Mike Celizic

Roger Clemens taught Andy Pettitte more about pitching than any other person. It’s too bad Clemens didn’t learn anything from Pettitte in return, because his friend has an awful lot to teach Clemens and all of us.

Be honest. Tell the truth. Accept that it’s going to hurt and there will be consequences. Be a man. And show some humility.

You do that, and people are going to feel sympathy for you and they’re going to forgive you. In one hour on Monday, Pettitte repaired just about all of the damage he’d done to himself with his actions. But that’s what happens when you tell the truth and express your sorrow at having hurt the game, the fans and the kids who look up to you.

Pettitte was believable. Clemens was not. It’s that simple. Faced with evidence and testimony against him, Pettitte admitted that what others had said under oath was true. Clemens said that everything everyone said was true — except those things that were said about him.

Last week, Clemens looked only like a man desperately trying to save his precious backside from the criticism and scorn that was going to come his way if he told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. On Monday, after Andy Pettitte with painful candor told his story of having used human grown hormone (HGH), Clemens looks more like a worm than a man, a worm who would impugn everybody’s honor to save what’s left of his own.

We got none of that from Pettitte, the lefthanded pitcher who has been Clemens’ tight friend for the better part of a decade while both have pitched in New York and Houston, sharing their homes and their trainer with each other. He gave no excuses, asked for no pity, made no effort to sugar-coat what he’d done.

He also refused to characterize Clemens’ conflicting testimony in any way. Clemens had told the congressional inquisitors that Pettitte “misremembered” conversations the two had. Pettitte said only that when put under oath, he did the only thing his moral compass would allow him to do — tell the truth. He did what he felt he had to do, and, he said, Clemens did what he thought he had to do.

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He hasn’t spoken to Clemens for months now, and though he said, “I love him like a brother,” and hoped they would remain friends, you know this is a friendship that may have taken a fatal hit. Yet Pettitte was willing to risk that, too, to avoid lying under oath.

“Was it stupid? Yeah, it was stupid,” Pettitte said of his two brief relationships with HGH, one in 2002 and the other in 2004, both when he was trying to recover from chronic elbow problems. “Was I desperate? Yeah, I was probably desperate. Stupidity. Desperation. That’s the only excuse I can give you.”

Pettitte said he doesn’t consider himself a cheater for two reasons. The first was that there was no policy against using it. The other was that he wasn’t trying to gain an unfair advantage over anyone, just trying to recover from his elbow problems so that he could give back value on the money he was being paid to pitch.

He admitted that others may choose to put a different spin on what he said and call him a liar and a cheat. Instead of trying to dissuade them from that view, he said he accepts that will be the case. He doesn’t like it, but he recognized that actions have consequences, and not all of them are under his control.

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