cried,” Victor told me. “And I vowed right then that I would never ever do anything again that might bring disrepute to my family.”

Victor Conte’s death is a loss for the people who cared about him and also for clean sport.

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Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – The Most Honest Sport: Two More Years Inside Boxing – is available at https://www.amazon.com/Most-Honest-Sport-Inside-Boxing/dp/1955836329/ref=sr_1_1?

In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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