Pettitte sings for his pennance

Forget about a bunch of uninformed Congressmen. Andy Pettitte faced the real heat on Monday when he sat in front of the assembled media for his first press conference of the spring.
His questioners weren't a bunch of people who are blissfully ignorant to the drug culture that has forever tainted Major League Baseball, sweeping up Pettitte and several of his New York Yankees' teammates and landing some of them, most notably his friend and mentor, Roger Clemens, in serious jeopardy of a stretch in federal prison. The New York media does its homework every day, consuming themselves with digging up every nugget that they can find about the Yankees, and they grilled the star lefthander for almost 60 minutes. Pettitte's revelations about his use of human growth hormone are about as tasty a morsel as they could ask for in the lazy days of spring training, and the intrigue involving Pettitte's impending divorce from Clemens over a third party named Brian McNamee is too rich to ignore.
Pettitte admitted that he was wrong for using HGH in 2002 and again in 2004. He referred to the deposition that he gave last week before Clemens was hauled in front of Congress to answer questions about his involvement in The Mitchell Report, a damning piece of testimony that implicated Clemens as a cheater. Pettitte's account backed up McNamee and his accusations that Clemens doped his way into an extended career and a renaissance that started with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1998.
Pettitte said that he didn't watch the Congressional hearings. He's hopeful that Clemens being embarrassed like he was by Henry Waxman and the rest of the grandstanders would be enough of a haunting visual image to sway anybody who is thinking about cheating in the future.
But Pettitte is still in denial. He said on Monday that he doesn't believe he cheated. He swears that he didn't use HGH to gain a competitive advantage. Pettitte said that he used the drug to heal his ailing left elbow, a constant hindrance throughout his career. Pettitte's most serious problems with his pitching arm came in 2004, fresh off signing a lucrative deal with the Houston Astros. He said Monday that he hurt his elbow during his first start that season but that he was determined to pitch in pain to fulfill his end of the bargain. Pettitte said that he turned to HGH "because I heard it could heal tissue." By healing faster, Pettitte did gain an advantage over other pitchers who suffered the same injury to the flexor tendon in their pitching arms and tried to recover clean. He was able to extend his prime into his late 30s by taking a drug that prevented him from putting any additional strain on himself.
Pettitte's mentality is indicative of just about any professional athlete backed into a corner. Their first inclination is to deny, deny, deny. Pettitte's first confession was that he had used HGH twice, both occasions coming in 2002. He later admitted to Congress that he used the drug again in 2004. By shading the truth people like Clemens and Barry Bonds unknowingly create nightmares for themselves. The media hates nothing more than being lied to. They'll find the truth, and in this case the truth won't set Clemens free. It'll land him behind bars.