Mike Celizic

Roger Clemens can’t possibly know about the world he’s stepped into. He’s spent the last 30 years living in the fantasy world inhabited only by great athletes, and it’s a world in which the everyday laws of behavior don’t apply.

All his life, he’s gotten a pass on most things because he’s a great athlete. And when from time to time people have gotten on his case about one thing or another, he’s always shouted them down, getting whatever he wants because he could throw a baseball better than most people who ever lived.

News reports say that his attorney, Rusty Hardin, has been earning his fees by running Clemens through mock cross-examinations and then critiquing them. Hardin’s good at what he does, so you know he’ll do everything he can to impress upon his client just how perilous is the corner he’s painted himself into.

And still, there’s no way Clemens can comprehend a world that is as unfamiliar to him as driving a Corvette is to a moray eel. You could see the fantasy island Clemens still thinks he inhabits last week after he was deposed by the congressional subcommittee that is going to hold his feet to a very real fire on Wednesday. After the deposition, in which he apparently kept insisting he didn’t have performance-enhancing relations with those needles, he returned for one-on-one visits with about half the members of the committee.

This is the jock at work. Whenever things have gone a little bit against him on his luxurious island and being nasty didn’t work, he’s turned on the charm, pressed the flesh, posed for pictures with the office help, autographed some baseballs, and walked away with the fawning thanks of the multitudes ringing in his ears.

The problem is that nobody knows that trick better than a Congressman, who can make most problems go away by stopping at an elementary school, giving a happy talk about civics and delivering a flag that flew over the Capital — for five seconds. Clemens has spent enough time in Texas to know you can’t B.S. a B.S.er.

This is deadly serious business. An earlier Congress impeached and almost dismissed a President of the United States for less of a lie than the one Clemens can find himself accused of. If lying about an affair could nearly bring down Bill Clinton, think what lying about steroids can do to Roger Clemens.

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And this is more than just he said, he said. There’s enough circumstantial evidence linking him to performance-enhancing drugs to have convinced former-Sen. George Mitchell that he did it. Mitchell is nobody’s fool, one of the more respected members of the Senate during his tenure, a former prosecutor, and a respected diplomat.

Unlike many of the Congresspersons on the panel that will grill Clemens, Mitchell isn’t trawling for votes or trying to make a splash in the weekly papers back in his district. He was paid a lot of money to do a job, and the credibility he’s built up over a lifetime is riding on the accuracy of what’s in his report to Major League Baseball.

So it’s not just former trainer Brian McNamee against Clemens. It’s Clemens versus the weight of Mitchell’s reputation, it’s Clemens against the U.S. Congress, it’s Clemens maybe against the testimony of his former teammate and supposed friend, Andy Pettitte. And in the end, it’s going to turn out to be Clemens against himself.

It’s something that he seems incapable of appreciating until it’s washed over him and buried him in the same muck that encases Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds and Rafael Palmiero. They don’t get it because unlike most people, they’ve never had to play by the rules of real life.

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