The Dallas Morning News Evan Grant Column: Clemens' Interview Was a Waste of Time

Jan 07, 02:06 AM

Jan. 7--Roger Clemens made a salient point during his hyped 60 Minutes sitdown with Mike Wallace on Sunday night: There may not be anything he can do to prove his innocence.

Particularly if he keeps talking.

I was one of those inclined to give Clemens the benefit of the doubt about the steroid accusations former trainer Brian McNamee made to the Mitchell Commission. I was so inclined, only until Clemens started talking in circles.

Clemens repeatedly denied McNamee's accusations with, "It never happened." Wallace mostly let it go at that. But when Wallace asked why he didn't speak with the Mitchell Commission, Clemens said he listened to counsel and wasn't aware of what was being said about him. If he had known, Clemens said, he'd have straightened it out.

Wallace did follow by asking whether Clemens would accept Congress' invitation to testify in the next 10 days. Clemens, um, well, uh, hesitated.

He said he didn't know if it was worth his time. On the other hand, however, he apparently thought doing a 60 Minutes interview was.

Truth is the interview was mostly a waste of time. This game of who injected what into whose buttocks in 2000 or 2002 misses the point. It should be about getting performance-enhancers out of the game, not about finding a used needle in a haystack.

But that's where we are. Big news: What was going on with Clemens' butt five years ago? Of lesser significance: How do we get PEDs out of sports?

Baseball, Congress and 60 Minutes need to spend more time coming up with solutions than figuring out who was injecting whom at a point when there were no penalties and no testing procedures.

CBS would have been better served to rerun the 2004 piece it did on Plano's Don Hooton and the Taylor Hooton Foundation, which seeks to stop usage of performance enhancers, than to rummage around Clemens' hindquarters.

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