KRIEGER: Clemens, Wallace both fail to deliver

Clemens, Wallace both fail to deliver

By Dave Krieger, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published January 7, 2008 at 12:45 a.m.

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Photo by Julie Jacobson / Associated Press/2007

Roger Clemens said he received injections of a local anesthetic and vitamin B-12, not steroids, as has been claimed.

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On the bright side, for a guy about to turn 90, Mike Wallace looks great. We should all look so good at 891/2.

That will about do it for the bright side. It's hard to say whether Wallace's interview with Roger Clemens on 60 Minutes Sunday night was more disheartening for fans of Clemens or fans of Wallace.

For fans of Clemens, it was more of the same. He denied everything. He has no explanation for any of it - why his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, would lie about him, or how he managed a stunning late career surge in performance that mirrors that of Barry Bonds.

And what of the injections McNamee told former Sen. George Mitchell he gave Clemens?

Clemens did not deny them. Instead, he said they consisted of lidocaine, a local anesthetic, and vitamin B-12. Wallace did not explore why one might take a local anesthetic in the backside, where McNamee said he made the injections.

Nearly a month after publication of McNamee's allegations in the Mitchell Report, Clemens finally expressed some of the emotion you would expect from an innocent man unfairly accused, emotion so noticeably absent from his earlier written and YouTube denials.

It might have been more persuasive if he had offered any reason for McNamee to tell the truth about injecting Andy Pettitte with human growth hormone and lie about injecting Clemens with steroids and HGH.

"Shocked," Clemens said of his reaction to Pettitte's admission that McNamee was telling the truth. It was hard not to think of Claude Rains.

Clemens' version would also be more persuasive if Jose Canseco hadn't reported some time ago that vitamin B-12 was a common cover story for steroid injections.

"It was so open, the trainers would jokingly call the steroid injections 'B-12 shots,' and soon the players had picked up on that little code name, too," Canseco wrote in Juiced, the steroid tell-all published in 2005.

"You'd hear them saying it out loud in front of each other: 'I need to go in and get a B-12 shot,' a player would say, and everyone would laugh."

In fact, Canseco specifically linked Clemens with this cover story, while carefully pointing out he had no knowledge of Clemens as a steroid user.

"It was the pitchers who really kept that 'B-12' joke going," he wrote. "For example, I've never seen Roger Clemens do steroids, and he never told me that he did. But we've talked about what steroids could do for you, in which combinations, and I've heard him use the phrase 'B-12 shot' with respect to others."

In fact, you may recall Rafael Palmeiro, who denied using steroids just as vehemently as Clemens, trying to blame former teammate Miguel Tejada for a tainted B-12 shot after testing positive. Tejada told Palmeiro to leave him out of it.

Tejada, too, was implicated as a user in the Mitchell Report.

Sadly, Sunday's interview may have reflected more poorly on Wallace than Clemens. Clemens, at least, said what you would expect.

Wallace sounded as if he had been dragged out of mothballs to use the credibility he built as the bulldog of 60 Minutes to do a soft celebrity interview instead.

So sympathetic was he to Clemens, whom he acknowledges is a friend, that he permitted the interview to veer off into Clemens' outrage at the recall of the painkiller Vioxx and, of course, his indignation at the direction of our country, now that the principle of innocent until proven guilty lies in tatters.

Although Wallace claimed at the end of the segment that McNamee declined an interview, one of McNamee's lawyers told Newsday late last week that CBS had contacted neither McNamee nor his legal team.

In other words, the segment was never intended as an attempt to get to the bottom of the allegations. It was a celebrity interview and, because it was Clemens' first since the Mitchell Report, a "get" for venerable 60 Minutes.

At times, it was almost comical. Clemens wondered why on earth he would put something dangerous like steroids into his body, moments after relating how he ate Vioxx "like Skittles" and insisted on a painkilling injection when Yankees manager Joe Torre wanted to sit him down.

In fact, his self-professed determination to do anything to perform was perhaps the best explanation yet offered for why he might do steroids.

He would have broken down if he had used them, he insisted. They are a short-term fix. Wallace never asked how Bonds lasted so long.

He did ask if Clemens would take a lie-detector test - a useless canard that didn't even help the public relations offensive because Clemens rightly wondered about its validity.

Certainly, Clemens' indignation would play better if it didn't follow Palmeiro's indignation and Tejada's indignation and Bonds' indignation and Mark McGwire's indignation and so on and so forth. There has been so much lying by so many ballplayers that we have come to expect it.

In exchange for its scoop, 60 Minutes put on your basic infomercial. It didn't make the sale.

kriegerd@RockyMountainNews.com

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