What Roger Clemens Wants
By ROSS DOUTHAT
NYT
Bobby Thomson died last week, and Roger Clemens was indicted. No juxtaposition could better capture the way we used to feel about our sports heroes, and the way we feel about them now.
Clemens is just one of the many baseball superstars credibly accused of using performance-enhancing drugs. But the Red Sox-turned-Yankee ace has achieved a particular infamy because he keeps obdurately denying it — to fans, to reporters and finally (and fatefully) to a Congressional committee. Other athletes have apologized, beaten their breasts and tried to move on. But not Clemens. A mercenary figure during his career, in retirement the pitching great has become an icon of celebrity entitlement and public dishonesty: part LeBron James, part Richard Nixon.
If Clemens embodies baseball’s decline into sordidness and scandal, Thomson’s death is a reminder of the height from which it’s fallen. “The shot heard round the world,” his pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants in the autumn of 1951, stands as the crowning glory of baseball’s golden age.
All the romance of a bygone American era hovered around that day. It was the Dodgers and the Giants, the New York of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, the American century at its peak. And then there was the contest itself, thrilling and improbable and perfect. “The art of fiction is dead,” Red Smith’s famous account began. “Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”
(More here.)
NYT
Bobby Thomson died last week, and Roger Clemens was indicted. No juxtaposition could better capture the way we used to feel about our sports heroes, and the way we feel about them now.
Clemens is just one of the many baseball superstars credibly accused of using performance-enhancing drugs. But the Red Sox-turned-Yankee ace has achieved a particular infamy because he keeps obdurately denying it — to fans, to reporters and finally (and fatefully) to a Congressional committee. Other athletes have apologized, beaten their breasts and tried to move on. But not Clemens. A mercenary figure during his career, in retirement the pitching great has become an icon of celebrity entitlement and public dishonesty: part LeBron James, part Richard Nixon.
If Clemens embodies baseball’s decline into sordidness and scandal, Thomson’s death is a reminder of the height from which it’s fallen. “The shot heard round the world,” his pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants in the autumn of 1951, stands as the crowning glory of baseball’s golden age.
All the romance of a bygone American era hovered around that day. It was the Dodgers and the Giants, the New York of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, the American century at its peak. And then there was the contest itself, thrilling and improbable and perfect. “The art of fiction is dead,” Red Smith’s famous account began. “Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”
(More here.)
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