01/07/2008

Clemens Fires Back....ball one

Super Bowl Quiz: Name the only four franchises that are
undefeated in Super Bowl play. Answer below. [Hint:
Indianapolis is not one of them because you have to combine
their record with that of the Baltimore Colts.]

BREAKING NEWS from the Las Vegas Sun

The levee break in Fernley, Nev., may have been the result of
“burrowing rodents,” gophers, according to one official. With
mere hours to go before the New Hampshire primary, you just
know the candidates are scrambling to come up with coherent
positions regarding this new terror threat.

---

The Rocket

Roger Clemens was asked by Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” if
trainer Brian McNamee ever injected him with any steroids or
drugs.

“Lidocaine, and B-12,” said the Rocket. “It’s for my joints, and
B-12 I still take today.”

A local radio sports guy, Jared Max, had a great bit on Clemens’
response and expression. Paraphrasing, ‘It’s as if Roger got a
question right on a game show .ding ding ding!’

Monday morning we learned Clemens has beaten Brian
McNamee to the punch and filed a defamation suit.

“All of McNamee’s accusations are false and defamatory per se,”
the lawsuit reads, according to the Houston Chronicle and USA
Today. “They injured Clemens’ reputation and exposed him to
public hatred, contempt, ridicule, and financial injury.
McNamee made the allegations with actual malice, knowing they
were false.”

I don’t know about you, but I hated Roger Clemens long before I
had ever heard of Brian McNamee.

Bob Raisman / New York Daily News

“Mike Wallace had just reminded Roger Clemens that when
Andy Pettitte admitted to receiving shots of human growth
hormone from Brian McNamee, the personal trainer’s credibility
was enhanced.

“ ‘Why would Brian McNamee tell the truth about Andy Pettitte
and lie about you?’ Wallace asked Clemens.

“ ‘Andy’s case is totally his, is totally separate,’ Clemens
answered. ‘I was shocked to learn about Andy’s situation. Had
no idea about it.’

“Then there was laughter. Not from Wallace or Clemens, but in
the room where the ’60 Minutes’ interview was beaming out
over two small television sets. This would suggest that those
assembled in the room, members of that much talked about
‘court of public opinion,’ did not believe much of what the
seven-time Cy Young Award winner had to say.”

Alas, now Roger and McNamee, along with Andy Pettitte,
Chuck Knoblauch and former Mets clubhouse worker Kirk
Radomski, have been asked to testify before Congress Jan. 16 in
what promises to be great television.

Mike Lupica / New York Daily News

“Roger Clemens could always pitch his way out of it, even if he
had to finally throw one at somebody’s head the way he did with
Mike Piazza. Clemens always had the power because he was the
big guy with the baseball in his right hand. He was the one with
the fastball. It doesn’t work that way anymore. Now Congress
has the power. It is why Clemens is in a bind.

“Smart people thought from the start that Clemens was getting
terrible legal advice, whether it was coming from a Texas magpie
like Rusty Hardin, or from Clemens’ longtime agents, the
Hendricks brothers. They thought that if Clemens kept talking
and talking, he was going to talk his way in front of Congress.

“Now that is exactly what has happened.

“It’s like he’s daring us, they kept saying in Washington. So
now the dare is accepted, now comes the invitation for Clemens
to go there and talk to Rep. Henry Waxman and Rep. Tom Davis
(though Davis was originally the guy who said he didn’t want to
call ballplayers to testify at the new baseball drug hearings) that
is like a fastball heading to Clemens’ helmet. Piazza knows the
feeling better than anybody, and how the tables have turned on
Clemens.

“If Clemens goes to Washington and takes the Fifth Amendment,
says he can’t answer questions about drug use because he could
incriminate himself, then he all but admits that Brian McNamee,
his former trainer, was telling the truth about injecting Clemens
with testosterone back in the day.

“Already people look at Clemens as the Barry Bonds of pitchers.
Now he could walk out of the room like Mark McGwire, and
start wondering if Hall of Fame voters will be more forgiving
with him someday than they were with McGwire last year and
might be again this year.”

Clemens said the following on YouTube:

“I did not provide Brian McNamee with any drugs to inject into
my body.”

But now he told Mike Wallace that he did indeed let McNamee
“inject him with a cocktail of B-12 and Lidocaine,” as Lupica
writes, “even though that means McNamee would not only have
been practicing medicine without a license, he would have been
shooting up Clemens in the butt for sore arm joints.”

