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TORONTO — Before Brian McNamee and Roger Clemens learned they were to appear Wednesday in front of a Congressional subcommittee. Before the 60 Minutes interview and taped telephone conversation and defamation suits and even before the nine damning pages in the Mitchell Report.
Before all that, there was Toronto.
It was 1998. Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell had just finished negotiating peace in Northern Ireland. Clemens had just won a Cy Young Award in his first year with the Toronto Blue Jays and McNamee was just a former New York City cop and college catcher with a bunch of theories and muscles who'd caught in the New York Yankees bullpen and gone to university to study athletic training. And, he knew a guy – Tim McCleary, another St. John's University alumnus and son of Queens – who was the Blue Jays assistant general manager.
And all the Blue Jays knew was that after unsatisfactory experiences with previous strength and conditioning coaches, McNamee seemed to be the guy who – in Gord Ash's words – “fit the bill.” To a T.
“McNamee was the kind of guy who wasn't afraid to get into a player's face, who'd say: ‘If you've already run a mile, good. Let's go for two miles,' '' said Ash, now the assistant GM of the Milwaukee Brewers and GM of the Blue Jays when McNamee was hired by the club before the '98 season.
“We never had player complaints about him like we'd had about some of the (strength and conditioning) people who came before him. It was clear that he was developing a very personal relationship with Roger but that seemed natural because Roger liked to work and (McNamee) liked to push people to work.''
But Blue Jays catcher Darrin Fletcher noticed something else about McNamee.
“He was a guy who was out to make a name for himself,” said Fletcher, who is now retired and is one of the Blue Jays broadcasters.
Things certainly worked out on that end for McNamee. Before he ripped the lid off Clemens's alleged steroid use in the Mitchell Report about the use of steroids and other illegal performance-enhancing substances in baseball – leading to a defamation suit filed by Clemens and Wednesday's date in front of a Congressional subcommittee – McNamee revelled in being identified as Clemens's training ‘guru' after being reunited with Clemens in 2000 when the pitcher was traded from the Blue Jays to the Yankees. McNamee was featured in articles in several U.S. publications and even penned an article (“Don't Be So Quick to Pre-Judge That Power”) in the New York Times in 2000 that criticized reporters who were hammering Mark McGwire for his use of androstenedione.
That didn't surprise some people who came to know him in his two years with the Blue Jays.
In a National Post article that appeared in August 1998, McNamee is quoted talking about andro (a substance that was then banned by the International Olympic Committee but not by baseball and was found in McGwire's locker by a reporter) saying: “They're all testosterone precursors. I don't recommend it, but guys take it. I take it. I think it works.” (In the same article Jose Canseco, who was on the Blue Jays that year and who was admitted his own steroid use, is quoted as saying “C'mon, they're steroids.”) In 2004, androstenedione was added to the list of Schedule III banned substances as part of the Steroid Control Act passed by Congress and was therefore banned by baseball. Mitchell's report into the use of illegal performance enhancers in baseball, released last month, says the discovery of andro in McGwire's locker was a seminal point in forcing baseball executives to face the issue of steroid use.
Ash said the comments did not raise red flags because “the issue of andro was being talked about a lot that year.”
That doesn't explain, however, how a person described by one long-time Blue Jays employee as someone who “gave off a weird vibe,” and who was “a pipeline” to McCleary's office, and described by a former Blue Jays player as “one of those ‘Noo Yawkahs' who knew everything and liked being part of the baseball life, especially the idea of walking into a bar with Roger Clemens,” went from someone on the fringes of the game to being widely quoted in Mitchell's report, providing details that include injecting Clemens with Winstrol in the pitcher's hotel room at the then-SkyDome Hotel. He apparently kept evidence, too, based on photographs released by his legal team last week that showed syringes and vials and bloody gauze that one of his lawyers claimed had been kept in McNamee's basement for seven years and contained DNA that could be matched to Clemens.
The position of strength and conditioning coach is not a collectively-bargained right as is the position of trainer and assistant trainer, but all teams now employ one. Turnover is common (“we've had three guys in the six years I've been with the Brewers,” said Ash,) but there's a vetting process that goes on – especially now – that didn't happen in the past.
“We didn't have to do background checks on people back then,” Ash admits.
McCleary, who started out in baseball in the early 1990s as a spokesman for the American League office before the AL and National League amalgamated and whose contract was not renewed by current Blue Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi in 2005, did not return repeated messages left at his home.
“I know it devastated Tim to see his name in that(Mitchell)report,” said a person who has spoken to McCleary since the report was published. “You don't want to see your name in that.”
McNamee grew up in the Breezy Point section of Rockaway, Queens and attended Archbishop Molloy High School and St. John's, where he was given a baseball scholarship. A catcher, he was regarded as a gritty, take-charge competitor who played on a squad that upset Stanford University in the 1988 NCAA tournament.
