Believing Someone Who Believes Roger Clemens

Aa a recent former New Yorker, over the years I heard a lot about Roger Clemens when he was a Yankee...and beyond, when he played for Houston. He was an awesome pitcher. He was a hero. Now he's being bashed by people left and right after his former trainer claimed he injected Clemens with steroids on several occasions. Who do you believe and how do you know how to judge?

Well, I believe Clemens.

I am not in a position to know anything about what happened or what didn't. But someone I know and respect is an award-winning, longtime sports writer who has covered Clemens for some years, and he has taken a strong stand for the (hopefully) future Hall of Fame pitcher. His name is Mike Geffner. Mike is a passionate do-gooder in the BEST sense of the word; he has created several writers groups online solely for the purpose of giving writers a place to go for help, to help other writers and to learn about writing. If you write anything, or aspire to, I urge you to subscribe to Mike's Writing Newsletter (free!), join Mike's Writing Workshop (a Yahoo group), and become a "friend" of Mike's on his MySpace page.

Mike posted a blog item today on his MySpace page called "Believing in Roger Clemens." You can see it on his MySpace page and on recordonline.com. He says he believes Clemens because he knows him, knows who he is as a person, and he believes in him. That's good enough for me.

People have no idea what journalists get to learn about people. They, well, we -- I'm one too, which is how I know -- are attuned to whether someone is being straight with us or not. Our job is to ferret out the exaggerations, distortions and outright lies and deliver the truth to our readers, and we get to be very good at it. We can smell a lie a mile away. Not always -- we can be gullible too. But by and large, we know who people are when we talk to them. It's a lot about patterns. When we see something 150 times, we can assume when we see it for the 151st that it's a lot like the first 150.

But really and truly, the great benefit of being a journalist is the relationships we form with the people we write about. It would absolutely astonish you to learn what people tell us. They start to trust us or they get caught up in the conversation and they forget we're journalists and they open up to us. I've had people tell me the most private things about their businesses, their marriages, their extracurricular activities, their bodies, their partners and their deep-down frustrations and desires. I know when they lost their virginity and to whom (the best was at a Black Sabbath concert), I know the exact moment their marriages took a turn for the worse, I know the political landscape and that they're angling for the CEO position (or leaving the company) before they've told anyone else. I know the real reasons for their actions despite what they've told their colleagues, clients, spouses or their p.r. people. So I totally believed Bob Woodward when he said that William Casey, the former head of the CIA, revealed deep secrets to Woodward on Casey's deathbed for Woodward's book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. Casey's wife said it never happened, that Casey would never do that. Well, wives, p.r. agents and best friends never know what people say to us one-on-one. There is no doubt in my mind that Casey had that kind of conversation with Woodward, a journalist he trusted. Hey, journalists will go to jail to protect their sources. You're better off telling things to a journalist than to your best friend.

So when Geffner says he believes Clemens, I believe him. And, therefore, I believe Clemens.