B-12? This is the defense used by Floyd Landis, Rafael
Palmeiro and Barry Bonds. OK, Bonds said flaxseed oil.

Clemens has said he’ll show on Jan. 16. Will he?

Stuff

--Congratulations to Eli Manning. He got the monkey off his
back.

--Baseball Hall of Fame selections to be announced Tuesday, 2
pm ET. According to an AP story, Red Sox broadcaster Jerry
Remy says “It seems like there’s been a groundswell of support
for Jim Rice.” Rice garnered 63.5% last year, with 75%
required. Goose Gossage, who got 71.2%, is definitely getting in
this time, but I’m not so sure Rice will in this his next to last,
and best, chance.

--The 2008 PGA Tour season is underway with Daniel Chopra
winning the Mercedes-Benz Championship (or Tournament of
Champions) at Kapalua. Interestingly, the top 10 players on the
money list last year averaged 22.4 starts, while players ranked
from No. 115 through No. 125 averaged 29.8 starts.

--1976 Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill is undergoing
treatment for breast cancer. We wish her all the best. Bar Chat’s
all-time favorite woman, 1968 gold medalist Peggy Fleming,
also had breast cancer but is now cancer-free.

--20 years ago, Saturday, “Pistol” Pete Maravich collapsed and
died while playing a pickup game of basketball. He was only 40.
Hall of Fame center Bob Lanier told Doug Haller of the Arizona
Republic, “I could tell you to this day, he’s the only player that
I’ve seen that I would pay to see play. He was just
phenomenally ahead of his time.”

It’s still incredible to note that Maravich averaged averaged
44.2 points per game over three seasons at LSU, and without the
three-point shot! In his ten seasons in the NBA, he was a five-
time All-Star.

But he walked away from the game when he couldn’t make
Boston’s starting lineup, prompting former player and coach Paul
Westphal to say, “All those things that made him a great player,
they were also his curse. It was hard for him to blend his game
with other players. He had been groomed to see how many
points he could score rather than how many games he could win.
That’s the enigma of Pete Maravich.”

20 years. I swear it seems like yesterday.

--If there is a more irritating pair on the planet than the Barber
twins, Tiki and Ronde, I’d like to know because these two would
make the world a better place by just keeping their mouths shut.

--Martina Hingis grunt has been suspended grunt for two
years grunt .by the International Tennis Federation grunt
and ordered to repay $129,481 in prize money grunt for
testing positive for cocaine grunt at last year’s Wimbledon
tournament. Hingis said back in November that she was
innocent and was walking away from the sport. Good riddance.

--Goodness gracious! Harry K., an old friend of Bar Chat from
up in the Great White North, passed along a story from Friday’s
Globe and Mail by Dawn Walton.

“Skunks that should be hunkering down to hibernate in southern
Manitoba are instead braving low temperatures to hound horses,
attack inanimate objects and charge at people.

“A rabies outbreak has hit Brandon, prompting police in
Manitoba’s second largest city to issue a rare warning this week
to beware bizarrely behaving skunks.

“ ‘On New Year’s Eve when we came home, there was a skunk
chasing the horses in the pasture,’ recalled Barb Vinthers, who
has a horse farm.”

In another tale, a Brandon animal control officer responded to
Ms. Vinthers’ “complaint of a cantankerous skunk and found
himself under assault.”

“ ‘It was biting a lady’s broom, attacking it leaning up against the
house,’ he recalled. He followed it for a few houses, attempting
to capture it, but the animal turned and ran toward him.

“ ‘I shot it,’ he said.”

Kind of makes you want to hibernate all winter to avoid them,
doesn’t it? I also see a box-office smash hit somewhere in this
tale. I’m going to start working on the screenplay. Throw in an
obligatory shower scene or two and Shazam! $250 million
gross.

--Uh oh New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has far more
important things on his plate than his run for vice president these
days. According to the High Plains Journal, “Gov. Richardson is
asking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to double its efforts to
find a group of endangered Mexican gray wolves that has gone
missing in southwestern New Mexico.”

“Officials with the Fish and Wildlife Service say the last signal
from the collars of the pack’s male and female were received
Nov. 1. A search has turned up no signs of the wolves. One
spokeswoman for Fish and Wildlife said it’s possible to disable a
collar, but added, “A person could do that; a bear couldn’t.”

