With the new book about Roger Clemens hitting the stores today, the Rocket has come out of the closet (so to speak), to stick to his guns about his non-use of PED.
According to this piece from STATS,
Roger Clemens broke his silence Tuesday, again denying that former personal trainer Brian McNamee injected him with performance-enhancing drugs in his first public comments in more than a year.
Here’s a more thorough piece from MLB.com The new book, American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime, by four writers from the New York Daily News, was reviewed in The New York Times today. The critique is generally positive:
By focusing on Clemens and the people around him, the authors have turned the sprawling story of steroid-use into a sleek narrative that reads like an investigative thriller, peopled by a Dickensian cast of characters, from big-name ball players and their high-powered lawyers to small time bodybuilders and gym owners, from federal investigators and members of Congress to denizens of “the violent criminal underworld of muscle-building drug distribution.”
but also notes a trend that has become all too familiar when discussing such allegations:
As in Bob Woodward’s inside-Washington books, the narrative of “American Icon” draws upon lots of official documents — in this case sworn depositions, medical records, courtroom transcripts, records from criminal investigations, as well as the groundbreaking articles these reporters did for The Daily News, and hundreds of interviews, both on the record and off. And as in many of those Woodward books, the omniscient narrative voice employed in these pages can often make sourcing highly opaque: scenes that are authoritatively rendered in an omniscient narrative voice may in fact reflect or spin one party’s point of view. The reporters write that their requests for an interview with Clemens were ignored or declined.
That last sentence has me confused; doesn’t it have to be one or the other? Unless there were repeated request by more than one of the writers. A small point, but even so…
The most amazing aspect of this whole mess: somebody is clearly lying, and we’ve taken to not believing the player as a matter of course. A lot of this is due to Clemens. Can he really be that delusional? Can he possibly be telling the truth? One way or another, I wish the whole thing was over. I can’t understand the need for Congress to be involved, but since they are, I can’t understand why this is taking so long.
is available on Amazon.com,
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