Boston Herald: Sox Hope to Lure Clemens Back to Boston With Slick Video
HOUSTON. Free agent pitcher Roger Clemens today rejected an overture to rejoin the Boston Red Sox, the team he began his career with, despite an expensive video presentation ordered up by Tom Werner, the Hollywood producer who is the team's chairman.
"They must think just because I'm from Texas I'm some kind of rube," Clemens said. "That was one cheesy film they put together." Clemens criticized the screenplay, which imagines the six-time Cy Young Award winner returning to Boston in a gauzy, sentimental story line reminiscent of "Lassie Come Home," as well as Werner's directorial style.
"He didn't give the actors any room. It had a very tight, scripted feel to it," Clemens said. "Also, what's up with the voice-over narration? Who was that supposed to be? Oliver Wendell Holmes' 'brooding omnipresence'?"
The film, entitled "Rocket Come Home," won praise from the high-brow French film magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema. "I do not know why zee Rocket ees so peesed off," said reviewer Jean-Claude Stendahl. "He ees portrayed verry seempathetically, even when he has un cramp du brain and throws le bat at Mike Piazza."
Sox officials fell back on a tried and true marketing lure for Boston when they heard that Clemens was unmoved by the film, boasting about the region's many prestigious colleges and universities. "Big deal," was Clemens' reply. "Every winter when the Charles River freezes some genius from MIT drowns trying to walk across on the ice. How smart is that?"
Clemens, whose children are named "Koby", "Kory", "Kacy" and "Kody", said he might consider a return to Boston if the region would accommodate his love affair with the letter "K", the baseball scorekeeping symbol for a strikeout. "If the Governor of Massachusetts changed his name from Mitt to 'Kitt' Romney, maybe I'd think about it."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
