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Teri Thompson - American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in Americas Pastime

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It was an epic downfall. In twenty-four seasons pitcher Roger Clemens put together one of the greatest careers baseball has ever seen. Seven Cy Young Awards, two World Series championships, and 354 victories made him a lock for the Hall of Fame. But on December 13, 2007, the Mitchell Report laid waste to all that. Accusations that Clemens relied on steroids and human growth hormone provided and administered by his former trainer, Brian McNamee, have put Clemens in the crosshairs of a Justice Department investigation.
Why did this happen? How did it happen? Who made the decisions that altered some lives and ruined others? How did a devastating culture of drugs, lies, sex, and cheating fester and grow throughout Major League Baseballs clubhouses? The answers are in these extraordinary pages.
American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in Americas Pastime is about much more than the downfall of a superstar. While the fascinating portrait of Clemens is certainly at the center of the action, the book takes us outside the white lines and inside the lives and dealings of sports executives, trainers, congressmen, lawyers, drug dealers, groupies, a porn star, and even a murdererall of whom have ties to this saga. Four superb investigative journalists have spent years uncovering the truth, and at the heart of their investigation is a behind-the-scenes portrait of the maneuvering and strategies in the legal war between Clemens and his accuser, McNamee.
This compelling story is the strongest examination yet of the rise of illegal drugs in Americas favorite sport, the gym-rat culture in Texas that has played such an important role in spreading those drugs, and the way Congress has dealt with the entire issue. Andy Pettitte, Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, and Chuck Knoblauch are just a few of the other players whose moving and sometimes disturbing stories are illuminated here as well. The New York Daily News Sports Investigative Team has written the definitive book on corruption and the steroids era in Major League Baseball. In doing so, they have managed to dig beneath the disillusion and disappointment to give us a stirring look at heroes who all too often live unheroic shadow lives.

Teri Thompson: author's other books


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For Mom and Dadand of course Jim TT For Mom and Dad and all my teachers NV - photo 1
For Mom and Dadand of course Jim TT For Mom and Dad and all my teachers NV - photo 2

For Mom and Dadand, of course, Jim

TT

For Mom and Dad and all my teachers

NV

For Mom and Dad, Tim and Terry, and especially Lorna and Aidan

MO

For Beth, Mom and Dad, all the Reds and O'Neils

CR

Contents

Chapter One:

Chapter Two:

Chapter Three:

Chapter Four:

Chapter Five:

Chapter Six:

Chapter Seven:

Chapter Eight:

Chapter Nine:

Chapter Ten:

Chapter Eleven:

Chapter Twelve:

Chapter Thirteen:

Chapter Fourteen:

Chapter Fifteen:

Authors' Note

This is not just a book about Roger Clemens and his fall from grace. He is at the book's core, of course, but there are others who also play crucial parts: Brian McNamee, Andy Pettitte, Tom Pettitte, Rusty Hardin, Richard Emery, Earl Ward, Kelly Blair, along with other ballplayers, lawyers, and politicians. But this book isn't really about them, either. They are basically role players in a drama about cheating and lying and fameall the elements that seem to have taken over and dominated what once was America's purest and favorite sport.

At the time of this writing, Roger Clemens has not lost his legal war with his former trainer Brian McNamee, who told former senator George Mitchell and the Mitchell Report investigators that he injected one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball with steroids and human growth hormone. But there is little question that the seven-time Cy Young Award-winning pitcher and his high-powered legal team lost the public relations battle a long time ago. Their aggressive challenge of McNamee's claims has done far more to hurt Clemens than McNamee.

In a survey conducted by the Gallup Poll about a week after the February 13, 2008, congressional committee grilling of Clemens and McNamee at a hearing on Mitchell's blockbuster report on steroid use in Major League Baseball, only 31 percent of those surveyed believed Clemens was telling the truth when he said he never used performance-enhancing drugs. And the overwhelming majority of the 80,000 respondents to an unscientific ESPN poll also agreed that Clemens had lied and McNamee had told the truth (McNamee would later tell friends with great glee that he'd won all 50 states). Even more devastating for Clemens, the two men who presided over that five-hour hearing had their doubts too. In a February 27, 2008, letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Representative Tom Davis (R-Va.), the panel's ranking Republican, asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Clemens had lied during the hearing and in his February 5 prehearing deposition. FBI and IRS agents fanned out across the country to conduct a long investigation. That investigation is still under way as this book goes to press in early spring 2009.

