Roger, Over and Out?
At 38, Roger Clemens—the greatest pitcher ever to come out of Texas—is losing his edge. He is no longer the strutting, rosin bag-slamming, fist-pumping fireballer who terrorized the American League and won five Cy Youngs.
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Clemens is also, it must be pointed out, an extraordinarily disciplined human being. His answer to everything, from a difficult childhood to the ups and downs of big-league baseball, has always been to be harder, tougher, and more dedicated than anybody else. He may be going down, but he is not about to admit that to a crowd of pencil-neck geeks. And in any case, as absolutely everything in his past suggests, he is not going down easy. On the upper shelf of Roger Clemens' locker, there is a ceramic Father's Day gift type of thing shaped like a football. It reads "The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender." Clemens likes that. It describes him. He has always subjected himself to brutal disciplines. Those closest to him say that at the core of his intense drive to succeed is the fact that, for a good chunk of his life, Clemens has been without a father. He spent his early life in Ohio. His biological father, Bill Clemens, a truck driver for a chemical company, disappeared before Clemens turned four. Clemens remembers only one encounter, when he was just ten, over the telephone. It wasn't pleasant. "My father had called my mother and was irritating her," he says, "so I got on the phone and said, 'There's no need for you to call here anymore.'" They never reconciled. Though his mother remarried, Clemens' stepfather, whom he loved, died of a heart attack when he was nine. "I grew up fast after that," he says. "I found out real quick I would have to work." Clemens' friends say he is driven, variously, to be exactly what his father was not and to show his worth to a father who never bothered to know him. After his stepfather died, Clemens' mother worked at three jobs, while he shuttled to and from his grandmother's house in Dayton. They had little money. Clemens moved to Houston in 1976 to join his older brother, and the rest of the family followed the next year. He attended Spring Woods High, where he was initially "the third best pitcher on my team," behind Rick Luecken and Rayner Noble, who were later drafted by the San Francisco Giants and the Houston Astros, respectively. (Noble is now the coach of the University of Houston.) An oversized, pear-shaped kid with chubby cheeks, Clemens was also the center on the basketball team and a star defensive end. It was during these years that he developed the peculiar habit of "draining himself," exercising to the point of total exhaustion. While the other kids drove to and from school in their jazzy new cars, Clemens, whose family could not afford to buy him a car, was content to run the miles both ways with a knapsack full of books on his back. And on weekend nights, "When all the guys were partying," he says, "I was at the track running." By his senior year, he was the team's best pitcher, despite the fact that he did not throw very hard. His fastballs were in the low 80's. What he had was an exceptional breaking ball and remarkable control. "Even with the stadium lights off, I could find the plate," he says. This wasn't simply due to nature. Clemens practiced his control for hours on end. He'd draw a small square with chalk on a brick wall and, pitch after pitch, would try throwing to different spots within it.
"A lot of kids, you have to stay on top of to keep them focused; not Roger," remembers his high school coach, Charlie Maiorana, who has just retired after thirty-three years at Spring Woods. "He didn't say much, but you could tell he was deeply motivated to accomplish things. He did his work every day without fail, wore his uniform proudly, and on the mound, never gave in to a single hitter. Not a single one while I had him." During Clemens' last year at Spring Woods, Nolan Ryan came to pitch for the Astros. Maiorana recalls how Clemens made it his business to go to the Astrodome every time Ryan pitched, sneaking down to watch him warm up in the bullpen, mesmerized by the shotgun sound of Ryan's fastball smacking the catcher's mitt. Clemens says he couldn't imagine a baseball being thrown that hard. He studied Ryan's moves and even borrowed a few. "That's why Roger yells at hitters," Maiorana says. "He got that from Nolan."
At San Jacinto Junior College in Houston, Clemens suddenly blossomed. He sprang up from six two to six four in a matter of months, his body hardened, and he started blowing fastballs by hitters for the first time in his life. Word of this eventually spread to University of Texas coach Cliff Gustafson, who offered Clemens a baseball scholarship as quickly as he could coax him into his office. Clemens remembers being in awe the first time he walked on the huge UT campus and struck cold by the large sign in the clubhouse at the university's Disch-Faulk field that read "The University of Texas Tradition Will Not Be Entrusted to the Timid or the Weak." He knew of UT's rich winning tradition, of having a slew of Southwest Conference titles to its credit, and of its knack for manufacturing major league pitchers, such as Burt Hooton and Jerry Don Gleaton and Richard Wortham. "It was so intimidating, so overwhelming," he says. "I felt I could get lost in there." He was so intimidated that, for the first two months, he raced back home on the weekends.
