A Meeting of Aging Lions

From the last out of the World Series to the first stretching exercises of spring training, Major League Baseball shows rare good sense by not trying to compete with the juggernaut that is the NFL. Short of an occasional blockbuster trade, free agent signing or indictment, baseball simply can't command our attention while footballs still fill the air.

But this Sunday night, the opening weekend of the NFL playoffs, should be an exception. Because none of the football games figures to be as intriguing as the encounter on CBS's "60 Minutes" between two aging lions, Roger Clemens and Mike Wallace, each of whom once boasted the best fastball in his respective field.

We will tune in to hear Rocket Roger's explanation of how he defied pitching mortality, excelling in a kid's game well into his 40s without the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Since last month, when he was accused in former senator George Mitchell's official MLB report of using steroids and human growth hormone, Clemens has seen his baseball career under attack, his reputation potentially in tatters.

But we also want to see if Wallace, at 89, can still bring it, as he has at "60 Minutes" for almost four decades. Even if the octogenarian has lost a bit on his high hard one, this meeting appears something of a mismatch. Clemens has never been particularly articulate; for much of his career he was reticent, verbally clumsy and often prickly. As a result the superstar was respected as a performer but never exactly beloved. But in recent years he has mastered a rather becoming homespun folksiness that fits his image as a devoted family man. And as he continued to defy Father Time he evolved into something of an authentic American hero.

It is the authentic part that is now open to question. And if Clemens hopes to convince us that he is the victim of a great injustice, he will need Wallace to be on his game and to push him where he has to go to make his case. It is not sufficient for Roger to deliver earnest denials that he has already repeated many times before. Virtually every drug cheat in sports history has denied cheating. And he shouldn't bother to remind us that he never flunked a drug test. Neither did Barry Bonds nor Mark McGwire nor, for that matter, Marion Jones, and she has already been stripped of her Olympic medals and is headed for prison. We are now sophisticated enough about this stuff to know that drug testing has lagged far behind drug cheating ability and that MLB testing, in particular, has been behind the curve and even something of a joke. Nor should Clemens risk parsing words. We are unlikely to be suckered by Clintonian dodges on the exact meaning of words like "take." And he should avoid the word knowingly, which Barry Bonds scattered about in his federal grand jury testimony with the hope—ultimately futile—of skirting a perjury indictment.

Clemens's handlers have suggested that his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, who is the source of the Mitchell Report accusations, has incentive to lie. After all, he was faced with a possible indictment for distribution of illegal drugs and was anxious to please the feds with his performance for Mitchell's team. Yet that doesn't fully explain why McNamee, who was involved intimately with Clemens for many years, would lie in the face of a threatened perjury indictment. And since McNamee also named Andy Pettitte, a close Clemens pal and training partner who has admitted using HGH, the bald-faced-lie defense is a trickier sell.

Clemens has to make the case that McNamee is a liar, which requires robust language that carries with it risk. According to the New York Times, McNamee's lawyer has already warned that an accusation against McNamee will be met with a defamation of character lawsuit, which could mean that Clemens would have to repeat his story under oath.

Clemens and his lawyers are unlikely to want that to happen. Not before a congressional committee, where McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro discovered that telling the truth and telling an apparent lie can be equally fatal to reputations. Not in front of a grand jury, even if its target is McNamee, because, as Bonds discovered, the feds have no sense of humor about shadings of the truth. And not in a deposition, regardless of whether Clemens sues McNamee or vice versa. You don't have to be a legal scholar to appreciate the risk in having Clemens exposed to a talented trial lawyer; you only had to watch New York Knicks coach Isiah Thomas's self-immolation while defending his behavior and that of his Madison Square Garden bosses during a deposition in a recent sexual harassment case.

To the extent that so many fans side with Clemens, it's because they view what has happened to him as a perversion of the American justice system, in which, at least in the Civics 101 version, a man is innocent until he's proven guilty. Unfortunately, most of those fans confuse everyday American life with that justice system. Clemens's current liability is in the court of public opinion, which doesn't adhere to the same lofty standards that American jurisprudence purports to.

In the end, perhaps the only way to change all that is for Clemens to use the "60 Minutes" platform to propel his case into the justice system. To sue or at least call McNamee out and risk a lawsuit in return may be his only recourse if Clemens truly hopes for vindication. We live in a cynical age, one in which the president of Iran can posture to Mike Wallace as the voice of reason, and we tend not to believe people's self-serving pronouncements unless there is jeopardy attached to them. And not even always then.