BOSTON -- "Are you crazy?" they asked him. "Are yo stressed out? Overworked? Losing control?"
Roger Clemens stood silently, defiantly, black smudges under his eyes, a goatee on his chin. On his shoelaces, plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles glowed green.
"What happened, Roger? What went wrong? What made you act that way?"
It was a late afternoon in October. Oakland had tossed the Red Sox from the American League Championship Series. Umpire Terry Cooney had tossed Roger Clemens from the game. Clemens left Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the game, and the season with a string of expletives and an elbow to an unsuspecting photographer's chin.
It was a most disturbing end to a most promising Boston season. The city had been embarrassed, the team had been swept, and the team's superhero was losing his mind.
Or so the papers said.
It got worse in the winter. On a warm January night in Houston, Clemens' brother was involved in an argument at Bayou Mama's, a downtown nightclub. When an off-duty policeman tried to arrest his brother, Clemens jumped on the officer's back and tried to choke him, police reports said.
"Do you need help?" reporters asked him. "Some counseling, perhaps?" Columnists called him a brat, a baby and a "borderline psychotic."
His life became The Topic for radio talk shows. "Is Roger OK?" an elderly woman from South Boston asked a call-in host, tremulously, days after the Houston incident.
"Time will tell," the man answered. "I think so, but we'll have to wait until the season to see."
* It is April 13, Clemens' first Fenway Park start of 1991. In two days, a federal grand jury will start deliberations on his aggravated assault charges in Houston. (He was indicted Wednesday for hindering arrest, a misdemeanor, rather than the felony charge.) In six days, he will travel to New York to meet with commissioner Fay Vincent and appeal the five-game suspension and $10,000 fine he received for ALCS incident.
On this day, however, Clemens says that baseball -- and baseball only -- is on his mind.
"When I'm on the mound, I'm very intense," he says. "I don't worry about those other things. I concentrate on the game."
He had pitched a beautiful game in the season opener in Toronto, holding the Blue Jays to six hits and one run in eight innings of a 6-2 Red Sox win. The team has fallen apart since then. There were two painful losses in Toronto, then a third consecutive loss last Thursday when the Sox hosted Cleveland for Fenway's Opening Day. Team hitting, supposedly the strength this season, has been dismal. Wade Boggs has been off; Jack Clark, the newly acquired slugger, is on a strikeout binge.
