Marquette Sports Law Review Volume 19 Article 11 Issue 1 Fall Fall of the Rocket: Steroids in Baseball and the Case Against Roger Clemens Daniel Healey Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/sportslaw Part of the Entertainment and Sports Law Commons Repository Citation Daniel Healey, Fall of the Rocket: Steroids in Baseball and the Case Against Roger Clemens , 19 Marq. Sports L. Rev. 289 (2008) Available at: http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/sportslaw/vol19/iss1/11 This Symposium is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Marquette Law Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. FALL OF THE ROCKET: STEROIDS IN BASEBALL AND THE CASE AGAINST ROGER CLEMENS DANIEL HEALEY* INTRODUCTION - THE ROCKET ON THE HILL Athletes who are chemically propelled to victory do not merely overvalue winning, they misunderstand why winning is properly valued .... Drugs that make sport exotic, by radical intrusions into the body, drain sport of its exemplary power by making it a display of chemistry rather than character. In fact, it becomes a display of some chemists' virtuosity and some athletes' bad character. - George F. Will1 On February 13, 2008, Roger Clemens (Clemens) traveled to Capitol Hill to clear his name. A seven-time Cy Young Award-winning pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays, New York Yankees, and Houston Astros, "the Rocket" had come to the end of his career, but only the beginning of his legal and media troubles. In December 2007, Clemens's trainer, Brian McNamee (McNamee), had implicated his former employer as a steroids user in the "Mitchell Report," the definitive account of the proliferation of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in Major League Baseball (MLB).2 After facing two months of intense media scrutiny, Clemens traveled to the Hill to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (the "Committee") that he had never used PEDs.