"He was a very good baseball player here – really into the game, really loved it – and he was a really good player for St. John's," said Jack Curran, Molloy's legendary baseball and basketball coach. "The next time I saw him I was at Yankee Stadium with Whitey Ford for some function. Suddenly I hear a guy yelling 'What are you doing here?' I said: ‘What am I doing here. What are you doing here?' He was in a Yankees uniform. He was the bullpen catcher."
McNamee followed his father into the New York City police department in 1990 and worked undercover until he quit the force in 1993. In a profile published in ESPN The Magazine, McNamee is reported to have had at least one 30-day suspension on his disciplinary record during his time with the force.
McNamee was taking courses toward a degree in athletic training at Long Island University when McCleary hired him for the Yankees. He returned to New York in 2000 – widely accepted at the request of Clemens – and he held a full-time position as a strength and conditioning coach with the team until he was fired after the 2001 season by Joe Torre, on the heels of an incident at the teams hotel in Tampa Bay where he was discovered having sex in a swimming pool. A bottle of GHB, known as the ‘date rape drug' was found on the pool deck and McNamee was questioned the next morning. Police eventually dropped the case when questions arose about some of details provided by the complainant. McNamee was subsequently taken to court by the law firm that represented him for non-payment of legal fees. Last year, published reports said that the St. Petersburg police believe McNamee lied to them.
Clemens and Andy Pettitte retained McNamee as their personal trainer – Pettitte admitted after the release of the Mitchell report that McNamee injected him (Pettitte) with human growth hormone. Clemens is suing McNamee for defamation of character, after dropping him as his personal trainer earlier in 2007, six years after the incident in the swimming pool at the Renaissance Vinoy Hotel. McNamee, in fact, brought Clemens to a St. John's baseball alumni dinner last year. He also helped Molloy's athletic department design its new weight room and Curran said McNamee gave him a copy of Clemens's workout routine.
"He was pretty busy with his major league guys ... it was a pretty good gig," said Curran. "He and Roger were pretty tight, the two of them. It's a shame that this thing happened. They're both great people, probably."
McNamee still runs a private training business, but his clients are no longer high profile. He stayed involved in the Breezy Point community, according to Curran. "It's one of those enclaves you find in New York City," said Curran. "They have a saying out there: Once you get the sand in your shoes you never leave."
Is Ash surprised that Clemens retained McNamee's services for that long?
“No,” Ash said. “In fact, when Roger left us (the Blue Jays) I remember sitting in the office with Tim (McCleary) one day and saying: ‘Just watch, Mac (McNamee) is going to end up there, too.' ”
McNamee's training regimen with Clemens, which the pitcher started to use in Toronto, was often termed the ‘Navy SEAL' routine and involved rigorous, almost-daily strengthening including abdominal exercises. “I never lift more than 25 pounds over my head,” Clemens said in a Sports Illustrated article in which he added that the routines were so tough that the easiest day of all was the day was when he pitched.
Fletcher said that the only thing that separated McNamee from other strength and conditioning coaches he worked with was that he was “a hard one.” But he added that McNamee always had time for every player, not just Clemens (although pitcher Paul Quantrill, a teammate of Fletcher's in Toronto, said he found McNamee's exercises to be less sports-specific than other trainers he'd had in his career.) It was known that long-time Blue Jays trainer Tommy Craig – who is now in the Brewers minor league system – did not have much time for McNamee, whom he suspected mostly of being a pipeline to McCleary.
McNamee would find himself in the middle of a piece of Blue Jay folklore at the end of the 1998 season when he helped escort Jays manager Tim Johnson out of a bar in an Arlington, Tex., hotel after Johnson had a heated argument with pitching coach Mel Queen. Johnson was subsequently fired.
Ash says candidly that the Blue Jays had complaints about the two strength and conditioning coaches who preceded McNamee: Rick Knox – who was do disliked by the members of the 1992 World Championship team that he was only voted a 25 per-cent World Series share – and Geoff Horne, the latter of whom worked hard enough but was seen as being too malleable.
“One of our complaints was that we didn't think we were getting full results out of the position,” said Ash, whose ability to hire training staff was hamstrung by the fact that the U.S.-based National Athletic Therapists Association did not recognize Canadian-educated trainers. “We needed a more aggressive personality, someone who would capture the attention of the players. If he could throw batting practice and catch in the bullpen, well, that would be great, too. Brian fit the bill on all three fronts.
“Trainers were going through a transformation at that time,” Ash continued. “It had started to go from the old one-man operation to a two-man operation, where the second guy wasn't always as qualified. Now you have massage therapists, chiropractors . . . it wasn't like that back then. The strength and conditioning guy would often work independently of the trainer. It was kind of ‘This is my area. That's yours.' “Now there's a bridge. There's a better understanding that, for example, if a guy is injured his strength and conditioning routine will need to be changed.”
Fletcher said he knew that McNamee had been a cop. He was also aware he had a son with diabetes.
“We never had player complaints about (McNamee) like we'd had about some of the other people before him,” Ash said. “It was clear that he was developing a very personal relationship with Roger but that seemed natural.
“Roger liked to work. (McNamee) liked to push people to work.”
