Clemens Faces Dangers of Spin in Steroid Case

By ALAN SCHWARZ

Published: January 13, 2008

Roger Clemens has not stumped in New Hampshire, has not yukked with Stephen Colbert, and most certainly has not welled up in a coffee shop. Yet he is running perhaps America’s most provocative campaign.

Accused by his former personal trainer of taking steroids for several years, Clemens has found his reputation as one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history splintering by the day. He has embarked on a furious and, some say, debatable public relations effort with the spin of his tightest slider.

Clemens released an online video denying the allegations; opened himself to a “60 Minutes” interview; filed a defamation lawsuit against the personal trainer, Brian McNamee; and held a contentious news conference Monday in which he not only played a stealthily recorded tape of a telephone conversation with McNamee, but also fumed for the cameras before storming off.

Unlike that of a measured and calculating politician, Clemens’s fierce and occasionally unbridled response to attack evidenced what made him so successful (and at times polarizing) as an athlete: a visceral, almost manic competitiveness that can explode into imprudence. A boot-wearing Texan in the John Wayne mold, Clemens won 354 games and a record 7 Cy Young awards not by meekly pitching around threats but by firing fastballs, some of them up and in. A former catcher, Charlie O’Brien, once said reverently: “When things get tough, Roger wants to go harder, to throw faster. You can see smoke coming out of his nose.”

Clemens’s appeal to the public has been based not on dousing his characteristic fire but on flaunting it.

“Roger knows that these allegations are untrue,” Rusty Hardin, his lawyer, said, “and he will do everything to prove that, including testifying under oath. I don’t think you can go halfway.” Experts in crisis management, however, said he might be losing this strangest of games for the same reasons he won so many others.

An industry has developed around defending celebrities who are accused of wrongdoing, find themselves in a news media firestorm and want to emerge with their public image intact. Whether ultimately guilty (like Martha Stewart) or vindicated (like the Duke lacrosse players), many of them begin with teams of experts who have navigated the course before — and who tend to preach immediate-but-tempered action.

“In my view, you have to make a contrary impression as soon as the news comes out,” said Barry Langberg, a lawyer who represented Carol Burnett and Aretha Franklin in successful defamation lawsuits against tabloid newspapers. “And then you shield the person from direct confrontation. I would not say that has been done in Mr. Clemens’s case, but of course it’s hard to know how much he is responsible for it.”

If Clemens is telling the truth about never having taken steroids, Langberg and other experts said, he is failing to leave that impression — and instead leaving himself open to public and legal consequences. His contentions that injections he received were merely of the painkiller lidocaine and the vitamin B12 have not rung plausibly with the public, they said, despite his emotion.

The only pro-Clemens crowd he has encountered came Saturday at a Texas coaches convention, where he was swathed in home-state devotees at a speaking engagement.

Langberg said that he would have filed a defamation suit as soon as Clemens was named in the report released Dec. 13 by George J. Mitchell because defamation lawsuits impress the public as long as they look as if they are immediate, rather than more calculated, responses. Hardin said he waited until Jan. 6 partly to be assured of Clemens’s truthfulness and to conduct further investigations on Clemens’s behalf.

Langberg said: “People generally have the reaction that if you file a suit, you must be right — you wouldn’t subject yourself to depositions, court proceedings, all those things. The way they did it, timing it with his appearance on ‘60 Minutes,’ it looked too staged and theatrical. They got a lot of negative when it should have been a positive, because of the timing.”

Langberg and Marina Ein, a crisis-management consultant based in Washington, said they would have strongly advised against Clemens’s appearing on “60 Minutes” last Sunday and holding a long news conference the next day. They tell their clients to assert their innocence, outrage and commitment to fight the charges under oath only in a brief written statement, rather than in the more uncontrollable forums in which Clemens lost his cool.

Clemens did issue such a statement through his agent, Randy Hendricks, five days after the Mitchell report became public. After lawyers defended McNamee vociferously, the Clemens team decided to accept a CBS request for a “60 Minutes” interview, in part because it would be conducted by a friend of Clemens’s, Mike Wallace.

“He fell into a trap he didn’t see,” Ein said. “Early in the interview, he said about steroids, ‘Where would I get the needles?’ But later, talking about how McNamee’s injections were only lidocaine and vitamin B12, apparently needles were no problem. I guarantee you that the authorities are going to jump all over that. He did exactly what you should fear would happen.”

In the next day’s testy news conference, Clemens reiterated his outrage, pointed it toward the reporters, and also warned that “I would be afraid for McNamee” if he ever visited Houston. At one point, Hardin passed him a note that said, “Lighten up.”

It appeared notable that the question that caused Clemens to exit abruptly in anger concerned whether he thought the report would endanger his otherwise guaranteed status as a baseball Hall of Famer, a ballplayer’s ultimate legacy. “I could give a rat’s ass about that,” he said with a sneer.

Ein said: “People who are under the microscope tend to not do themselves favors when they go on offense. They’re much better off being very brief and allowing others to speak on their behalf. I don’t think that secretly taping people and news conferences where you’re outraged and storm off is effective or persuasive.”

Langberg added, “I’ve never seen someone help himself by explaining himself.”

Then again, Mark McGwire, who vacuously told a Congressional committee three years ago that he would not “talk about the past” and has since virtually disappeared from public view, was mocked and vilified for his scripted flimsiness. Clemens can hardly be accused of that. Since mounting his counteroffensive 10 days ago, attacking McNamee’s claims and credibility while pledging to tell his story under oath and without immunity, he has displayed the same questionable defiance that has occasionally pocked his career.

With the Boston Red Sox in 1990, Clemens was ejected from a pivotal playoff game in the second inning for profanely jawing with an umpire — which he denied doing — and later remained in the dugout against the rules, which he said he did not know. His catcher that day, Tony Peña, said in a telephone interview Thursday that the incident had demonstrated how Clemens was occasionally too competitive for his own good.

“He wants to win so bad — in his mind, he can’t lose,” said Peña, now a coach with the Yankees. “Sometimes, he tried to do more than he is capable of doing. He wants to show you who’s the best.”

Ten years later, pitching for the Yankees in a World Series game against the Mets, Clemens threw the barrel of a shattered bat in the direction of his longtime nemesis Mike Piazza, and later explained that he thought he was throwing only the ball. At worst, he was laughably lying; at best, Clemens was so wired for battle that he blew past the limits of competitive decorum.

As for his current vehemence, a close confidant of Clemens said that it was partly borne of his shaken view of a country he had represented with pride. Clemens, with a strong patriotic streak, visited United States troops in the Middle East in 2002 and savored wearing the Team USA uniform during the 2006 World Baseball Classic. He seems to feel as if the public and the news media are trying him for virtual treason.

“He’s worried that he has been convicted by a country that he loves,” the confidant said. “It’s like a death watch, and he’s the condemned.”

Meanwhile, Clemens sits at home in Houston, hearing the Martha Stewart comparisons and telling himself that Duke lacrosse vindication awaits. He has said his public piece for now, his legal team says; Clemens will deliver his deposition to Congressional authorities, then testify under oath on live television. When it comes to winning or losing public good will, Roger Clemens — as he has for 24 seasons and through the past two weeks — does not give up the ball.

News source：http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/sports/baseball/13clemens.html?ref=baseball