I went to Toronto to write about the comeback kid and, as luck would have it, witnessed his first loss. He struggled from the start against the Seattle Mariners and trailed 3-2 going into the seventh inning. Along the way, the only notable moment was when he drilled Seattle first basemen Paul Sorrento with a fastball, a familiar purpose pitch to anyone who had watched Rocket Roger intimidate hitters throughout his career. In the seventh Clemens surrendered two more runs and, down 5-2 and having thrown well over 100 pitches, was clearly done for the night. So we denizens of the press box were stunned to see Clemens stride to the mound to the start the eighth and face Sorrento again. On the first pitch he drilled him again. Everyone was watching Sorrento’s painful dance, so by the time we glanced back at Clemens he was already striding over the third-base line, into the dugout and out of the game. He had come out for just one pitch and one purpose: to hit Sorrento. And, of course, despite its transparency, he denied it later.
Clemens is one tough Texan, more than a little ornery and something of a bully. That’s the approach he used to become the best pitcher in the game, and he doesn’t appear to know any other way. Now that he finds himself cornered, facing disgrace as a result of accusations that he propped up his career with steroids and human growth hormone, he has come out firing—high, hard and inside. He’s fighting for his good name, and good luck to anybody who gets in his way. That explains why, in the dramatic taped telephone conversation with his accuser, Brian McNamee, that Clemens made public, he apparently didn’t consider the effect if McNamee’s 10-year-old son happened to hear his dad say that the kid was “dying.” Roger’s reputation is at stake and everyone else is collateral damage.
In the telephone conversation, an obviously distraught McNamee kept asking Clemens—more than a dozen times—what Roger wanted him to do, once even suggesting that he was willing to go to prison for him, as Barry Bonds’s trainer had done for his man. Clemens never answered him directly and, for the most part, responded with generalities that didn’t even constitute a direct denial. “I just want the truth out there,” Clemens said one time. Another time he said, “I’m trying to figure out why you told guys I did steroids.” Clemens explained that he never responded directly to McNamee’s repeated question out of concern for the state he was in because of his son’s illness. His attorney, Rusty Hardin, later added that he didn’t want Clemens to risk accusations that he had tampered with a witness. This is a familiar pattern: Clemens and his defense team always have belated explanations for everything he has said or done—and they are seldom convincing. Like how his contention that he had taken no injections became injections of B-12 and lidocaine in his “60 Minutes” interview.
While McNamee was presumably reeling from this emotional encounter, another assault on his credibility by the Clemens team was emerging, one that showed precious little regard for McNamee’s state of mind or his son’s illness. Clemens’s defamation lawsuit against McNamee, filed Sunday in Texas, quotes police in St. Petersburg, Fla., saying they believe McNamee lied to them in the investigation of a possible rape back in 2001. McNamee was questioned about whether he had engaged in nonconsensual sex in a hotel swimming pool after giving a woman a “date rape” drug. He denied all of it, despite conflicting evidence. At the time McNamee was the New York Yankees’ strength and conditioning coach, and the team was finishing the season against Tampa Bay. The Yankees fired McNamee after the season without public explanation.
No charges were ever filed against McNamee. Still, in terms of personal integrity and honesty, it appears to be a rather damning incident. Clemens, who had helped lure McNamee from Toronto to New York to work with him, must have known about this alleged incident after the Yankees axed McNamee. Yet Roger kept him on as his personal trainer and, according to McNamee in that taped phone call, treated him like family. If Clemens seriously believed that McNamee was untrustworthy, and possibly even a rapist, what does it say about his character that he kept him around?
I exchanged notes pertaining to this lawsuit with Roger Abrams, a distinguished law professor at Northeastern University and a baseball scholar to boot. Abrams has made it clear in his Huffington Post blog that he is less than impressed with the Mitchell Report and that his concerns with what he feels is a lack of due process in this case are paramount. He told me that he does not view Clemens’s lawsuit against McNamee as a desperate public relations ploy but rather as “a pretty gutsy move to try to get some due process.” In case I missed his point, he addressed his note to “Cynical Mark” and signed it “Naive Roger.” And there are a lot of fans who share his concerns, reminding me about that fundamental legal tenet, “presumed innocent until proven guilty.”
My response is always the same: I am not operating in a courtroom. But if due process is the real issue here, I wonder why Clemens didn’t sue the nominal author of the report, George Mitchell, a former senator who knows a little something about playing hardball. Moreover, while the character of the principal witness against him may be suspect, we put people in jail—even execute some of them—all the time on the testimony of far more dubious witnesses than McNamee. On the very same “60 Minutes,” just before Clemens had his say, we heard from another Boston legend, John Matorano. Matorano was a mob hit man who murdered 20 people, or at least 20 that we know of. He is now out of prison and will be the key witness against a former Boston FBI agent in a murder conspiracy case in Florida.
But Roger, the law professor Roger, was certainly right about one thing. I am cynical about athletes and doping. For more than 15 years I have covered what is clearly an epidemic. One Olympic star confided to me—off the record—the belief that everyone in sports “except me” was doing illegal drugs. I took that as a wink and a nod that meant that everyone “including me” was doing illegal drugs. Perhaps that was a bit of an exaggeration, but folks were sure performing like it—running, swimming and cycling faster and, of course, hitting home runs in unprecedented numbers. Middle-aged track and swimming stars were doing better than they had in their prime years; aging baseball players were outslugging and outpitching their younger selves as they segued seamlessly into their 40s.
With those few who were unlucky enough to get caught, you could pretty much count on one thing: they lied. And some, it appears, didn’t even stop lying when they wound up before Congress or a federal grand jury. Clemens’s righteous outrage is pretty familiar to me, though he brings a singular Rocket ferocity to it. Still, it recalls Marion Jones’s response to the same accusations. The Olympic superstar managed for years to sustain what appeared to be heartfelt outrage at anyone who dared suspect her of wrongdoing. Having written a flattering NEWSWEEK cover story on Jones, and later having celebrated her Sydney triumphs in the magazine’s pages, I wanted to believe her in the worst way. And now, finally, seven years after Sydney and under duress from the feds, she has fessed up and forfeited all her medals, and will soon be headed to prison.
Almost nobody this side of Jose Canseco gets caught and says, “You got me, I did it, I took illegal drugs.” Which is why Yankee star pitcher Andy Pettitte, Clemens’s buddy and training partner, is getting more attention—even some kudos—for confessing that he used HGH—just as McNamee said he did—than for the fact that he cheated in the first place. So Roger the law professor as well as Roger the pitcher, excuse me for being more than a little cynical. But trust me on one thing: after all these years of covering sports and athletes, that cynicism is hard-earned.
