Keidel: Roger's Thesaurus
By: Jason Keidel
He sauntered into Capitol Hill, swathed in seven Cy Youngs, expecting a glorified autograph session. A few hours later he accidentally expanded the sporting lexicon and just may have "misremembered" his way into an orange jumpsuit.
Odd things happen when the performer leaves the rehearsed comfort of his stage. In the case of Roger Clemens, he flashed his stardom like a badge through the halls of congress. And while he made his way through the metal detector, the B.S. detector lit up like three cherries on a slot machine.
Clemens has become a corporeal cliché, his cover-up way worse than his crime. Worst part of all is he never had to be there. He received no subpoena, no ultimatum. Only his arrogance and myopic sense of invincibility compelled him to set fire to his legacy in the nation's capital while on national television.
He wanted you to hear it from the horse's mouth, not knowing that Brian McNamee saved syringes laced with DNA from the horse's ass. And while most of us have done things we regret, we don't lie to the feds about it.
Sure, Clemens's lawyer should have put him in a sleeper hold as soon as he opened his mouth under oath. But this is on Clemens, who asserted his First Amendment right when he should have pleaded the Fifth.
Perhaps Roger Clemens is not the brightest boy on the block. For twenty years he communicated by nodding to a squatting catcher. And as long as he blasted clouds of dirt off the catcher's mitt that was all the talking required.
Roger shaved his vocabulary down to two words at his arraignment for perjury: not guilty. With the hubris of the captured luminary, he goes down swinging and whiffing, like so many on the business end of his rising fastball. Then he did the rich man's perp walk, ducking into a dark SUV with tinted windows.
You would understand if Clemens looked in grim retrospect at his former pal, Andy Pettitte, who was always a more nuanced pitcher and person, tricking foes and fans alike. Few of us believe that Pettitte was entirely truthful when he said that he only used HGH twice to recover from injury. But we want it to be true because we embrace character in our baseball characters. Easy Andy, drawl and all, placed his hand on the Bible and we knew he could recite those pages under his palm. He played the naïve jock so well that we took him at his word even when he broke it. But at least Pettitte copped to partial guilt, and that was enough for us.
No, Roger couldn't cop to anything. Like his bulging brethren (Barry Bonds) in the other league, Clemens refused to march in lockstep with Father Time. When we're 25 we think 35 is something that happens to other people. And it must be exponentially worse for athletes trapped in the vacuum of celebrity. Because when 35 hits – and it always does – they must remold the math.
Clemens asked – no, demanded – us to ignore the swollen face, feet, and feats heretofore reserved for Stan Lee and Stephen King. You'll recall the defiant flamethrower in a Blue Jays jersey, his seething stroll from mound to dugout at Fenway, scowling up at the owner's box because they had the gall to give up on him.
For all their woes over 86 years, the Red Sox reasonably assumed that 13 years of throwing gas drained the Rocket's tank. Clemens, like so many of his peers, took his act to some clever chemists, the athletic version of a nip 'n' tuck. Bud Selig and his acolytes gave a no-look pass, swimming in cash during the Summer of Sammy. Like all lies and chemical highs, the crash was inevitable.
What have we learned? Sadly, we learned that the pages in the Mitchell Report were merely Cliffs Notes to a drama that renders the game with an eternal stain. We pray that the Clemens saga is the bookmark to an era while knowing that it isn't.
Perhaps we can just remember how Roger Clemens started and misremember how he ended.
Feel free to email me: Jakster1@mac.com
