GREAT Clemens Article

Big, Bad Clemens really feeling the heat

Roger Clemens was going to stare down the truth tellers, make them blink, make them cower with a look that would have left Ray Nitschke shaking in his cleats.

He smeared on his eye black, Clemens did, and figured that would be good enough to get out of one last jam. He's as big as Texas, after all, the biggest Longhorn there's ever been.Instead he blazed a trail that could lead him to prison, and hardened the stereotype of the intellectually challenged jock along the way. In the long history of sports stars gone bad, only Pete Rose was this drop-dead dumb in defense of his legacy and name.

If Clemens ends up doing time for lying under oath about his alleged steroid and human growth hormone use, nobody will "misremember" why. Roger came up with a strategy, a campaign, that made Rudy Giuliani's brilliant in comparison. The Rocket choreographed his own spectacular implosion, and eagerly sold it to national TV.

His explanation the night he threw the jagged remains of a World Series bat at Mike Piazza — "I thought it was the ball" — is pure genius when measured against the cover stories he's told Congress, Mike Wallace and anyone else who's asked about the Mitchell Report entries accusing the game's greatest pitcher of being a common fraud.

And now the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is referring the Clemens matter to the feds, and asking the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation to match the ones that greeted Marion Jones and Barry Bonds.

"We believe that his testimony in a sworn deposition on Feb. 5, 2008, and at a hearing on Feb. 13, 2008, that he never used anabolic steroids or human growth hormone, warrants further investigation," committee chairman Henry Waxman and ranking Republican Tom Davis wrote.

The feds aren't about to go any easier on Clemens than they've gone on Jones and Bonds, not when a free perjury pass for Roger would feed suspicions that justice in this country remains a contrasting study in black and white.

Yes, Roger still deserves his presumption of innocence. But the more Clemens talks, the more that presumption looks as small as a resin bag.

Now Clemens is in Kissimmee, Fla., where he is preparing to throw BP to Astros minor leaguers, including his son, Koby. Clemens is telling reporters it's time to move on to baseball questions, please. Only it's not that easy.

That Jose Canseco gathering Clemens didn't attend is reportedly a Jose Canseco gathering Clemens did attend, according to an 11-year-old's camera. Hey Roger, are you smarter than a fifth grader? Or did you forget that little kids at big parties full of major league ballplayers will grab whatever evidence they can to show their classmates they were indeed in your glorified presence?

Clemens tried blowing up this Bash Brother bash into something it wasn't — a smoking gun shooting holes in Brian McNamee's credibility — and even that backfired on him. But long before he Nannygated himself into the tightest of corners, Clemens looked and sounded so much more like a hopeless rookie than a Hall of Fame ace.


His decision to secretly tape a McNamee phone call and then play it at a news conference, when that phone conversation only cast more doubt on Clemens' innocence, was as foolish as his choice in attorneys, Rusty Hardin, who, on introduction, should've given his new client this one and only order:

Shut up.

As comfortable as Clemens was in uniform, ball in hand, batter in the box, he was never an impressive or convincing figure before the notebooks and cameras. But the penalty for stumbling and bumbling through cliched, half-baked answers to sportswriters in locker rooms doesn't measure up to the penalty for giving false testimony to elected officials on Capitol Hill.

Hardin should've done enough homework to know that Clemens was never artful in dodging tough game-night questions, never mind the hard stuff that would be thrown his client's way in a legal process shaped by the most urgent of stakes. But the lawyer let Clemens go on 60 Minutes, let him hold that train wreck of a news conference, and, ultimately, let him go under oath, a place Clemens never should've gone.

The depositions provided by Andy and Laura Pettitte amounted to a nine-run inning for the opposition, and by then Clemens couldn't be rescued by a compassionate manager waving toward the 'pen.

He offered an absurd story about graybeards talking up HGH on TV, and he threw his wife, Debbie, under the Congressional bus. In the end, Clemens' version of events sounded almost exactly like McNamee's.

Pitcher and trainer agreed that McNamee injected Debbie with HGH. Pitcher and trainer agreed that McNamee planted needles in Roger's rump, too.

Pitcher and trainer only disagreed over the substance contained in those needles.

Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch confirmed that McNamee was a truth teller, at least in the context of this case, and the pile of evidence against the Rocket grew to Mount Everest-like heights.

Clemens, king of the hill, left Capitol Hill with his reputation in tatters. No more cell phone ads with his wife. No more stomach-crunching sessions with Pettitte, whose father, of all people, would be dragged into this unseemly HGH mess.

None of this had to happen. Upon the release of the Mitchell Report, Clemens could've remained silent or made a brief declaration of his innocence before refusing further comment.

He didn't have to launch a full-blown attack that would leave him so vulnerable, so weak, so unlike the fierce dominator who ruled from sixty feet and six inches away.

Now Clemens is drowning in a pool of his own hubris, with the Justice Department closing in. Hardin recklessly promised that a duel to the performance-enhancement death with the IRS man and steroid sleuth, Jeff Novitzky, wouldn't end pretty for Novitzky, but the smart money says Clemens won't be earning his 355th victory here.

Wednesday, Congress called in the commissioners and union leaders of the major sports for more hearings on the drugs poisoning their games. Meanwhile, Clemens was with the kids in Kissimmee, presumably showing young Astros how to win the right way.

The Rocket ought to be afraid right now, very afraid. His final staredown didn't make anyone blink. The feds are coming after him, and their heat will be high and tight.

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/7846262