Rocket that's crashed and burned

BY KEN DAVIDOFF | ken.davidoff@newsday.com

10:11 PM EDT, May 5, 2008

A Texas gym owner said he was asked by FBI agents in late March if he gave performance-enhancing drugs to Roger Clemens. (Getty Images Photo)

May 6, 2007 played out like a movie script, kicking off like a secret-agent flick and concluding like the biopic of a cult figure.

Roger Clemens awoke in his Houston-area home a year ago Tuesday morning, boarded a plane to New York with agent Randy Hendricks and sneaked into Yankee Stadium. During the seventh-inning stretch of that day's Yankees-Mariners game, venerable Stadium public-address announcer Bob Sheppard directed the crowd to George Steinbrenner's box.

"Well, they came and got me out of Texas, and I can tell you it's a privilege to be back," Clemens told the roaring fans. "I'll be talking to y'all soon."

He was a returning hero, and a rich one, as the Yankees paid him a prorated salary of $28 million to come back. At 44, the seven-time Cy Young Award winner was on top of the world -- the highest-paid player and the talk of the baseball industry.

Today ... well, if someone hadn't already come up with the phrase "What a difference a year makes," the turn that Clemens' life has taken in the last 366 days would have created it.

"Your heart aches for him, for what has happened. Particularly in the last week," Astros owner Drayton McLane told Newsday in a telephone interview. "But Roger is very resilient, and he lives on."

"It's unfortunate," said Derek Jeter, Clemens' closest remaining friend on the 2008 Yankees. "How would you think he's doing?"

Clemens limped off the Yankee Stadium mound last Oct. 7, unable to complete his goal of helping the Yankees win a 27th World Series title and prompting questions whether his body finally had quit on him. But time has turned that into a mere footnote.

Accusations of illegal performance-enhancing drug use have savaged his professional reputation. Reports of myriad infidelities have shaken up his family.

Most daunting of all, Clemens' very freedom is in question, as the Justice Department is investigating whether Clemens perjured himself in his Feb. 13 testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Seemingly Teflon for the first 45 years of his life, able to shake off any accusation that came his way by riding his right arm to more victories and dollars, Clemens now is anywhere but on top.

"Obviously, you hate to see it, that's for sure," said Andy Pettitte, whose congressional testimony helped put Clemens' fate in the hands of the Justice Department.

And don't count on another Clemens comeback to mend any wounds. Both after last season and when the Mitchell Report came out, friends of Clemens told Newsday they believed that he would pitch again in 2008. He didn't like the way his 2007 season ended, the friends said, and he would want to further his argument that he didn't need illegal PEDs to attain his success.

But now, as a Clemens friend put it, "the window is closing." The friend, speaking on the condition of anonymity, believes that Clemens is too distracted by his ongoing off-the-field dramas to engage in a major-league baseball season.

"There's a lot of stress there," the friend said, referring to Clemens' home. "They're hurting, big-time."

Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, appointed by Bud Selig to investigate baseball's past regarding illegal PEDs, released his report Dec. 13 and dedicated roughly nine of his 311 pages to Clemens, the most for any player. Former Yankees assistant strength coach Brian McNamee, with whom Clemens worked in Toronto and New York, alleged that he had injected Clemens with different steroids, as well as human growth hormone.

Of the nearly 100 players named, only Clemens truly went on the offensive. With more to lose than any other accused player, Clemens took on the report, the institution of Major League Baseball and McNamee, a full-bore attack on everyone's credibility.

The results of such a strategy, executed by high-profile Houston attorney Rusty Hardin, have been nothing short of catastrophic for Clemens -- and, for what it's worth, for Hardin's reputation as a sound legal mind.

His filing of a defamation lawsuit against McNamee, and his Jan. 7 airing of a taped phone call in which McNamee discussed his sick son, turned McNamee from a reluctant whistleblower into a direct enemy. McNamee knew of countless skeletons in Clemens' closet, and, coincidence or not, a great deal of negative information about Clemens has come out since that day.

While Clemens found sympathy from Republicans in his Feb. 13 congressional testimony, those Republicans nevertheless signed off on a referral of his case to the DOJ.