ST. LOUIS — Here’s the story none of us probably wants to really consider.
Maybe we’re just too late.

Maybe it’s finally time to face the unsettling truth that we’ve lost the battle to be able to turn back the tide of performance-enhancing drugs that have overtaken our sports world. Maybe it’s time to resign ourselves to the sad reality that it’s just too late to change minds, alter cultures and fight back the decades worth of mad science that has turned a generation of athletes into genetic freak shows.
I keep hearing the haunting words that Jack Clark told me on Monday. It hit me later just how powerful and disturbingly prophetic the former baseball slugger’s words probably were:
“I just think that it’s not over with. ... I’m sure someone is going to be on that list who is going to crush us again. And this time I just hope it’s not anybody that hurts us too bad.”
We can fight it, write about it, expose it, demonize the drug cheats, track down the chemists and prosecute them all for lying to us. But the culture is already too deep, the payoff too astronomical and the consequences too abstract to matter much.
I listened to Roger Clemens on Tuesday morning, out of self-imposed hibernation for the first time in more than a year, and it hit me again:
My gosh, here’s a guy who is getting buried under a pile of damaging accusations that he built his reputation as the greatest power pitcher of our generation fueled by a steroid-filled syringe, who is trying to hold off a very real federal grand jury investigation for perjury following his questionable congressional testimony, and he can’t stop himself.
It just doesn’t feel like anyone is afraid of this. It doesn’t feel like anyone is worried that they might be risking their long-term health, destroying their athletic legacy and risking federal prison as a result of using performance-enhancing drugs.
Clemens broke his long silence on Tuesday on ESPN’s “Mike & Mike in the Morning” show, going on the offensive to counter the scathing tales in the newly released book “American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime.” I was expecting to hear something different from Clemens from the last time he spoke to Congress.
I was waiting for some bombshell revelation, or at least a change of tune. Instead I heard more of the same strident but clumsy explanations. He said Andy Pettitte was still “misremembering” details about their conversations about drug use. He continued to deny that former trainer Brian McNamee supplied him with steroids and human growth hormone with nothing more substantial than we have to believe him because he once was the greatest pitcher on the planet.
But sooner or later, Clemens is going to end up having to back up all these public comments with something more substantial. His accusers keep giving us details. The federal investigators have been sorting through evidence for more than a year and the four New York Daily News reporters who wrote “American Icon” — award-winning professional investigative reporters for one of the top sports sections in America — have been compiling evidence, too.
Ultimately, Clemens will have to back up his bluster or face charges of lying under oath to Congress. Instead, he gave us more awkward nonsense that was crafted by his new image maker, a professional spin doctor named Gene Grabowski, whose fanciful title is Crisis, Product Liability & Recall Practice Director for the Houston-based damage control firm Levick Strategic Communications.
“Crisis, Product Liability & Recall Practice Director” is a very long and colorful title that is perfectly symbolic of everything that is wrong with this era of unreliable nonsense from our sports culture. It’s all about strategies, not solutions. So now Clemens is attacking his problems with expensive weapons of mass distraction, doing like Manny and A-Rod.
It’s not all about baseball, either. It’s the overwhelming culture of all sports, and it’s not likely to change as long as coaches and general managers keep sending out the messages that you need bigger, faster and stronger, and the locker rooms continue to produce some of the most uncanny athletic freaks of nature you’ve ever seen.
Three-hundred pound linemen who can run like the wind; rock-jawed baseball players who are built like linebackers; world-class sprinters who travel at speeds that make no human sense at all. And all of them shaped like Marvel comic book characters, cut and chiseled like marble statues.
And as long as they’re all becoming exceedingly rich men and women, the threat of ruined livers, damaged hearts, haywire testosterone levels and the possibility of either going to jail or dying before you’re 50 doesn’t seem to matter all that much.
The freak show isn’t over. Unfortunately, it’s probably just begun.