We are writing to ask the Justice Department to investigate whether former professional baseball player Roger Clemens committed perjury and made knowingly false statements during the Oversight and Government Reform Committee's investigation of the use of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball, the letter from Congress said. We believe that his testimony in a sworn deposition on February 5, 2008, and at a hearing on February 13, 2008, that he never used anabolic steroids or human growth hormone, warrants further investigation.

The letter pointed out that significant questions have been raised about Mr. Clemens' truthfulness. After a year of extensive reporting, the New York Daily News Sports Investigative Team reached the same conclusion.

Since the release of the Mitchell Report in December 2007, Clemens has vehemently denied using steroids in several forums, including on television in a 60 Minutes report, in a courtroom in a defamation action against McNamee, on the Internet in videos posted on YouTube and on his charitable foundation's Web site, and in an angry press conference in Houston. He toured Capitol Hill before the hearing to convince law makers of his innocence, and has told friends he is the victim of a great injustice.

Despite his fervent denials and challenges to his accuser, in the winter of 2009, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., began reviewing evidence to determine whether Clemens should be indicted for perjury. That evidence presumably included much of the material our investigative team reviewed, including the Mitchell Report, mountains of court documents, congressional depositions, police reports, medical files, candid e-mails, transcripts of secretly recorded phone calls, photographs, and shipping receipts. We interviewed scores of sourcesbaseball players, steroid suppliers, trainers, doctors, gym rats, and anti-aging-clinic employees, as well as Major League Baseball executives, Players Association officials, congressional leaders, law enforcement agents, attorneys, and doping experts. We traveled across the United States in the course of our investigation to Washington; Houston; San Francisco; Nashville; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Lexington, Kentucky; Fort Myers and Kissimmee, Florida; as well as the Bronx; Breezy Point (Queens); Midtown Manhattan; and Manhattan's Upper East Side.

It was challenging and difficult work. We were threatened with lawsuits and physical violence, not to mention regular doses of verbal abuse from many corners.

McNamee was not a perfect witness: As a memo from the committee's Democratic staff says, he had a history of misleading investigators. He told the committee he lied to police during a 2001 sexual assault investigation in Florida. He also admitted during the recent investigation that he withheld evidence from prosecutors in a loyal attempt to mitigate the damage to Clemens. But the federal investigators who first interviewed McNamee in the summer of 2007 gave him a very powerful motive to tell the truth: the threat of criminal prosecution and likely jail time if he lied to them or to George Mitchell.

McNamee's claims in the Mitchell Reportan investigation into steroid use on behalf of Major League Baseballthat he injected Clemens's longtime friend and teammate Andy Pettitte with human growth hormone were verified by Pettitte, who also told the congressional committee that Clemens had admitted to him that he had used human growth hormone. Pettitte's wife, Laura, gave the committee an affidavit that said her husband had told her about Clemens's admissions. Testimony from Chuck Knoblauch, the former Yankee who, like Pettitte, has acknowledged receiving HGH from McNamee, supports the trainer's account. Jim Murray, an employee of the sports agency that represents Clemens, corroborated parts of McNamee's statements. So did Kirk Radomski, the admitted steroid supplier who says he provided illegal drugs to McNamee to deliver to ballplayers.

Clemens's own statements damaged his credibility. He told the committee's investigators that he never discussed human growth hormone with McNamee, but as the Democratic staff memo points out, he admitted having two specific conversations about HGH with the trainer later in the deposition.

The committee's Democratic staff memo also noted that there was an abundance of medical evidence that indicates Clemens lied to Congress. An MRI expert told the committee that an abscess on Clemens's buttocks was consistent with an injury from a Winstrol injection. Medical records and interviews with doctors and experts also contradict Clemens's claims that he had received lidocaine and B12 injections from McNamee and pain injections from team trainers, but no steroid or HGH injections.

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