Roger Clemens is acting like everyone else is lying

By Mike Lupica
New York Daily News
Wednesday, April 30th 2008, 2:20 AM



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Roger Clemens' entire case seems to hinge on his contention that everyone - everyone - but him is a liar: including Mindy McCready (below).

The latest one to lie about Roger Clemens, at least according to Roger Clemens, is a Nashville singer named Mindy McCready. Brian McNamee lied about Clemens and so did Andy Pettitte, even if Clemens didn't come right out and say that about Pettitte, he said his former teammate "misremembered" and "misheard" Clemens talking about using baseball drugs.

Now Clemens says that Mindy McCready is doing the same thing. And you are supposed to believe that revealing a long-term affair with the married Clemens is some sort of canny career move on McCready's part, something that is going to send her right to the top of the country-and-Western charts. As if it is every young woman's dream to be the next Monica Lewinsky.

If you do believe Clemens, more difficult now than it used to be catching up with his fastball, he never had an affair with McCready, he was just engaged in what we now find out was his secret passion:

A mentoring program he started up in karaoke bars for promising teenage singers.

Here is what McCready, who actually is about as happy to be in this story as Barack Obama is with that peacock the Rev. Wright, said to the Daily News after the original story about her appeared in Monday's paper:

"It doesn't make me look good to perjure myself, because I can't afford to be put in this position with my son [Zander]. That's why it angers me very much. I think it is selfish of Roger to put me under scrutiny. I could lose my son. He doesn't have to worry about losing his kids."



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But Clemens will now try to do with McCready what he did with McNamee, which means go through her like an armored truck. As he does, you are supposed to believe that the whole story was some kind of leaked setup, when in fact four reporters from this newspaper have been working on the McCready story for four months.

You are supposed to believe that either Mindy McCready went looking for all this or that Brian McNamee's lawyers did, as if McNamee's lawyers needed help in making Clemens' defamation suit against McNamee into more of a joke than it already is.

You are supposed to believe Clemens and his lawyer Rusty Hardin - sort of the Isiah Thomas of lawyers - when they tell you that Clemens' relationship with Mindy McCready has nothing to do with that lawsuit, when it has plenty to do with it.

"Why is it [the relationship between Clemens and McCready] relevant?" Richard Emery, one of Brian McNamee's lawyers, said last night. "Because everything in a defamation suit is investigated and tried at the same time. One of the main issues are the damages claimed by the plaintiff, Clemens. His claim for damages is based on his assertion that McNamee ruined his reputation.