CLEMENS' DENIAL TOUR '08 NOT CONVINCING
by Mike Celizic
If Roger Clemens had been paying attention these past five years or so, he’d know that he can’t deny his way out of this one.
According to the P.R. folks over at “60 Minutes,” Clemens told the show’s Mike Wallace that the only thing his former trainer, Brian McNamee, injected him with were Vitamin B-12 and lidocaine. The B-12, he said, is something he’s taken for years and the lidocaine was for his joints.
From what I can find, lidocaine is a local anesthetic like novocaine. It can also be used topically to treat skin irritation, but if you take a shot of it in the butt, which was the target area specified by McNamee, it’s not going to go to your joints. All you’re going to get is a numb butt, which might be helpful if it’s sore from all the other shots you’re getting in that part of your anatomy.
Of course, I’m not a doctor, and neither is McNamee. Yet Clemens does admit to Wallace – or so the show says he will when the interview is aired on Sunday – that McNamee did inject him.
I’m just guessing here, but I’m pretty sure Wallace doesn’t hold Clemens’ feet to the fire on this. “60 Minutes” does some pretty hard-hitting pieces, but few of them involve superstar athletes. Those pieces are usually pretty fawning – like the ones the show did with Tiger Woods and Tom Brady. Wallace has interviewed Clemens before and admits to being a fan of the big guy. Clemens probably couldn’t have done better if he’d sat down with the smoochmeister himself, Ahmad Rashad.
But he better not think the interview will make everything McNamee says about injecting Clemens with human growth hormone and steroids go away. And repeating it on Monday at a press conference won’t help. It didn’t work for Barry Bonds or Marion Jones or Rafael Palmiero or Justin Gatlin or Floyd Landis or anyone else. It’s not going to work for him.
You can see what’s coming here. Clemens is setting it up so he can say he thought McNamee was injecting him with vitamins and a butt-numbing agent. McNamee will say Clemens knew exactly what was in those shots. Clemens will say, “Who you gonna believe, him or me?”
Clemens’ attorney, Rusty Hardin, has called McNamee a “troubled man.” Others have said that’s not a fair characterization. If you’re registered with The New York Times, there’s a profile of McNamee here. (If you’re not registered, you should be; it’s a good newspaper.)
Clemens’ credibility takes further damage because his buddy and work-out partner, Andy Pettitte, has already admitted that McNamee did inject him with HGH, as the trainer said he did in baseball’s Mitchell Report.
There’s no hard proof that Clemens took any drugs, and if he was taking them before 2003, I’m not going to hold it against him because baseball had no rules against it. But I do object to lying. I also object to waiting for several weeks after the Mitchell report to get a lawyer and work out a story before starting the 2008 Roger Clemens Denial Tour.
It’s not going to work. Back when Jose Canseco started this with his book that everybody laughed at, we were willing to pretend that the guys ratting out other players were scum and the players denying the charges were the clean-living heroes they pretended to be. Then we found out that Canseco was telling the truth. And then there was the BALCO grand jury and the book, “Game of Shadows.” And now the Mitchell Report.
So who are we going to believe, the guy with the needle in his hand or the one with the needle in his butt?
