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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Clemens vs. McNamee in Congress: It takes a while, but one committee member finally asks the right question: What are we doing?
By King Kaufman
Read more: Drugs, Sports, Baseball, War on Drugs, Major League Baseball, Steroids, Roger Clemens, King Kaufman, Sports Daily, MLB
Feb. 14, 2008 | It took three hours and 41 minutes, but somebody finally said something worthwhile at the House Oversight Committee hearing on drugs in baseball Wednesday.
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., noted that he'd supported the committee's baseball hearings in 2005 because it has jurisdiction over drug policy, but then said, "I'm convinced that this hearing today is a shift away from questions about widespread use of steroids in baseball and instead focuses on alleged wrongdoing by individuals."
Those individuals sat in front of Westmoreland at the witness table. Roger Clemens, alleged in the Mitchell Report to have taken steroids and human growth hormone, sat a few feet away from his accuser and former personal trainer, Brian McNamee. Between them was Charles Scheeler, a partner in Mitchell's law firm who had worked on the report but who was mostly there so the two principals wouldn't have to sit next to each other.
Clemens spent about four and a half hours repeating his now-familiar denials, occasionally angrily. "No matter what we discuss here today, I am never going to have my name restored," he said in a sometimes heated opening statement. It was one of the few things he or anyone else said all day that was indisputably true.
In one of the toughest sequences of questioning late in the hearing, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., hammered Clemens with questions about why McNamee would lie about injecting Clemens with illegal drugs when Clemens' former teammates Chuck Knoblauch and Andy Pettitte had confirmed under oath that McNamee's similar statements about them were true.
Clemens went into a rambling answer about how he and Pettitte were close friends, and if Pettitte thought Clemens was an HGH user he would have discussed the matter with him when Pettitte used in 2002 and '04, all of which was beside the point.
"It's hard to believe you, sir," Cummings said. "I hate to say that. You're one of my heroes, but it's hard to believe you."
And it was hard to believe him. No members of the panel picked up on it, but Clemens spent the better part of the day contradicting himself about Pettitte. Pettitte said in his deposition that Clemens told him in 1999 or 2000 that he had used HGH and it helped him. Pettitte also said that when he, Pettitte, brought up the subject again in 2005, Clemens said Pettitte had misheard him, that he'd been talking about his wife, Debbie, using HGH. Pettitte said he was sure he hadn't misheard but didn't want to argue about it at the time.
