By Leonard Shapiro
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
1:56 PM
What were Roger Clemens and his attorneys thinking with their cockamamie broadcast-based defense strategy that now clearly has backfired on a bully of a ballplayer they surely had to know was going to be so media-unfriendly?
Couldn't Rusty Hardin, Clemens's colorful and eminently quotable lawyer, see that hardball side of Clemens when his client first stood in front of the cameras at a Houston news conference shortly after the Mitchell Report on the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs came out in mid-December?
An intimidating presence on the mound for so many years, Clemens spent most of that memorable session snarling surly answers back at the media invited to attend, as if they were a gaggle of .225 hitters not worthy of his best stuff. Eventually he stormed away from the podium in a self-righteous huff, virtually guaranteeing this grumpy old pitcher would be the lead story on SportsCenter morning, noon and night and get huge play on national and local newscasts around the country in the same news cycle, and several more.
As I watched Clemens's performance that day, I couldn't help but feel that fans rarely allowed in the inner sanctums of big-time sports were actually witnessing what many in the media have seen in locker rooms for years -- not-so-friendly, big-time athletes acting like petulant children when things aren't quite going their way.
I'd never personally been that up close and personal with Clemens before, but I've certainly seen his type, going all the way back to the time in the early 1970s when Redskins quarterback Billy Kilmer refused to talk to a scrum of reporters around his locker after a game unless I left the group and went elsewhere.
Apparently, he had been unhappy about something I had written that week. And when I declined his request to leave the group, he got more than a little belligerent and we nearly came to blows. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed at the time, and we both have since been able to laugh about it now that Kilmer is happily retired in South Florida. Last time I saw him, in fact, he told me to call him the next time I was in town so we could go out and play golf.
But we digress.
Clemens could have used a few cool heads of his own to shake him by the lapels and prevent him from appearing in that initial press conference in Houston and then again on Capitol Hill last week for another even more contentious Congressional hearing. His sworn testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform made him look even worse than some of the grandstanding Congressman grilling him for 4? hours of often riveting, often revolting must-see national TV.
According to Congressman Henry Waxman, who chaired the hearing, it was Clemens and his people who insisted on appearing before Congress that day to give his side of the story. Waxman told the New York Times the day after the hearing that he probably shouldn't have yielded to their request because the committee already had enough sworn affidavits and closed-door testimony from most of the key players and that it ultimately was a mistake to hold the hearing in the first place.
For Clemens, going to Washington was a killer mistake, preceded by his decision days before the hearing to pay lobbying visits -- not to mention signing autographs and posing for pictures -- with many of the Congressmen on the committee and members of their staffs, roughly akin to a defendant meeting and greeting his jurors before the day before the trial.
Under oath, Clemens was not to be believed. He hemmed and hawed and nervously licked his lips, using words like mis-heard and mis-remembered and generally leaving the impression that basically he was lying through his teeth.
Brian McNamee, his former trainer and very former friend who allegedly injected him with HGH and steroids, seemed far more credible in his testimony, even if he admitted he had lied before, mainly to protect himself and his athlete pals and clients from possible suspensions or prosecutions.
McNamee, sitting at the other end of the table from Clemens, actually came off as a somewhat sympathetic figure, a man now apparently broke and ruined, even if the testimony, interviews with the committee and statements from other clients like Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch indicated that he was not lying about juicing Clemens.
Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings at one point asked Clemens that if McNamee was telling the truth about providing HGH for Pettitte and Knoblauch, both of whom have confirmed it, how was it that "when it comes to you (Clemens), he's lying?" Clemens never answered him, going off instead on a tangent involving Pettitte and his use of HGH.
Pettitte, who did not appear at the hearing but spoke to committee staff and members in a private session the week before, clearly seemed like the biggest winner last week, even if he did throw his old pal and training partner Clemens under the team bus. But unlike the still defiant Clemens, at least he came clean, and did it again during a press conference yesterday when he reported to the Yankees' training camp in Tampa and publicly apologized profusely for using HGH.
Perhaps if slugger Mark McGwire had admitted using steroids during a similar Congressional hearing before the same committee in 2005, he'd be in the Hall of Fame by now. Instead, he lives mostly in seclusion behind gated walls and may never be voted in. If sprinter Marion Jones had admitted using steroids right from the start, she might well be preparing to run in the Beijing Olympics this summer instead of going to jail.
We Americans tend to be mostly forgiving, particularly if time is served, sincere apologies are offered and past mistakes are fully acknowledged with some contrition.
But we tend to shun those who deny, deny, deny, then delay, delay, delay hoping it might all go away. It never did for Pete Rose. It probably won't for McGwire, and it may well be going in the very same wrong direction for Clemens, the biggest loser of all last week on Capitol Hill.
By the way, No. 2 on that same loser list would have to be Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, who held Clemens up as a "titan in baseball," and then, along with many of his Republican colleagues on the panel, tried to discredit McNamee in a hearing that somehow became purely partisan.
Burton was the most vocal, bellowing from his sky-high horse to McNamee at one point, "you, with all these lies which are not true, are destroying (Clemens's) reputation...This is really disgusting...Lie after lie after lie...I know one thing I don't believe, and that's you."
Then again, maybe it takes one slime-bucket to know another one.
After all, according to published reports, this is the same man who, while married to his first wife in the 1980s, fathered an illegitimate child after an affair with an employee of an Indiana state agency. He's also been accused of sexual harassment in the workplace, including the alleged groping of a lobbyist from Planned Parentood in the mid-1990s when she visited his office.
Salon, the internet magazine, reported in a 1995 profile on Burton that several sources indicated the Congressman "has also maintained sexual relationships with women on his Congressional and campaign payrolls."
This is the same Dan Burton widely criticized by his home town Indianapolis Star newspaper for missing countless votes on the House floor while playing in a number of charity golf tournaments on the PGA Tour.
In 1997, he was the guest of the AT&T chairman and CEO in a practice round before the PGA Tour's annual Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Three weeks earlier, he had assumed chairmanship of a House committee that had approval over a legislative agency soon to award $5 billion in government contracts for long distance and local telecommunication services, with AT&T one of the companies trying to get a large piece of that action. AT&T reportedly also hosted a campaign fundraiser for him that week at a local restaurant.
This is the same Dan Burton who has been accused for many years of unethical campaign fundraising practices, a bullying, seemingly buffoonish Congressman, the Chicago Tribune once editorialized was a "crude, crass man who is a disgrace to his district, his state, his party and the House."
Hardly anyone in the print or broadcast media pointed out the incongruity of Burton being Clemens's most vocal supporter last week, though virtually everyone now agrees that the greatest pitcher of his generation surely came out of those hearings looking like a very guilty man. Live television, lousy legal advice and a hypocritical defender like Dan Burton can do that to a man, even a so-called titan.
E-Mail of The Week
I enjoyed reading your column this morning on Red Barber. Although I was a rabid Giant fan when I was young, I always listened to Red Barber, who I consider the greatest baseball announcer of all-time. You may be too young to remember, but in the 40s, Red used to broadcast Dodger road games from the studio using a Western Union feed to describe the game. It was remarkable how he made you feel that you were in the stands actually witnessing the game, even though you could hear the ticker in the background.
Gerald Post
Tampa, Fla.
Leonard Shapiro can be reached at Badgerlen@hotmail.com or Badgerlen@aol.com.
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