It started out as a full-court media press to clear Roger Clemens of the taint of the George Mitchell steroid investigation, but now the plot has thickened to Shakespearean proportions.
With apologies to the Queen in Act 3 (Scene 2) of Hamlet, methinks Roger might have protested too much.
Clemens and his lawyers probably thought there was no downside to his vigorous campaign to discredit the personal trainer who has alleged he injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone on several occasions from 1998 to 2001. And, if the Rocket is 100 percent innocent of those allegations, there shouldn't be.
Still, when Clemens appeared on 60 Minutes last night to give his side of the story, he raised the stakes in what could be a very dangerous game.
Think about it. If he had not embarked on such a high-profile attempt to create an alternative scenario to the one presented by trainer Brian McNamee in the Mitchell Report, he might not have been invited to testify in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform next week and reportedly grabbed the attention of the Justice Department.
The interview with respected CBS newsman Mike Wallace last night was compelling, but Clemens was already on record with a generic denial and might have complicated a bad situation with his belated contention that the injections he received from McNamee were the local anesthetic lidocaine and vitamin B-12.
Newsday reported in yesterday's editions that the controversy has gotten the attention of Jeff Novitzky, the IRS special agent who hounded Barry Bonds all the way to a federal indictment on perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges.
Citing an unnamed source familiar with the situation, the newspaper said Novitzky has turned his focus to Clemens. Who knows what that might mean, but if it's true, it can't be good.
Clemens handled the grilling by Wallace with equal parts defiance and outrage, directed mostly at McNamee, but also at the public and the media for not giving him the benefit of the doubt after "what I've done for the game of baseball and what I've done" outside the game.
There were times when he was convincing and times when he wasn't, in particular his waffling when Wallace asked him whether he would take a lie-detector test to prove he was telling the truth.
"Some say they're good and some say they're not," he replied, never really giving a firm yes-or-no answer.
