For Clemens, No Joy Found in Testimony

WASHINGTON — Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee
kept a tight grip on their contradictory accounts of illegal drug use
in a dramatic showdown Wednesday before a Congressional panel whose 40
Democrats and Republicans seemed to line up and take sides on a
partisan basis.

In a four-hour hearing in which Mr. Clemens and Mr. McNamee shared
the same table but never seemed to directly look at each other, Mr.
Clemens continued to insist, under sometimes strenuous questioning,
that Mr. McNamee never injected him with steroids and human growth
hormone, as Mr. McNamee maintains.

Missing from the witness table but present nonetheless was Mr. Clemens’s friend and former teammate, Andy Pettitte,
who in an affidavit, along with a separate one submitted by his wife,
provided some of the most difficult moments of the day for Mr. Clemens.
Both affidavits stated that Mr. Clemens, in the past, had talked to Mr.
Pettitte about Mr. Clemens’s use of H.G.H.

Mr. Clemens,
in repeated questioning about Mr. Pettitte’s sworn statements,
said several times that Mr. Pettitte “misremembers” the
conversations that they had.