McNamee had said about them was true, Clemens not only vociferously denied the allegations against him but also went on to file a defamation suit against his former trainer and insisted on testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, even though the leaders of that committee told him that going through such a questioning in public was unnecessary. Whereas two of his former teammates, Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch (who were also cited in the Mitchell report), acknowledged that what Mr. “A man who had spent much of his life embracing the perks of stardom celebrity golf, philanthropy, goofy cameos in movies virtually disappeared from the public landscape.” Hubris, questionable legal and public relations strategies, and Clemens’s “refusal to lose” would turn his world upside down in the course of three dramatic months from December 2007 through February 2008: “He went from a shoo-in for Cooperstown to the target of a Justice Department investigation,” the authors of “American Icon” write. As they astutely point out, it is a story right out of classical tragedy: the very qualities that once made Clemens a demigod on the mound aggression, tenacity and a relentless need to win were the very qualities that would sabotage him in real life, “in the legal arena, on Capitol Hill and in the court of public opinion.” In their gripping new book, “American Icon,” four reporters for The Daily News in New York Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O’Keeffe and Christian Red, who constitute the paper’s award-winning sports investigative team recount the story of Clemens’s shockingly swift fall from grace. Clemens is currently under a federal inquiry into whether he lied when he testified under oath before a Congressional committee that he never used performance-enhancing drugs denials that directly contradict assertions made by his former trainer, Brian McNamee, who testified that he had injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone on numerous occasions from 1998 to 2001. Mitchell’s December 2007 report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball. This was just one measure of how fast and far the heat-throwing pitcher had tumbled since he was prominently named in former Senator George J. It was as though Roger the Rocket who had become a focus of a federal investigation had never even pitched for the Bronx Bombers. Conspicuously absent was Roger Clemens, the seven-time Cy Young Award winner, who boasted 354 career victories and 4,672 strikeouts on his stat sheet.
The ceremony commemorating the Yankees’ final game at the old stadium last September featured appearances by famous Yankees like Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Don Larsen, Reggie Jackson, Tino Martinez, Bernie Williams and David Wells, and a video celebrating the team’s greatest players at each position.
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