Well, as you might be musing, ranchers in the area have long had
problems with the wolves. Enter Laura Schneberger, president
of the Gila Livestock Growers Association.

“Of course it’s suspicious, but none of us had anything to do with
it.”

I’m no Inspector Clouseau, but it seems to me some
waterboarding may be in order, know what I’m sayin’?

Since the reintroduction program began, 26 wolves have been
killed by poaching.

--Brad K. passed along this AP story:

“A northern Indian state said Thursday it planned to use
unemployed youths to sterilize monkeys to try to combat
aggressive primates who have been raiding farms.”

Yikes. Now you all know from reading this column that India
faces a serious problem with tens of thousands of monkeys that
call the cities home, specifically rhesus macaque monkeys, but I
think authorities are forgetting one important fact. Macaques
place ahead of humans on the All-Species List for a good reason;
they’re smarter, and these kids who are expected to do god
knows what to sterilize them face annihilation. It also makes you
wonder why we’re often told to invest in India. Or as Brad K.
pointed out, there was only one man who was able to
successfully do something like this; that being Rudy Giuliani and
his campaign to eliminate the squeegee guys in New York.

--But wait there’s more on macaques! In a late-breaking story
from Gillian Wong of the AP:

“Male macaque monkeys pay for sex by grooming females,
according to a recent study that suggests the primates may treat
sex as a commodity.”

My word, this could nail down the #1 slot on the list.

“ ‘In primate societies, grooming is the underlying fabric of it
all,’ Dr. Michael Gumert, a primatologist at the Nanyang
Technological University in Singapore, said in a telephone
interview Saturday.

“ ‘It’s a sign of friendship and family, and it’s also something
that can be exchanged for sexual services,’ Gumert said.”

So it seems our boy Gumert observed 50 macaques in a reserve
in Indonesia for 20 months (someone’s got to do it), and “found
after a male grooms a female, the likelihood that she will engage
in sexual activity with the male was about three times more than
if the grooming had not occurred.”

“And as with other commodities,” writes Wong, “the value of
sex is affected by supply and demand factors: A male would
spend more time grooming a female if there were fewer females
in the vicinity.”

But the male macaques aren’t giving up any actual cash! You
have to respect that, sports fans. Now discuss amongst
yourselves.

--Lions are making their final bid, perhaps a misguided one, for a
top ten ranking in the upcoming All-Species balloting, currently
slated for release Jan. 17. From BBC News:

“A South African man has been killed and eaten by lions at a
game lodge where he worked 150km west of Johannesburg,
police say.

“Samuel Boosen, 36, was attacked after entering the enclosure on
Tuesday where an estimated nine lions were kept.

“ ‘Only his spine and skull remained,’ police spokesman Lesego
Metsi (no relation to Mr. Met, incidentally) told the South Africa
Press Association.”

Well, that’s kind of gross, I think you’d agree. The lions need to
be reminded that killings such as this one don’t necessarily
guarantee a higher placement in the rankings.

--And the hits just keep on coming ..from the Sydney Morning
Herald:

“A python that bit a woman and wrapped itself around her leg
had to be killed and its head pried off the bite on Moreton Island
today. The woman was airlifted to a hospital north of Brisbane,
when a carpet python bit her above the left ankle about 1:15 pm.
The attack took place in the bathroom of the Deception Bay
woman’s accommodation.”

Holy Toledo!

“ ‘Because it was such a ferocious attack, they had trouble
getting the snake’s fangs out of her leg and had to kill the snake
and pry the head and fangs from her leg,’ said emergency
helicopter pilot Brent Hall.”

Makes you want to be extra careful who you choose to install
your next carpet, doesn’t it?

--Rutgers running back Ray Rice had 280 yards on 35 carries in
the team’s bowl win over Ball State, Saturday. [Have to admit, I
was so disinterested in this one I forgot it was even on.] For the
sure-fire NFL star it hiked his season total to 2,012 yards, one of
just 14 Division I backs to hit that mark; though I hasten to add it
was in 13 games. Only 11 accomplished it in 11 or 12, and, until
2002, for some stupid reason totals in bowl contests were not
included. In other words, this whole 2,000-yard category is
bogus. There is only one worthy of being called the greatest for
a single season, that being Barry Sanders. The rest are just
pretenders.

