Clemens stoops to disturbing lows
Innocent or guilty, Roger Clemens only made himself look worse by secretly taping a phone call with his accuser, Brian McNamee
January 8, 2008
BY Xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sun Times Columnist
NEW ORLEANS -- As the tape played for 17 sleazy minutes, Roger Clemens sat with a disgusted smirk, assuming very wrongly that Americans everywhere now were ready to side with him. On the contrary, all he established Monday is that he's one sneaky S.O.B., which is exactly the last thing you want when trying to show a doubting nation that you're not a steroids sneak.
In secretly taping a phone call with Brian McNamee, the personal trainer who says he shot up The Rocket with steroids and human growth hormone, Clemens only proved he's capable of a dirty, lowdown attempt at entrapment. That's not what we need to see from the greatest pitcher of our baseball lives, an American icon who has as much to lose in immortality as Barry Bonds does as the all-time home run king*. His defense strategy must be performed with some semblance of dignity, not with the real-world version of a purpose pitch to the head or a jagged shard of broken bat flung toward Mike Piazza.
I don't know what's creepier: Trying to set up McNamee by playing the tape at a national televised news conference in Houston, or not answering a question that McNamee repeatedly asked Clemens: ``What do you want me to do?'' He asked it 21 times, to be precise. If I'm Clemens and I've never used steroids or HGH, I tell McNamee that I want him to call his own news conference, fess up that he lied about Clemens to give George Mitchell's men the marquee name they needed while keeping the heat off himself, then agree to take his lumps in jail. At one point, McNamee even suggested as much on the tape.
``What do you want me to do? I'll go to jail, I'll do whatever you want,'' the snitching trainer told Clemens.
But strangely, on a day when he snarled angrily at the media and threatened physical harm to McNamee if he ever came to his home, Clemens maintained his cool every time McNamee asked in the conversation what he wanted him to do. ``I need somebody to tell the truth, Mac,'' he said calmly. Why so poised when he otherwise was unraveling? Oh, maybe because Clemens had been programmed by his attorney, Rusty Hardin, who feared major consequences.
``The last thing Roger wanted, just as we did, was any suggestion that we were trying to interfere or coerce a federal witness,'' Hardin said. ``So, yeah, all he kept saying (was) nothing. Except you hear him throughout saying, `Tell the truth.'''
Again, this is not an honorable approach. It's a scheme, which also is what you'd call any big-league ballplayer who uses steroids to gain a competitive edge. Mind you, I'm not dipping into the pool of rampant media irresponsibility and declaring Clemens guilty as sin.
What he's doing is going on the attack, something he should have done the very day the Mitchell Report was released on Dec. 13. But Monday, he took his attack much too far and lost more credibiity. He somehow made a sympathetic figure out of a grimy trainer trying to stay out of jail. Even if we live in a world of scurrilous Internet activity and paparazzi madness, it's still disturbing to see Clemens slinging from the mudpile.
We're looking for reasons to believe him. We found none Monday. All we saw was a desperate man and his lawyer searching for legal loopholes -- and finding one in the states of Texas and New York, which allow a phone conversation to be taped if one party gives consent. That's a polite way of saying you can secretly tape a conversation, not that Clemens was able to expose McNamee.
``For the life of me I'm trying to figure out why you told guys I did steroids," Clemens told him.
``I understand that," McNamee replied.
Did you hear an admission that McNamee had lied to Mitchell? An apology? He sounded like a trainer who knew he had burned his longtime friend -- by outing him as a user, not lying about him. McNamee's public credibility is higher than Clemens' at the moment, thanks to the admission by Andy Pettitte, Clemens' close friend and McNamee-related training partner, that he indeed took HGH twice in 2002. In the Mitchell Report, McNamee claims to have injected Clemens at least 16 times with steroids and HGH. In a report on Sports Illustrated's web site, McNamee specified Clemens' use, claiming he was ``in no way an abuser of steroids.''
Said McNamee: ``He took them in late July, August, and never for more than four to six weeks max. Within the culture of what was going on, he was just a small part of it. A lot of guys did it. You can't take away the work Roger did. You can't take away the fact that he worked out as hard as anybody."
It's important to know real sports events still exist to balance out the surreal. Because before LSU and Ohio State played Monday evening in the Superdome, I stood among other writers by a row of TVs in the media dining room, astonished that the Steroids Era had come to a public, Springer-show hissing match between a superstar and his alleged enabler. In his first press conference since the Mitchell Report named him as a juicer, Clemens was supposed to answer questions.
Instead, he looked extraordinarly uncomfortable, mockingly asked the media if it was OK to take a sip of water and wound up storming out of the room. This was no time to challenge the media, who hold his Hall of Fame future in their hands and also can influence public opinion on Clemens' performance-enhancement guilt. But he seemed not to give a damn.
``Do you think I played my career because I'm worried about the damn Hall of Fame?" Clemens said bitterly. ``You keep your vote. I don't need the Hall of Fame to justify that I put my butt on the line and I worked my tail off, and I defy anybody to say I did it by cheating or taking any shortcuts, OK?"
On the tape, McNamee comes off like a troubled, beaten man asking for mercy. He says his 10-year-old son is sick with celiac disease, an intestinal disorder. ``I'm firing my lawyers. I'm getting rid of everybody," McNamee told Clemens. ``My wife is gone. My kids are gone."
I don't think America needed to hear about McNamee's personal woes. I don't think we feel good about anyone's 10-year-old son being ill. And again, who made the tape public?
That swell guy, Roger Clemens.
It was a foolish mistake to play such a tape at a press conference, to deliver a dog-and-pony show when all we demand from Clemens are straight answers. He should have waited to testify next week under oath on Capitol Hill, where America could have judged him in a more formal setting. What happened Monday was an idiot fest that only lessened Clemens.
``I'm going to Congress,'' said The Rocket, ``and I'm going to tell the truth.''
If this was a pitching performance, he'd be on the hook for the loss.
