Game Over 
Gary Cartwright
Truth and Consequences
Yes, Roger Clemens is a jerk. But Congress shouldn’t make a federal case over whether he lied about using steroids.
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Clemens refused to talk to the Mitchell team. Now nobody can shut him up. He didn’t help himself with his evasive, self-serving, and sometimes childish remarks on 60 Minutes. If he really had used steroids, he smirked to Mike Wallace, why wasn’t there a third ear coming out of his forehead? He was an even less sympathetic figure after his press conference, in Houston, so defiantly defensive that at one point Hardin passed him a note that said, “Lighten up.” The highlight of the press conference was a seventeen-minute audiotape that Clemens had secretly recorded of a conversation with McNamee, who desperately wanted his old friend to understand that the feds had him by the balls and he had no choice except to talk. The tape ultimately answered no questions but did pose one: Who was the real lowlife in this relationship? Clemens shrugged off suggestions that his legacy was in jeopardy, saying he didn’t “give a rat’s ass” about the Hall of Fame.
Although baseball had banned steroids in 1991, they were nevertheless deeply embedded in the game’s culture by 1998, the year that McNamee told Mitchell that drugs had become part of Clemens’s rigid training routine, which awestruck teammates called “Navy SEAL workouts.” McNamee had just landed a job as a strength coach with the Toronto Blue Jays, for whom the 36-year-old Clemens had won a Cy Young Award the previous season after spending thirteen years with the Red Sox. It’s not clear when McNamee claims to have started giving Clemens injections, but after a mediocre start, Clemens was almost unhittable from June through September, posting a 15-0 record and a 2.29 ERA.
Baseball wouldn’t start testing players for steroids until 2003, so there are no drug tests that could implicate Clemens and impeach his testimony. However, there may be other physical evidence that could expose Clemens to criminal charges of perjury. McNamee has turned over to federal investigators bloody gauze pads and syringes that he says he used to inject the baseball star in 2000 and 2001. The pads may contain Clemens’s DNA, though surely it is contaminated after all this time. And there could be another uncorroborated piece of evidence. McNamee now claims that he gave injections to Clemens in 1998 that caused an abscess on Clemens’s buttocks, not an uncommon side effect for anabolic steroid users. It is not clear from medical records if Clemens’ sore butt was caused by an abscess or something as simple as a bruise, but the trainer, the general manager, and the team doctor for the Blue Jays at the time have all told the New York Times they don’t recall an abscess. Credibility, it would appear, is not one of McNamee’s strong suits. According to a report released by the police in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the Yankees stayed while playing the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, McNamee lied several times during a 2001 investigation into a possible rape reported at the team’s hotel. The victim was given a near-fatal dose of GHB, a drug taken by bodybuilders and sometimes used to facilitate date rape. Charges were never filed.
Clemens seemed nervous at the congressional hearing, licking his lips, wrinkling his brow, insisting that if he was guilty of anything, it was being too nice to people. The most damaging testimony came not from McNamee but from Clemens’s friend and former teammate Andy Pettitte, who had already taken Clemens by surprise by admitting that he’d gotten injections from McNamee; another former teammate, Chuck Knoblauch, admitted the same thing. Of the three players McNamee had fingered, two had confessed. But Pettitte may have done his friend lasting damage when he told the committee that in 1999 or 2000 Clemens confided that he had taken HGH. At first Clemens denied such a conversation had taken place. Later, he claimed that Pettitte had “misremembered” a conversation in which Clemens told him that his wife, Debbie, had taken an HGH injection from McNamee. But the denial did not fit the timeline: Debbie got her injection four years after that misremembered conversation. Clemens’s testimony was full of inconsistencies, apparent lies, and one enormous unanswered question: Why would McNamee tell the truth about injecting Pettitte and Knoblauch but lie about Clemens?
Its rush to judgment aside, the Mitchell report may have performed a public service by shooting holes in some of baseball’s more suspect myths. Start with the illusion that drugs are destroying the integrity of the game. Integrity? Oh, you mean like the monopoly that Congress gives owners, granting them an exemption from antitrust laws and allowing them to thumb their noses at the public while juiced-up stars such as Mark McGwire and Bonds smash the game’s most cherished home run records? You might say the real victims of steroids are Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. Meanwhile, owners bulk up on steroids without having to actually take the nasty things. Baseball revenues soared as home run records fell, jumping from $2.9 billion in 1998 to just over $6 billion last year.
Then there is the myth that steroids are turning players into freaks. Players have always been freaks. That’s what makes them so different from the rest of us. No normal person can throw a baseball 98 miles an hour. Normal people can’t run a slant-in and catch a football with a 250-pound linebacker waiting to cream them. Baseball is no more egregious than professional football, but cheaters are easier to identify because baseball is a game intoxicated with statistics, such as Clemens’s 354 career wins or Bonds’s 762 career home runs.
It is time to admit that not all steroids are dangerous and that every individual and every situation cannot be addressed with the same set of rigid rules. Instead of banning steroids, we should control them. Cool the hysteria; educate without scaring. Understand the problem. “There is a tipping point in a player’s career where he goes from chasing the dream to running from a nightmare,” former big-league outfielder Doug Glanville wrote recently in an essay published in the New York Times’ op-ed page. “At that point, ambition is replaced with anxiety, passion is replaced with survival.” If an athlete like Clemens needs medication to overcome the aches and pains of aging and the fear of failure—if he needs a little help to keep on keeping on—whose business is it, anyway?
Granted, the use of performance enhancers sends a bad message to young people, but so do a lot of other things, like drinking and smoking. Hasn’t our collective experience taught us that prohibition doesn’t work and that we can’t totally kid-proof society? A larger problem with liberalizing the use of steroids is that players who want to compete might be forced to use them against their wishes. That happens, beyond a doubt. We need to make a distinction, as previous generations did, between amateurs and professionals. Sports on an elite level is an inherently unhealthy pursuit; professionals define themselves by what they are willing to do to succeed. Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins has written that “world-class athletes are in the business of torturing their bodies unnaturally,” of changing the body’s chemistry and pushing it to unnatural extremes. It’s the price they have agreed to pay.
So let’s give poor Roger Clemens a break. He’s not a drug addict or even a serious abuser. In the four-year span that McNamee claims to have juiced Clemens, he took a total of maybe sixteen injections—hardly enough to account for a career of greatness or do any harm to the game. Now he faces a perjury investigation that comes down to his word against his accusers’. It seems as if Roger Clemens is being prosecuted not just because he may have used steroids but because he acted like a jerk.
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