Clemens immediately moved into one of the greatest college pitching staffs ever assembled: Calvin Schiraldi (who played for the Mets, the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago Cubs, the San Diego Padres, and the Rangers), Mike Capel (who played for the Cubs, the Milwaukee Brewers, and the Astros), and Kirk Killingsworth (who played in the Rangers' farm system). They all went by nicknames: Schiraldi, then the ace, was Nibbler; Capel was Gamer; Killingsworth was Killer. Clemens was Goose, a nickname he got in high school because he reminded people of the Yankees' hulking, ace reliever Rich "Goose" Gossage. As a sophomore, Clemens had an outstanding season. He went 12-2 and had a stretch of 35 scoreless innings in the post-season, even though he lost to Miami 2-1 on one unearned run in the final game. (Texas finished in a tie for third in the college world series.) Clemens was competitive off the field as well. "In college I'd watch him play video games until his fingers nearly bled trying to beat them," says Capel, who is now the general manager of a Ford dealership in Houston.
Clemens' junior and final year, though, was a distinct struggle, despite his respectable 13-5 record. Throughout the season, he fought the constant distraction of scouts in the stands clocking his every pitch. "There were so many radar guns on me," he says, "I thought they were landing a plane." Clemens estimates that at one time there were as many as 25 scouts watching him. The pressure got to him. Bill Little, UT's assistant athletic director for media relations, who has been in the sports communications department of the school since 1968, says, "Roger got lost his last year with us. Every time the scouts pointed their guns at him, he tried to prove himself. Tried doing too much." Things got so bad for Clemens that, late in the season, in the midst of a horrible string of starts—getting shelled by Oral Roberts, looking like a BP pitcher against Texas A&M—he had to be talked out of quitting by Gustafson. Clemens, who went on to beat Alabama 4-3 to win the College World Series, credits that talk with saving his baseball career. "Coach Gus was like E. F. Hutton," he says. "When he talked, you listened. He had a way of always saying just the right thing. And, at that moment, he said all the right words to me. Because, believe me when I tell you, I was fully prepared to hang it up and never go back."
Instead, Clemens was picked in the first round of the major league draft, the nineteenth selection overall, by the Boston Red Sox. It was the first of several times in his career he'd be passed over by the Rangers and the Astros, which had the third and eighth pick, respectively. Clemens gave himself only two years to make it to the major leagues. He beat that by a year, going 9-4 in twenty starts with the Red Sox in 1984. Two years later, after recovering from a career-threatening arm injury and subsequent surgery, he became the ace of the rotation, set a major league record with twenty strikeouts in a single game, and won, as only nine players have in the game's history, both the Cy Young Award and the Most Valuable Player Award. He won the Cy Young again the next season and again in 1991, combining power and finesse as well as anyone who's ever pitched. He played for the Red Sox until 1996, compiling a 192-111 record, and for the Toronto Blue Jays in 1997 and 1998, when he went 41-13. He was traded to the Yankees in 1999.
But Clemens was always more than the sum of his statistics. He was a massive presence on the mound, a player who played with a kind of mad intensity rarely seen in professional baseball. "There's an aura about him unlike anyone in the game," Blue Jays catcher Darrin Fletcher once said of him. "I think it's about him being the Great Texas Fastball Pitcher." Take him out of the game, he didn't run for the showers or grab a beer. Instead, he jumped atop the stationary bike, working out his volcanic aggression until it was gone. Draining himself the way he did as a kid. A teammate in Boston once taped over the nameplate of his locker: "Possessed Rebel." Clemens didn't protest. He liked it. At one point in his career, he even pitched with a custom-made rubber mouth guard to keep his teeth from grinding. "My emotions have gotten me into trouble," says Clemens, who once, in an infamous incident in 1990, was thrown out of a playoff game because he would not stop yelling profanities at home plate umpire Terry Cooney.
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