Roger Clemens wants to blame everyone else except him

Friday, December 28th 2007, 4:00 AM

We get the Floyd Landis defense now from Roger Clemens, which means putting everybody else on trial. Maybe it will work out better for Clemens than it did for Landis. Maybe Clemens will still make it to Cooperstown, make all the money you can make as a Hall of Famer, because there is no positive drug test on him the way there was on Landis. At least not one that we know about.

You remember how Landis tried to do it after he tested positive. First he said he had been drinking Jack Daniel's. After he ran that up the flagpole and nobody saluted, he blamed the tests and the testers and the testing system and the French lab that analyzed his samples and the World Anti-Doping Agency and everybody except Marion Jones.

Landis went on the Internet with nifty PowerPoint presentations and held town hall meetings like he was trying to win the Iowa caucus.Eventually he wrote a book, trying to refute a testosterone level in his urine that seemed big enough to fuel an Acela Express. In the end, they stripped him of his Tour de France title anyway.

"I have never taken any banned substances, including testosterone," Floyd Landis said.

"I will fight these charges with the same determination that I bring to my ... training," Landis said.

"It is now my goal to clear my name and restore what I worked so hard to achieve," he said.

Everything Clemens is saying now about not using steroids to become an even greater baseball pitcher after the age of 35 than he had been before that, Landis said when he went on the attack. Clemens and his lawyer and his agents put Sen. George Mitchell on trial and Sen. Mitchell's report on trial and challenge every bad thing Brian McNamee, Clemen's former trainer, says in that report.

First came Clemens' lawyer, Rusty Hardin, saying that McNamee had slandered Clemens. A few days later came a statement from Clemens issued through his agents. Then Clemens posted his very own video, nearly two minutes in length, one that ended up being a big hit on YouTube.

Next on the Clemens redemption tour, the Rocket pedaling as fast as he can away from the Mitchell Report, comes an appearance with Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes," which historically has been a softer place for famous athletes to land than a down comforter.

At least it will be the first time since the Mitchell Report became public that Clemens has answered a single question about McNamee's allegations that he began shooting Clemens up on steroids starting in 1998, when Clemens was still with the Blue Jays, the season that Clemens began his extraordinary finishing kick with a 14-0 record after a 6-6 start.

Even Barry Bonds never called "Game of Shadows" libelous. If he had, you could have come at Bonds even harder with the question everybody has had since that book was published:

Where's the lawsuit, which is always so much fun when they get to the discovery phase? Sometimes you think the simplest way to resolve these disputes is with a lie detector test.

Instead, Hardin - who seems pretty hot to get his 15 minutes of fame - thinks that everybody is supposed to go weak at the knees when he spoon-feeds a story to the New York Times about hiring private investigators to challenge Mitchell's report. Wow. Real private investigators. Like on television.

"To our surprise," Hardin says, "we have identified several people who logic dictates that Mitchell's team should have talked to but did not. That's troubling. We are asking questions and encourage the news media to do the same."

Hardin, of course, neglects to mention that the most prominent person Sen. Mitchell didn't interview about Roger Clemens was Roger Clemens. Hardin encourages the news media to ask questions and then doesn't make his client available for questions until after they are asked on "60 Minutes" by Mr. Wallace, who has already described Clemens as a friend.

It is the Landis defense, just with more money behind it because Clemens has more, the way he was always looking for more. Next he'll be telling us he just thought McNamee was just giving him B-12 shots. Then it would turn into the Palmeiro defense.

"I did not use steroids and human growth hormone," Clemens says, "and I have never done so."

He will put the Mitchell Report on trial as much as he will do that to Brian McNamee. He will begin to explain with Mike Wallace why McNamee would tell the truth about Andy Pettitte with feds in the room and then turn around - even with the threat of perjury in the room along with those feds - and lie about Clemens.

But for what?

Clemens and his handlers will say, McNamee used to say that he'd never given me steroids, so why does he change his story for George Mitchell? It will be the heart of the Clemens/Landis defense. McNamee is as flawed as a human being as the testing procedures were flawed with the Tour de France.

Nobody is going to defend McNamee's honor or character here. Nobody defended Jose Canseco's honor or character when he was accusing ballplayers of using steroids and human growth hormone all over the place. But Canseco turned out to be telling more of a truth about steroids in baseball than anybody around.

Pettitte's apology wasn't much, and occasionally sounded light enough to qualify as a soufflé. It shows you again how low we set the bar for accountability in sports, especially when it comes to juicing. But at least there was some accountability from Pettitte. There has been none so far with Clemens, just a public relations campaign. Like Floyd Landis'. But for the last time:

How did it work out for Floyd?

News source：http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/yankees/2007/12/28/2007-12-28_roger_clemens_wants_to_blame_everyone_el-3.html