As he watched Roger Clemens' interview on "60 Minutes" on Sunday with a reporter from SI.com, Brian McNamee guessed that Clemens could beat a lie-detector test.
"He might actually believe that he's telling the truth," McNamee said.
McNamee is the personal trainer who told George J. Mitchell that he injected Clemens with performance-enhancing drugs. His interview with SI.com was released an hour or so after Clemens played a tape of a phone conversation with McNamee at a news conference in Houston on Monday.
On the tape, an emotional McNamee never admits to lying to Mitchell but praises Clemens for treating him like family. On SI.com, he said Clemens was simply part of a widespread steroid culture within baseball.
"Roger was in no way an abuser of steroids," McNamee said. "He never took them through our tough winter workouts. And he never took them in spring training, when the days are longest. He took them in late July, August, and never for more than four to six weeks, max ... it wasn't that frequent.
"Within the culture of what was going on, he was just a small part of it. A lot of guys did it. You can't take away the work Roger did. You can't take away the fact that he worked out as hard as anybody."
C.J. Nitkowski, the veteran reliever who worked out with Clemens and McNamee, has defended Clemens' legacy on the same grounds. But Nitkowski said it troubled him that Clemens had taped and played the conversation with McNamee.
"What I'm most disappointed about is that basically he was set up like that," Nitkowski said in a telephone interview. "You've got a guy who was loyal to him for 10 years, loved working for him and was obviously really distraught, and he wanted to talk to Roger. He called him back with his lawyers and taped it and played it in front of the press. That's a low blow, as far as I'm concerned."
Nitkowski said he has never doubted that McNamee told Mitchell the truth, because McNamee was risking jail time if he lied.
In the news media, though, McNamee has made contradictory statements about Clemens, specifically to SI.com. In November 2006, he denied any involvement with steroids, a stance he has now reversed.
"I looked at them like white lies," McNamee said. "I was doing clinics and getting mail from high school coaches, and the topic would always come up. Why did they need to hear the truth and take away from my program of smart training, eating well and working hard?"
In the tape played at Clemens' news conference, McNamee at one point said he would go to jail for Clemens, but at another point said he did not want to go to jail. On SI.com, he said he had "no choice" but to tell Mitchell the truth.
McNamee said he was first contacted by federal agents in May and was "pretty compelled to tell the truth."
He said he was so stressed that he had to be hospitalized, and that his August interview with Mitchell consisted only of confirming what he had told the government. When he was finished, McNamee said, Mitchell hugged him.
McNamee added that he was told he could not speak about his testimony and did not know if Mitchell would reveal the names of Clemens and Andy Pettitte. McNamee has been spared jail time, but he said he deeply regretted his involvement with steroids. "I have a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old, and I don't want them taking steroids," McNamee said. "I'm embarrassed. I wish I had nothing to do with it."
