IS THERE a chance Roger Clemens is telling the truth? Sure there is.
No matter how loud the voices rise, no matter how much rhetoric gets thrown around, no matter how many lawsuits are threatened, there are, and will always be, two men who know for sure what Roger Clemens knew and when he knew it.
Brian McNamee is one.
And Clemens is the other.
This is the problem living in the Age of Accusation. It would be nice if life proceeded like an episode of “Life” (still the most vastly underrated show on TV, by the way), or like an episode of “Law & Order,” in which even the most hard-to-detect facts somehow come to life in courts of law under the magical spells of the great Jack McCoy.
It would be nice if somewhere there was grainy videotape of McNamee sticking a needle the size of Delaware in Clemens’ rear end, and if the camera then conveniently picked up the word “testosterone” on the side of the box. It would be even better if the audio picked up Clemens himself saying, “Thanks for shooting me up full with HGH, Brian.”
Alas, even Mike Wallace in his prime would have had difficulty getting those kinds of goods on Clemens or anyone else. And it would be too much to ask that Clemens would have created the kind of elaborate taping system that eventually allowed Richard Nixon to hang himself with his own noose, right?
So no matter what we get out of the Wallace-Clemens conversation tonight on “60 Minutes,” we’re not going to be any closer to knowing what the truth is. We will have our suspicions, sure, the most damning one remaining the quasi-confession Andy Pettitte released a few days after the Mitchell Report was made public. Even the most ardent Clemens supporter – assuming any still exist – will continue to have an impossible time believing Pettitte knew what was going in his system while Clemens was blissfully unaware.
That’s just the way it is. And that’s the way it’s going to be in the Age of Accusation. For now, and forever, the strategy toward trying to affirm your innocence is raising your voice and lifting it to the sky as loud and as indignantly as you can. Especially if you know there isn’t a smoking gun (or a dripping syringe) that will ultimately shoot you down and shoo you off the stage.
Clemens is hardly the first one, of course. No one has screamed louder or longer than Barry Bonds, even as the government methodically built a case against him. Pete Rose screeched for a decade and a half that he was innocent, that he was an aggrieved victim of wretched circumstance, right up until he needed to replenish his checking account and discovered that a revised version of the truth – also known as admitting a lie – could be a profitable way to pass the day. Hell, there was that picture of Frank Sinatra with half the Gambino Family that surfaced years ago; even that wasn’t enough to change the Chairman’s story.
So Clemens shouts, and he screeches, and he goes on his Web page and declares his innocence, and he goes on the air with an 89-year-old man who makes regular appearances in George Steinbrenner’s box at Yankee Stadium, and he is going to keep shouting into the wind. McNamee, through his lawyers, no doubt will shout back.
And it won’t matter, not in any real way, because the only real evidence we have of Clemens’ alleged guilt is the information McNamee supplied to the Mitchell committee. And let’s just say that no one is ever going to confuse Brian McNamee as a member of Eliot Ness’ band of Untouchables.
Do I think Clemens used steroids? You bet I do. I believe every word of the Mitchell Report. I believe if Roger Clemens had never been a Yankee that Andy Pettitte would never have been tempted to discover what magic powers lay in the mysterious mistress of HGH. I believe Clemens’ inexplicable explosion in the World Series seven years ago isn’t nearly as inexplicable as we thought, that what we saw when he tossed that bat at Mike Piazza was the most public example of Roid Rage that we’ve ever seen – and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was related to what we saw the time he was kicked out of that ALCS game years before that.
I think all of that.
But I don’t know it. I can’t prove it. Same as the Mitchell Report didn’t prove it. Same as Clemens can’t prove his innocence, no matter how many forums he tries to hijack now, no matter how loudly he tries to get across his message. Same as Barry Bonds can cling to the notion of “burden of proof” until his fingers are exhausted, because until a jury renders a verdict there is no conclusion, no finality, just accusation.
And in the Age of Accusation, we see it every day. Except Wednesdays, 10 o’clock to 11, when Jack McCoy makes everything right in 44 minutes. Plus commercials.
Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail address is michael.vaccaro@nypost.com. His book, “1941: Think About How Good Joe DiMaggio Could Have Been if He’d Had Brian McNamee as a Trainer” is available at bookstores.
VAC’S WHACKS
If the first episode of the final season of “The Wire” is any indication, it will be almost impossible for the people who vote for Emmy Awards to continue to pretend the show doesn’t really exist. And once that happens, they should give Dominic West four of them, the equivalent of retroactive pay.
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Anyone who saw that Sabres-Penguins game on TV last week – 75,000 people at a football stadium watching ice hockey in the snow – knows what a crime it is that Yankee Stadium was deprived the chance to play host to one of those babies in its declining years.
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We’re coming up on a month and change until pitchers and catchers, and with LaTroy Hawkins joining Kyle Farnsworth in the bullpen, it would be wise for Yankees fans to report to camp with their vocal cords in midseason shape if they want to be able to boo right from Opening Day.
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SNY will soon be bidding farewell to Julie Donaldson , meaning there’s even less reason to watch that channel between October and April than there is now.