Working With The Rocket
Part I: Enter Roger Clemens
Sitting in Bess Clemens home in Katy, Texas, I’ll never forget the moment her front door opened and in walked a man who looked like a superhero. Big, tall, strong and muscular, Bess’ son Roger ducked under the top of the doorway with a broad smile on his face. It was an amazing moment to see just how big of a man Roger Clemens was at that time. And that was the beginning of my two-year working relationship with him.
It was only a week earlier that I had spoken to Roger for the first time via phone to ask if he would be interested in working with my PR firm to launch a COPD awareness program for clients, Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim. Given his national celebrity as one of the greatest pitchers ever in Major League Baseball, plus his personal experience with the disease due to his mother’s health battle, there was no question that he would be a great spokesperson to generate awareness for the lung disease which is a combination of chronic bronchitis and emphysema. He liked the idea and a week later I was sitting in his mother’s front room talking with Roger and Bess.
We had a photographer and film crew on hand to do interviews and take pictures to get the program started. My client from Pfizer, Mike Bentivegna, was there as well. I was so happy Mike could make the trip because he was the one who had informed me about the news story of Roger dedicating his sixth Cy Young to his mother and mentioned that she suffered from emphysema.
“Maybe he would be interested in working with us,” Mike suggested. “It’s worth a call to find out.”
Well, yes it was well worth a call and thanks to Mike, that suggestion turned into the most successful public relations campaign I have ever created and managed.
Our first trip was to Washington, D.C. where we held a press conference with the U.S. COPD Coalition, inviting Congressional staffers to attend and conducted media interviews afterwards. Debbie Clemens, Roger’s wife, joined us for that event. Debbie is a very pretty lady and like Roger, an athlete. After talking with her, it was quite apparent that she is a take-charge lady. She raised the couple’s four boys at their home in Houston, while Roger pitched for the Yankees.
The Clemens’ home was our next stop as I set up an exclusive interview with Tyler Kepner of the New York Times. This was an interesting experience. Before Tyler was allowed to enter the Clemens home, I was told by Jim Murray, Roger’s day-to-day representative for the Hendricks brothers – Roger’s agents - that we had to meet with Tyler at his hotel first to go over the ground rules. Ground rules? The Hendricks brothers, a couple of powerful no-nonsense Texas agents, didn’t trust that Tyler was there to write a story about Roger’s efforts to promote COPD. Jim Murray sat at the head of the table relaying their concerns to the New York Times baseball writer, letting him know that if he were to write anything derogatory about Roger, he would be placed on their “list.” This meant he would no longer be allowed to interview Roger as a Yankee from that point on. The threats weren’t necessary as Tyler made it clear that he was there purely to write about Roger’s work promoting COPD awareness to honor his mother. And that’s exactly what he did once we traveled to the Clemens’ estate.
His home was a mansion to be sure, literally a baseball museum. His mother-in-law decorated it with signed memorabilia and photos hung on each wall and signed baseball bats along the entire side of each wall. In one room, Roger’s six Cy Young Awards were placed on a fireplace mantle, an amazing sight to be sure. Roger knew Tyler very well as the beat reporter for the Yankees. The interview went smoothly with no gotcha-questions. It was all COPD, just as Tyler had promised. His story appeared the next day on the front page of the New York Times sports section, a major victory for everyone involved in the campaign.
After he left, my client from Boehringer Ingelheim, Elizabeth Garofalo, and I received an inside look at the Clemens’ family and their four boys, all GREAT athletes. They have a large gymnasium on their grounds and Roger hit ground balls to the boys, whose names all begin with K (strikeout). There was Kody, Kacy, Koby and Kory. Debbie even got in on the action and exhibited her excellent athletic skills.
At that time, Kody was playing infield for his high school team and watching him workout in the gym, his great talent was on full display. Kody was strong and fast with a great throwing arm. Any high school baseball team in the country would have been lucky to have him. But apparently he had a disagreement with the coach about where he was playing, which Roger assured him that he would get straightened out right away. Being the son of a celebrity athlete isn’t always easy. Some coaches feel threatened, jealous. I watched an Atlanta Braves pitcher’s stepson get jerked around and cut by a widely-disliked and disrespected baseball coach in the Atlanta area. The great pitcher handled it well though and took the high road, probably realizing any blow-back might negatively impact his son’s time at the school. On the other hand, knowing Roger, I’m sure he was very direct with Kody’s coach, just as he always was with umpires he disagreed with during a game he pitched. After a game once, I recall him saying with a smile and winning pride, “The umpire wasn’t giving me the corners, so I had a little chat with him and got that straightened out.”
As Elizabeth and I left their beautiful home, I glanced out the back window at the horseshoe pit in the backyard that Roger had set up specifically for the visits by the former President, George Herbert Walker Bush. I thought that was pretty cool, and represented the pride that the Clemens family had in Texas and one of it’s state’s history-making heroes. As we walked past the workout room, we saw Roger’s trainer preparing to put the Yankees’ star pitcher through his training that day. We didn’t know who he was at the time. Elizabeth was really surprised to see him. She told me that when she flew in that morning, that same man was sitting across the aisle from her.
“He was chewing tobacco and spitting it into a plastic bottle and just seemed really weird,” she told me as we drove away. Quite a coincidence that the “weird guy” on the plane, Brian McNamee, would show up at the Clemens’ home and become such a major problem for Roger and his family just a few years later.
