LET the Congressional Re cord show that common sense, yesterday, took most of the day off.
Consider that Roger Clemens, among the most gifted and privileged athletes of our time, and with access to North America’s finest physicians, by his own admission allowed a gym instructor to inject him – with something or other – in his lower back.
And that, for the longest time yesterday, didn’t tickle anyone’s curiosity.
There was Clemens, soulfully testifying that he was raised to do the right thing and has always done the right thing. Yet, he was in the habit of allowing an amateur physician to stick needles in him then push the plunger.
When’s the last time any of these representatives allowed someone other than a licensed physician to diagnose their ailment and then inject them with the cure? Where do they go when they have a toothache, a pizzeria?
But not until nearly four hours after the hearing began did someone on the 41-member congressional committee ask Clemens why he didn’t choose to be injected by, say, oh, a doctor, as opposed to Brian McNamee. And when Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) injected that question, Clemens answered:
“I’m a trusting person.”
Oh, OK.
After the hearings, one of the first questions reporters asked Clemens’ attorney, Rusty Hardin, was why Clemens chose to be treated by McNamee instead of a doctor.
“Do you call a doctor every time you don’t feel good?” Hardin answered.
Well, a doctor does come to mind, certainly as opposed to everyone else – especially if I told him to come on over “and don’t forget the syringes.”
McNamee is or was a malodorous person. But that hardly means that Clemens passed the smell test, even if it was a sense-defying day.
The hearing was almost always headed in an irrelevant direction. Right near the top, in his opening statement, McNamee declared that he had lied in the past.
And then, for much of the next four hours and 40 minutes, congressmen and congresswomen took turns trying to establish that McNamee had lied in the past. Thanks.
Among the most dramatic moments, suitable for replay on the nightly newscasts, was one provided by Dan Burton (R-Indiana) who loudly, clearly and repeatedly called McNamee a liar. Burton was clearly a Clemens man.
But McNamee, in addition to having previously made it abundantly clear that he’d lied, also made it clear that he had lied to protect Clemens! But now, with the lid blown off, he no longer would or could.
And how could Burton have missed or dismissed the testimony provided by Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch, testimony confirming McNamee’s claim that he injected them with HGH and/or steroids? Clemens and McNamee were close. Why would McNamee lie about Clemens but tell the truth about Knoblauch and Pettitte? How could that two-plus-two escape a member of this committee?
But this was never, ever a case for Congress. This was always a case for the Justice Department. Major League Baseball – its team owners, team managements, its commissioner, the players and their union heads – knew that illegal performance-improving drugs had invaded baseball.
Yet they all decided – conspired – to do nothing about it. Baseball, which began to sell itself as Home Run Derby played by massively muscled cartoon action figures, had become too profitable to fix anything. In presenting the MLB-funded Mitchell Report, in December, George Mitchell even stated that for years, all of baseball put profit ahead of both integrity and legality.
Most everyone else, in most other businesses would by now have been indicted, convicted and looking forward to parole.
Anyway, yesterday’s hearing could have made history as the first time a merry-go-round ride got us somewhere.
Still, Roger Clemens isn’t alone. I’m a trusting person, too. Starting with our instincts, we all are.
And until Clemens stops telling us what a great American he is and starts telling us why McNamee got it so right about Knoblauch and Pettitte but got it so wrong about him, and until Clemens provides a logical reason why he chose a non-physician – a fellow who supplied steroids to others – to be his physician, Clemens continues to put a mighty strain on those trusting instincts.