|
... but then trips rounding the bases.
Writing for [url=http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/7785720/Clemens-fighting-to-save-his-butt-...-kissers]FOXsports online[/url], Whitlock - a columnist for the Kansas City Star - nails Roger for being a crack addict, addicted to the attention and privelege that goes with being a celebrity:
... if [Clemens] isn't telling the truth, all he's really fighting for is the right to show up in any restaurant in America and get a table without waiting, a round of drinks on the house and some groupie telling him he's the greatest.
He's a crackhead, a celebrity addicted to human lips resting on the crack of his/her rear end.
He then goes off track a bit by labeling the mainstream media as a pro-Roger cabal, something I'm certainly not finding to be true.
Roger, it appears, is consumed with image. He's worried about what guys like Bob Costas think. Roger wants to give Costas, Lupica and all the other baseball-is-America keepers of the faith a reason to believe Roger is better than Barry [Bonds].
Costas sold that line of garbage on Bill Maher's HBO talk show last week. Somehow Costas argued that Brian McNamee's sworn statements about rear-ending Roger and his wife with HGH was less compelling evidence than the gossipy book "Game of Shadows." Maher, even more incredibly, bought Costas' line of (spit) and argued that jealousy motivated McNamee's testimony.
And you thought Johnnie Cochran was a slick lawyer. Clemens has his own Dream Team of attorneys and media groupies.
Whitlock's had some semi-public feuds with other journos, especially Lupica who he accused of getting him tossed off of ESPN's round-table issue show 'The Sports Reporters', coincidently over this same issue. Whitlock's version is that he became a pariah with that group by not wanting to indict Bonds as baseball's sole steroid villian and so Lupica had him black-balled from the show.
He then loses me entirely by taking the idea that Roger has these protectors in high places and spreading it out that paint with a really broad brush:
White folks can't wait to forgive Clemens. All he needed to do was offer the same kind of half-hearted apology Jason Giambi gave. A momentary show of contrition and the steroid witch hunters would've returned to their primary mission of tar and feathering Barry Bonds.
Right now, the masses are upset with Clemens because he's turned attention away from Bonds by claiming innocence and glad-handing congressmen. The witch hunters never wanted to burn Clemens at a stake.
You never heard them talk about Clemens' hat size, muscle growth, physique change and career resurrection with the kind of passion and righteous indignation they discussed Bonds. For years we've been shown pictures of a 21-year-old Bonds juxtaposed against the 40-year-old Bonds. This is supposed to be undeniable proof that Barry did steroids. I've never seen one ESPN show do a similar picture graphic of Clemens
Yes Whitlock is black, although when I've read him he's generally been willing dish it out on both sides including being a very loud voice in taking on the destructive nature that the 'thug/rap culture' has had on sports in particular and the black community in general.
That's why I'm disappointed in the back of this article. He's usually better than that.
| 
