Lance Williams is a rock star with glasses, kind of like Rivers Cuomo of Weezer. But, his frames are not nearly as cool.

In his mid-50s, he'd much rather listen than indulge you with information about his life, which makes him such a great reporter.

Meanwhile, his writing partner, Mark Fainaru-Wada, is the perfect complement, a free-talking extravert that can keep the conversation going forever.

Together, the two, on advice of an agent who contacted them, wrote the book Game of Shadows, an exhaustingly detailed book that revealed the pervasiveness of performance enhancers in sports. Not only did it condemn Bonds as a cheater, egomaniac, liar and racist, but it nearly landed the duo of investigative reporters for The San Francisco Chronicle in prison. And had their anonymous source not come forward, I would not have gotten to meet them over spring break.

My girlfriend and I know Williams indirectly; he's a mutual friend of her aunt and uncle. He agreed to give her, her uncle and me a tour of the office and take us out to lunch with Fainaru-Wada on the date that they would've been sent to jail for refusing to come forth with the name.

For journalists and sports fans, these guys are as big as it gets. Their work publicized how Major League Baseball allowed its athletes to dope and it also reported the inner workings of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), which was created by Victor Conte, a self-taught nutrition expert and an extraordinary salesman to boot.

Afterward, they said they'd rather go to prison than reveal their anonymous source, Troy Ellerman, who is Conte's lawyer who admitted last month to leaking the Grand Jury testimony relating to BALCO.

While much of the country and their profession championed them as pariahs for the first amendment, they were surprisingly candid.

They were prepared to move into and out of prison as the case made its way through the appellate courts, and for middle-aged guys with wedding bands on their fingers, they seemed unfazed at the prospect.

If the Supreme Court let them down, their lawyer, who they said had a backup plan for everything, had a pardon from President George W. Bush in the works, even though the main man prosecuting them was his own appointee, United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

They seemed confused at the whole ordeal.

Bush thanked them for the "service" they've done to the country, not once, but twice. They knew, and they thought the government acknowledged that the use of anonymous sources, while often frustrating for prosecution, was necessary for any sort of justice at all. To prosecute them for the leak in a case about steroid use seemed contradictory to the point and a waste of time, especially when they were told they'd done a public good by the president himself.

Rather than dwell on what they've done -- it's been well documented -- much of our talk centered around the problems within the journalism industry, noting that even their paper had a scary meeting earlier in the week which announced that "heads would roll," according to Fainaru-Wada.

Williams, sitting in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant close to the Chronicle, put life in context.

"Well," he said peering over his glasses. "At least we're not going to prison today."

Rock 'n' roll.