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Clemens Throws Brushback Pitch

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By DUFF WILSON, New York Times News Service

Published: January 8, 2008

Updated: 01/08/2008 12:44 am

HOUSTON - Roger Clemens unleashed a furious attack on Monday on his former trainer, Brian McNamee, with a news conference featuring a tape of a secretly recorded phone call and a lawsuit accusing McNamee of lying about injecting him with performance-enhancing drugs.

"I'm going to Congress and I'm going to tell the truth," Clemens vowed at the news conference shortly before he got angry at a question about his feelings and his chances to make the Hall of Fame and bolted off stage and out of the room.

"Do you think I played my career because I'm worried about the damn Hall of Fame?" he told a room filled with many potential voters. "You keep your vote. I don't need the Hall of Fame to justify that I put my butt on the line and I worked my tail off, and I defy anybody to say I did it by cheating or taking any shortcuts, OK?"

McNamee responded to the day's events through his lawyers, vowing to testify against Clemens, the seven-time Cy Young Award winner, when both appear before the House Government Reform Committee on Jan. 16.

"It's war now," Richard D. Emery, one of McNamee's lawyers, said in a phone interview. He lambasted Clemens for secretly taping the phone call, saying McNamee had called Clemens because he wanted Clemens to talk to McNamee's ailing 10-year-old son and that Clemens had taken advantage of the situation. "This guy will stop at nothing," Emery said of Clemens.

In a related development, Andy Pettitte, a close friend and former teammate of Clemens who has admitted that McNamee told the truth about Pettitte's links to human-growth hormone, has now hired a lawyer to represent him at the congressional hearing. The lawyer, Jay Reisinger of Pittsburgh, is the same attorney who represented Sammy Sosa when Sosa was summoned to appear before Congress in March of 2005.

In a "60 Minutes" interview broadcast Sunday night, Clemens had maintained he did not know ahead of time that he would be named in the Mitchell report as a user of steroids and HGH.

However, in the lawsuit against McNamee, Clemens' attorney quotes from a lengthy interview that two private investigators conducted with McNamee a few days before the Mitchell report was released. That implied that Clemens and his attorney suspected what was coming in the report ahead of time and had approached McNamee to get more information.

The attorney, Rusty Hardin, tried to justify Clemens' answer on "60 Minutes" by saying his client could not be sure that he was going to be named in the report and thus had spoken honestly on the broadcast.

Meanwhile, lawyers for both sides put different interpretations on the secretly recorded phone call that was played at the news conference. McNamee had contacted Clemens at least in part to ask him to speak with his son. Clemens called him back from his house with the tape running and his lawyers listening in.

Under state law in New York and Texas, only one party has to give consent for a phone conversation to be taped. In this case, it was Clemens.

"All I did was what I thought was right, and I never thought it was right but I thought that I had no other choice, put it that way," McNamee said on the call, referring to a federal threat of prosecution if he did not tell the truth.

Clemens' lawyer emphasized that McNamee never contradicted Clemens during the call when Clemens said that he had not used performance-enhancing drugs and that McNamee should tell the truth.

"When Roger says, 'I just want you to tell the truth,' McNamee never says, 'I did tell the truth,' and when Roger says, 'I never did drugs,' McNamee never says, 'Yes you did,'" Hardin said in an interview.

Hardin said the call was "ambiguous" but worked in Clemens' favor.

McNamee appeared to get emotional during the call and made references to the toll the fallout from the Mitchell report was taking on his family and his son's health.

After the 17-minute tape had been played, Clemens answered questions.

"I'm trying to keep my composure here through all of this," Clemens said. "How do you prove a negative? How do I do it? Do I just keep shelling out millions?"

Emery, meanwhile, criticized Clemens for manipulating McNamee during the Jan. 4 phone call.

Clemens' lawyer, Hardin, said he thought McNamee may have been trying to "set up" Clemens, "try to get him to offer him something," with repeated questions, "What do you want me to do?"

McNamee's lawyers both said they had not listened in on the phone call and did not know about it until later.

McNamee talked about his son at the start of the call: "He's not feeling good. It's real, man, this is real, everything else is a joke."

Emery said Brian McNamee Jr., 10, has celiac disease, which damages the small intestine and interferes with absorption of nutrients from food.

Clemens admitted McNamee gave him injections, but said it was Vitamin B-12 and the painkiller lidocaine.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

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