'Roid Rage

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Roger Clemens has stared down many terrifying foes, but none like the two dozen congressmen sitting across from him at yesterday’s House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform hearing on whether he used steroids. Not that he realized this at first. Clemens is famously proud and intense and possessed of an outsized ego to match the outsized achievements that had, until the release of the Mitchell Report in December, made him a lock for the Hall of Fame. But he was as helplessly inept in the committee room as Newt Gingrich would be in the batter’s box at Yankee Stadium.

One after another, a parade of anonymous backbenchers lit into Clemens without remorse, hurling surreal insinuations about his “strained glutes” and “the palpable mass on his buttocks” with the same mix of high-flown piety and stentorian disapproval they ordinarily deploy against crooked lobbyists or felonious Halliburton executives.

You could tell from the miserable look on Clemens’s face and the stammering way in which he addressed each of his inquisitors as “Mr. Congressman” that he had no idea who these strange beings were or why they were doing this to him. Pro athletes like Clemens are deities in their own world and rarely challenged. When they are, it tends to happen gently and with their consent, as in a one-on-one television interview, or else privately, as in a disciplinary hearing before a league commissioner, with phalanxes of lawyers and union reps there to defend them. Never are they as nakedly vulnerable as when testifying before Congress—yet none ever seems to grasp this, which is what makes these hearings so bizarre and riveting.

How disorienting it must have been for Clemens, then, to face the hilariously red-faced Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), who has the bristling haircut of a 10-year-old boy, carrying on about whether the star witness had “carried Band-Aids for his butt if he bled” through his “designer pants” after receiving a shot of something powerful in his hind quarters. The whole Tom Davis litany was delivered as Tom Davis, seven-term congressman, sat beneath a gilded, gold-framed oil painting of … Tom Davis.

Professional sports and official Washington have much in common. Neither is a stranger to steroidally overdeveloped egos or grand displays of power. But as so often happens when the two worlds collide, yesterday’s hearing was a massacre—and, as usual, professional sports didn’t see it coming. It looked to me as though Clemens and the many sports media types in attendance were genuinely taken aback by the primal, dog-in-heat urgency with which these grandstanding nobodies tore apart a sports legend. The political reporters, however, were not the slightest bit fazed.

This highlights a crucial disparity that I think the sports world has never truly appreciated, and that helps to explain the disastrous string of recent appearances by major sports figures in Washington: sports and politics both thrive on ego, money, and power. But only in Washington is the ritual humiliation that Clemens experienced a deeply ingrained and important part of the culture.

At the same time that Clemens was being grilled by the oversight committee, the commissioner of the National Football League, Roger Goodell, was on the other side of the Hill acquainting himself with a mildly less public form of the same ordeal. It is Goodell’s bad fortune to have ignored a series of absurd letters sent to him by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) some months ago inquiring into a matter in which Specter had no possible professional reason to care about besides for his own aggrandizement: the New England Patriots’ “Spygate Scandal.” As everyone in Washington—and evidently no one at NFL headquarters— knows, self-aggrandizement is Arlen Specter’s chief business in the Senate, and ritual humiliation his favored method of achieving it.

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Joshua Green is an Atlantic senior editor.