It was compelling theatre, an often uncomfortable glimpse of human nature, a morality play carried out at a safe distance from most of our daily lives.
The script involved lying, for sure, and deceit, the survival instinct laid bare, broken trusts, shattered friendships, even a brief glimpse into a marriage.
And with all of that, the Roger Clemens-Brian McNamee appearance before a congressional committee yesterday wasn't really about anything at all.
You could compare it to Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, except that the direction of a country might well have turned there. You could compare it to Shakespeare, except that the Bard tends to leave his audiences pondering the most complex issues of the human condition. Or to the O.J. trial, except that at the core of that sideshow was the fact that two people died.
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In truth, the Clemens-McNamee appearance was closer in spirit to reality television - to the show where they hook people up to the polygraph and ask them whether they've cheated on their spouses while viewers find delight in their pain - than to high art or to the legal process of determining guilt from the starting point of presumed innocence.
Baseball is merely a game, a single entertainment business with a long history and a place in the larger culture, and of late some inconvenient truths have got in the way of the fans' willing suspension of disbelief.
Pull back the focus for just a moment.
Major League Baseball for decades created an environment in which players felt comfortable using performance-enhancing drugs to help them on the field of play, and to help them get through the grind of the longest season in professional sports. For most of that time, the substances of choice were amphetamines and caffeine. More recently - since the late 1980s on - ballplayers began dabbling in steroids and human growth hormone.
Why? Because it worked and because there was a reward.
There were rules on the books, but there was no testing - like speed limits without radar traps. The spirit was very much don't ask-don't tell. It was a win-win situation for the business, and everyone was complicit, from the commissioner right down to the clubhouse boys. The players enhanced their market value, their fame, their wealth. The owners profited from the spectacular results, the records shattered, and the paying customers who flocked to the stadiums to watch.
Health risks? Sure, but they're big boys, consenting adults.
Role-model issues? It's been long established that professional athletes have feet of clay, just like the rest of us, and can't we all agree that the winners in various genetic lotteries (including elite athletes and all of those enormously attractive folks in Hollywood) don't necessarily have anything to tell us about how we ought to live our lives.
It became a legal matter through the back door, a byproduct of a Treasury Department investigation that spit out some famous names.
Then the politicians got involved because it was an easy, hot-button issue of good guys and bad guys, far less murky than a tanking economy or the quagmire in Iraq. Plus, they hold a legal hammer, baseball's antitrust exemption, maintained at Congress's pleasure. That's why the focus has remained squarely on the national pastime while other sports with long histories of drug issues (the NFL, for instance) were largely spared the third degree, spared the Mitchell investigation, spared the public hand-wringing.
What you believe today you certainly should have believed before yesterday.
What you saw from Clemens, the greatest pitcher of the modern era, was either a brave truth-teller standing among a crowd of liars, or someone who understands that without testing, they can't really have the goods on him, that no amount of dirty gauze or others' words is going to be conclusive, and that his place in Cooperstown - alongside, it must be said, a whole bunch of other drug users with better timing - is on the line.
He's made his money. He has enjoyed the life of a celebrity. None of that is going to be taken from him. But Clemens is still worried about how baseball writers are going to judge him - delusional, since it's a battle that in the new, moral grandstanding spirit of the times, he has already lost.
All of this for that.
One of the blowhard congressmen, Dan Burton, actually got it right when he said: "This kind of a hearing, this kind of a circus really bothers me. If [Clemens] has done something wrong, he should be indicted, he should be prosecuted and he should be punished for it."
If it really mattered, he would be. It doesn't really matter. But, boy, what a show, what a distraction, until the next one comes along.
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