Wednesday, February 13, 2008

MISREMEMBER ME WHEN I'M GONE: We need to thank Roger Clemens for finally bringing to our attention the terrible scourge that performance-enhancing drugs have been to an institution as American as apple pie: Mom.

As Clemens bravely pointed out in sworn testimony today, his long-time friend Andy Pettite -- a guy who bears Clemens no grudge, and who appears to have been a key factor in luring Clemens out of fake-retirement to pitch for the Astros a few years back -- "misremembered" a conversation in which Clemens said that his wife took synthetic human growth hormone. Pettite mistakenly believed that the HGH was for the professional athlete, not the professional mom.

The fact is that while all parents reach daily the limits of their performance capacity -- do I have the strength to wrestle the Sharpie from my toddler-vandal's death-grip, the speed to grab him before he depantses himself and pees on the rug again, and the stamina to tuck him into his big boy bed for the 91st time in 90 minutes? -- we cannot even begin to understand the pressure on elite moms like Debbie Clemens. With nary but the help of a large and difficult-to-locate-at-the-request-of-Congress household staff, she must supervise the care and feeding of the Clemens boys while simultaneously maintaining a body suitable for a Sports Illustrated swimsuit photo and hair as blonde as the color of the Hummer that the Yankees gave her husband on the occasion of his first retirement. Who in that position wouldn't be tempted by a little synthetic help to put some extra snap in the reach-back fastball, so to speak? And who among us has never wondered whether we couldn't gain an edge on the maternal competition if we (or our wives) weren't more muscular and indefatiguable (even at the expense some pattern baldness and the tendency to throw broken bats at Mike Piazza -- again, so to speak)? So isn't Clemens right that what we really need is a Mitchell Report to investigate the sordid world of elite mommery?

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