--Star-Ledger columnist Jerry Izenberg related a number of tales
upon his retirement over a year ago (though he continues to write
an occasional piece), and I saved a little story about Vince
Lombardi, whom Izenberg knew very well in the day.

Marie Lombardi, Vince’s wife, told Izenberg a story about her
husband’s competitive nature.

“One day Vince was playing marbles with his grandson. The kid
began crying.

“ ‘What’s wrong?’ Marie asked.

“ ‘Grandpa’s winning all my marbles.’

“Marie leaned over and whispered, ‘For crissakes, Vince, let him
win.’

“Vince looked up and shouted: ‘The real world isn’t like that.
He has to learn sometime.’”

As to the quote attributed to Lombardi, “Winning isn’t
everything, it’s the only thing,” Vince once told Izenberg:

“I wish I never said that. It was misunderstood. What I meant
by ‘Winning’ is giving total commitment the desire to expend
every bit of energy on a given day toward being the absolute best
you can be. We get paid and measured by the final score but, in
my heart, it was always the effort that told me whether I
personally had won or lost.”

--Attention fellow Knicks fans. Trader George and I have just
picked up tickets to the April 14 Knicks-Celtics contest and we’d
love to have you join us.

You see, the Knicks are 8-24 and it’s the hope here that they
could be going for loss No. 70 in this their final home game of
the season. Granted, it means they would have to go 3-46 the
rest of the way (with the team having a last road game two days
later, game 82, in case you’re wondering about the math), but
anything is possible.

Of course Trader George and I also expect Isiah Thomas to still
be coaching at that point. Now wouldn’t that be fun? I mean is
there anyone out there who understands the true meaning of
Christmas?

Thomas, in case you didn’t hear, said this week at a press
conference:

“I believe one day that we will win a championship here and I
believe a couple of these guys will be a part of that. I believe I’ll
be a part of that.”

As reported by Frank Isola of the New York Daily News:

“With Walt Frazier sitting 10 feet away, Thomas even went a
step further by stating that his goal is to leave a ‘legacy’ that
future Knicks teams will live by.

“ ‘I don’t necessarily want to win a championship,’ Thomas
added. ‘I want to leave something that’s going to stand for a
long time. I want to leave a legacy. I want to leave a tradition. I
want to leave an imprint, a blueprint in terms of how people play
and how they coach and how they respond when they put on a
Knick uniform.’”

Unreal. Anyway, come April there’s also a chance the Celtics
could be going for win No. 70 in their own right, the team being
29-3 thus far, so for this express purpose we’re dragging along
Boston fan extraordinaire Pete M. with us. The countdown thus
begins.

--Guys, after just two months it appears Pamela Anderson is once
again available. It seems her marriage to third husband Rick
Salomon didn’t quite work out, as Larry King might have said.
Anderson told People magazine on New Year’s Eve, “What can
you do? We’re all human. We’re all trying.”

I think it was Karl Malden who first said, “What can you do?
What CAN you do?”

Top 3 songs for the week of 1/7/78: #1 “How Deep Is Your
Love” (Bee Gees .I don’t know, you tell me) #2 “Baby Come
Back” (Player something I would have said to Joey Heatherton,
if we had known each other) #3 “Blue Bayou” (Linda Ronstadt)
and #4 “(Every Time I Turn Around) Back In Love Again”
(L.T.D.) #5 “Here You Come Again” (Dolly Parton) #6 “You
Light Up My Life” (Debby Boone written in honor of Thomas
Edison .really) #7 “Slip Slidin’ Away” (Paul Simon) #8
“Sentimental Lady” (Bob Welch) #9 “You’re In My Heart”
(Rod Stewart) #10 “Hey Deanie” (Shaun Cassidy)

[For those of you who are incredibly observant, I skipped 1977
because I would have been repeating many of the same songs
from 12/25/76, the list in the previous chat.]

Super Bowl Quiz Answer: Only four undefeated teams in SB
play San Francisco, 5-0; Baltimore Ravens, 1-0; New York
Jets, 1-0; Tampa Bay, 1-0.

Next Bar Chat, Thursday .an analysis of the Hall of Fame
voting. And we’re back on a regular schedule for a few weeks.