Roger Clemens Subject of Devastating Portrait in New Book by Award-Winning Daily News Sports Investigative Team
Sports Illustrated to Excerpt American Icon in print and on SI.com
A new book by the award-winning New York Daily News Sports Investigative Team portrays Roger Clemens as both a compromised player and a person of questionable conduct, a man destroyed by his own pride, dishonesty, and judgment. The book, AMERICAN ICON: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime (to be published by Alfred A. Knopf on May 12), explores Clemens’s use of banned substances, details his dalliances with women, and suggests that he may have perjured himself while testifying before Congress. Sports Illustrated has purchased first serial rights to the book, and will excerpt it on SI.com April 21 and in its April 27 issue (on newsstands April 22).
“No player in baseball’s long and rich history has fallen from grace as fast and as far as Roger Clemens,” the authors write in AMERICAN ICON. “Clemens’s fall is straight out of Greek mythology: The very traits that made him dominant on the pitcher’s mound, his tenacity and mercilessness, contributed to and possibly even caused his downfall.”
AMERICAN ICON is the first book to offer compelling, insider details on Clemens’s life between 1998 and 2009. Drawing from a damning trove of documentary evidence and interviews with people who have never before gone on record, the authors paint a stark picture of Clemens. Their reporting culminates with Clemens unraveling in the wake of the Mitchell Report, when a series of choices transformed him from a Cooperstown shoo-in to the subject of a Justice Department perjury investigation. “This is a drama about cheating and lying and fame,” the authors write, “all the elements that seem to have taken over and dominated what once was America’s purest and favorite sport.”
The reporters on The Daily News I-Team—Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O’Keeffe, and Christian Red—are known for their deep sourcing and authoritative reporting (they recently won an APSE Award for Best Investigative Reporting in 2008, for their Clemens coverage). The I-Team has been at the forefront of many major sports stories since it was formed in 2000, and for this book, the team’s reporting took them all over America. They unearthed thousands of pages of court documents, congressional depositions, e-mails, text messages, police reports, medical files, and transcripts of secretly recorded phone calls. They interviewed hundreds of people—among them Hall of Fame baseball players, steroid suppliers, trainers, doctors, gym rats, porn stars, drug dealers, Major League Baseball executives, Players Association officials, congressional leaders, law enforcement agents, attorneys, and doping experts. During their investigation, they were threatened with both lawsuits and violence. “It was challenging and difficult work,” they write.
The I-Team made repeated requests to interview Roger Clemens for the book. All of them were denied.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Teri Thompson is the editor of the New York Daily News Sports Investigative Team and the paper’s Sunday sports section, both of which have won numerous awards under her direction. One of the first women sportswriters in the country, she spent 12 years as a sportswriter and columnist at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. She joined the Daily News in 1997, then left to work for ESPN as a coordinating producer for SportsCenter before returning in 2000 to lead the Sports Investigative Team, one of the only teams of its kind at a major metropolitan newspaper. She is the recipient of the New York Times Fellowship for Journalists at Columbia Law School and is a member of the Connecticut bar.
Nathaniel Vinton joined the New York Daily News Sports Investigative Team on December 13, 2007, the day the Mitchell Report was released. He has written for The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Men’s Journal, Ski Racing and Slate. From 2004 to 2007, he was based in France covering European sports. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College.
Michael O’Keeffe has been a member of the New York Daily News Sports Investigative Team since its inception in 2000. He has been a reporter and editor for more than 20 years and has covered a wide variety of topics, including crime, politics, the environment, and sports. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado.
Christian Red is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Daily News. He received a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
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AMERICAN ICON: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime
By Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O’Keeffe, and Christian Red
Publication Date: May 12, 2009
$26.95
464 pages
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CONTACT:
Paul Bogaards, Executive Vice President, Executive Director, Media Relations, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, (212) 572-2177, pbogaards@randomhouse.com
For review copies of the book, or if you are interested in interviewing the authors, please contact:
Michelle Somers, Publicity Manager, (212) 572-2082, msomers@randomhouse.com