Now, Roger Clemens joins Barry Bonds in baseball's version of hell. It's a slow burn that lasts a lifetime, then, after death, lingers as long as the game is played and tongues can wag. In baseball, a man's triumphs and his sins are immortal. The pursuit of one often leads to the other. And those misdeeds are seldom as dark as their endless punishment.
Read the whole thing here.
5 comments:
It seems like hackneyed prose to me, from "I'm shocked, shocked.." (Renault in Casablance, 1942) to "Yesterday, the only man with seven Cy Young Awards came crashing down the mountain of baseball's gods and ended in a heap beside the only man with seven most valuable player awards," a cliche which he repeats nine paragrahps later: "Clemens plummeted from icon to fallen idol in a matter of hours." Mixed metaphors like "general managers discussing trades evaluated how much weight to give the 'juice' factor" and "How like Superman to be above the law."
You may have a point, Ben. Perhaps my passion for the subject matter has clouded my critical judgment. Another good tight edit wouldn't hurt the piece. Nevertheless, what about passages like the following: "Clemens and Bonds now stand before us like twin symbols of the Steroid Age: cheats, liars, ego monsters who were not satisfied with mere greatness and wealth but, as they aged, had to pass everyone in the record book, break every mark and do it with outsize bodies, unrecognizable from their youth, that practically screamed, 'Catch me if you can.' The whole sport whispered as both walked by. Now, everyone can speak aloud."
"Clemens and Bonds stand before us like twin symbols of the Steroid Age.." The "twin symbols" being the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the "Steroid Age" the Stone Age.
Clemens is "the Rocket" after the Houston Space Center of his adopted hometown, where he went to college, and played for the Houston Astros. In the mid-1980s, Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson were known as the "Twin Towers (of Texas)" when they played for the Houston Rockets.
Hackneyed metaphors ("the Rocket and Barry stand convicted in the court of public opinion.."), because of their familiarity to a certain type of reader, are an effective form of provocation often used by sportwriters.
On the other hand, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centers show up in some fine literary fiction, most recently in "Man Gone Down" by Michael Thomas, where, I suspect it has some symbolic meaning related to DuBoisian "twoness" (the "double consciousness" described by W.E.B. Du Bois at the beginning of his most famous book).
PS I really enjoy your blog. I liked the George Saunders essay collection, though not as much as Consider the Lobster.
Thanks, Ben!
Angie, Well, maybe the Steroid Age isn't the Stone Age, but it's usually called the steroids era!
The only example of literal iconoclasm in a novel that I know of comes at the end of "Anil's Ghost" by Michael Ondaatje when an artisan paints the eyes of a Buddha that was vandalized in the Sri Lankan civil war. I finished it in 2001, just days before the news that the Taliban had destroyed the Buddha statues in northern Iraq.
I finished "Out Stealing Horses" by Per Petterson, one of the NY Times editors' 10 best books of 2007. It was interesting, but it's the kind of story I wouldn't want to divulge anything about.
I've started "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson. Should be interesting. The CIA operatives in Vietnam were required to memorize "The Lee Shore" chapter from Moby-Dick!
Carl Lewis talked about steroids in his memoir "Inside Track," published around 1990, the era of "professional amateurs" in Olympic sports. He names dirty coaches but not athletes, however, some of the athletes had the same names as the coaches!
I also read "Game of Shadows," which is as much about track & field as it is about baseball. So I tend to resist the narratives about athlete greed and arrogance that baseball writers try to impose onto this scandal, which is similar to Whitewater in some ways (BALCO prosecutor Kevin Ryan, who wasn't ready to indict Bonds, was fired by Alberto Gonzales and replaced by someone who was -- just as Robert Fiske was replaced by Ken Starr).
Anyway, I won't say any more about it!
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