Defending Clemens--Sort of

As the hurricane of destruction that is Roger Clemens' personal and professional life gathers strength like a tropical storm reaching the balmy waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the storm has enveloped its latest victim: country star Mindy McCready. The Daily News reported last week that Clemens had carried on a decade-long affair with McCready, a family friend, ever since she was fifteen and he twenty-eight. (I should add that I'm following the media designation of McCready as a "star," even though I couldn't pick her out of a lineup of McSteamy, Matthew McConaghey, and the McDonald's McRib. Then again, I don't really follow country music--more to the point, I run far, far away from it at every opportunity).

Clemens denied this affair, as he has denied everything else thrown at him in the past few weeks, hitting the metaphorical dirt more often since retiring than opposing batters did in dodging his deadly high-and-tight fastballs. While I don't believe everything that's said about hm is false, neither do I think that everything about him is true. In part because of his amazing career, especially in what were supposed to be his waning years, and in part because of his own inability to seem recalcitrant or even reasonable in the face of accusations that any neutral observer would find at least plausible, Clemens has become the whipping-boy for the entire Steroid Era. Much as McGwire received the bulk of the blame--and "bulk" is the appropriate word for the hulking redhead--for the sins of baseball players innumerable after his refusal to discuss his past in Congressional testimony, Clemens has become the latest guy for the media, Congress and the public to wag their collective fingers at.

This is all too familiar territory for American culture, as we love to build people up to incredible heights, only to tear them back down again at the slightest hint of (gasp!) humanity. Did Clemens and McGwire and Bonds take PEDs? Possibly all, and certainly most, of this group of three, did, but the same can be said for any group of players in the 90s who mysteriously became beefier or who avoided the inevitable decline associated with age.

Nevermind that Clemens, Bonds and McGwire all did considerable work in the weight room in addition to any doping that might have gone on--neither steroids nor HGH will work all by themselves to make you big and huge--and disregard the fact that all had considerable talent before they got bigger. PEDs may make you bigger, stronger and faster, but they won't help you throw a ball with pinpoint accuracy in the high nineties, or hit balls thrown at similar velocities and send them into the stratosphere.

Nevermind all that; if they cheated, they cheated, and they should be punished along with everyone else who can be proven to have taken PEDs during the nineties. That's the rub, of course, (though I'm not sure if that rub is Balco's infamous "the clear" or "the cream")--until we invent time machines to go back and take urine samples from these guys, all we have is the evidence of our eyes and the record books, and possibly peripheral effects, to rely upon to make our judgments.

Which brings me back to McCreary. We might point the hoary finger at McGwire, or others, if they begin to suffer the cancerous effects of long-term steroid use as he grows older (see Alzado, Lyle). But one of the known effects of steroids, as so vividly demonstrated by the PSA with the shrinking balls, is impotence. Bonds' alleged mistress makes such claims in Game of Shadows; Bonds suffered from impotence (and backne, that pimply affliction typically reserved for teenyboppers sprouting their first back hairs), both of which were indicators to her that he was using steroids.

So if Clemens was using 'roids and carrying on an affair, doesn't one of these things have to be wrong? Granted, Bonds evidently was able to sustain an affair in spite of this, and sexual capacity/incapacity isn't the only thing there is to an affair (though it's got to be a large part of it). Doesn't one of these stories remove some credence from the other? Even if both turn out to be true, it's rather typical and predictable that, in our excesses of mud-slinging, we are accusing Clemens both of artificially boosting his own masculinity (which, ironically, impedes that which biologically defines masculinity) even as we accuse him of being overly profligate with that same biological masculinity (which, ironically, makes him less of a man, at least in my book, for engaging in a long-term decimation of his marriage).

In all the frenzy about Clemens and his manifold alleged misdeeds, let's not forget that we are all part of the culture that inspired these acts: both the baseball culture that demands ever-increasing (or ever-steady) performance on the field and our  popular culture that demands men demonstrate their manliness with as many women as possible, marriage and other committments be damned.

As they say in the South, when you point a finger, remember there are four more pointing back at you.