AMERICA AT LARGE:ROGER CLEMENS has been back in the news again this week after the New York Daily News broke the story last Sunday that the star pitcher had engaged in a long-time, extramarital affair with a country singer named Mindy McCready.

Now, under normal circumstances this tawdry tale would rightly have been consigned to the gossip pages and tabloid television programmes, the American equivalent of Ronaldo (the Brazilian one, that is) and the he/she hookers - not great for endorsements, but a story with a fairly transitory shelf-life.

That it has instead become a headline event dominating America's sports pages for days is largely of Clemens's - and his lawyers' - creation, and in light of his pugnaciously overaggressive response to the Mitchell Report, l'Affaire Mindy now threatens to blow up in his face.

In fact, you'd have to say right now that Roger's chances of winding up in jail are much better than those of making the Hall of Fame.

On the day he took the mound in search of his 300th career-pitching victory at Yankee Stadium five years ago, I wrote, "If there were a Nitwits' Hall of Fame, they'd have to build a special wing for Roger Clemens. But when it comes to the baseball Hall of Fame, he's more than earned his place, even if he never wins another game."

That statement, apart from the bit about the nitwits, has been cast into considerable doubt in the five months since the emergence of the Mitchell Report on steroid use in baseball, in which Clemens's name was mentioned 82 times, including several in which his personal trainer, Brian McNamee, described having administered injections of Winstrol to the middle-aged pitcher.

On the advice of his attorneys, Clemens's answer to the Mitchell Report was to show up in Washington days ahead of the Congressional hearings that shortly followed. There, at the Rayburn Office Building, he attempted to schmooze his prospective interrogators, and during the hearings themselves he earnestly depicted himself as a devoted family man concerned primarily with how the steroid accusations would affect his children.

At roughly the same time, he filed a defamation suit against his erstwhile trainer, at the heart of which was his claim that McNamee's allegations had damaged his otherwise stellar reputation.

That the House committee was not entirely persuaded by his testimony was reflected in its subsequent decision to recommend that the Justice Department pursue perjury charges against Clemens.

The FBI is already on the case. And the McNamee lawsuit was an open invitation to investigate his personal life. If a jury can be persuaded that he was having an affair with McCready, it's going to be difficult to demonstrate that Clemens had a reputation even worth salvaging.

"If he is a philanderer and a liar," one of McNamee's attorneys reminded Mike Lupica of the Daily News, "he has very little reputation to ruin."

Although Clemens's Houston lawyer Rusty Hardin labelled it "a filthy smear campaign", Ms McCready has already confirmed the essential elements of the affair as reported in the New York tabloid.

"I cannot refute anything in the story," she tearfully said in Nashville earlier this week.

Roger Clemens and I have never exchanged Christmas cards. While he was in the employ of the Red Sox during the first 13 years of his major league career, we had several well-chronicled confrontations, and since I was considered his principal antagonist among the Boston media corps back then, it will be widely assumed, particularly by Clemens and his dwindling pack of defenders, that I must be revelling in schadenfreude over all of this now. But trust me, I'm not gloating when I point out that Roger and his people are getting just what they asked for.

In his 22-year big league career, Clemens won 354 games, which puts him eighth on the all-time list - and none of the seven guys ahead of him played in the last 45 years. His 4,672 strikeouts are the second-most in major league history, and he won the Cy Young Award as his league's best pitcher a record seven times.

Those figures must now be viewed with some scepticism. More than 200 of the wins came, astonishingly, after his 30th birthday, and most of those after he commenced his association with McNamee.

A team of Pennsylvania university professors concluded a dissertation on the subject by noting, "We are not saying that the numbers show guilt, but we are saying that the statistics show that something unusual happened in Clemens's career as he entered his 30s."

We are only left to ponder how he might have been judged by history had Clemens (as did his former team-mate and workout partner Andy Pettitte) simply acknowledged the essential truths included in the Mitchell Report and, like Pettitte, asked to be excused from the witness list. Yes, he would have taken his lumps, and yes, his legacy would have been affected.

On the other hand, it seems at least possible that it might have all blown away five years from now when Clemens will become eligible for Hall of Fame election. By then voters, given the apparently pervasive nature of performance-enhancing drug use in the corresponding era, may be faced with the choice of cutting the drug cheats some slack or suspending Hall of Fame inductions for an entire generation.

Instead, Clemens tried to cast himself as a victim, insulting our intelligence with his arrogant claim that each and every one of his accusers was a liar. By forcing them to prove that they were not, he has achieved the polar opposite of what he intended.