Rocket Man

By roger Clemens with Peter Gammons

Stephen Greene Press; 161 pp.; $15.95.

WE STAND and cheer our sports heroes's strength and skill when they grace the playing field. But when most of them drop bat and glove for a typewriter, it's time for us to dive under the seats.

Great players such as Mickey Mantle have written autobiographies detailing drunken debauchery so disgusting that they cannot help but attribute their "successes" in the saloon to the same prowess that makes them winning athletes. Sparky Lyle, in The Bronx Zoo, uses the same tone of excitement to describe big strikeouts as he does to chronicle his favorite habits: sitting naked on cakes brought to the clubhouse and shagging flyballs during pre-game practice with his pants unzipped.

Ever since former Yankee Jim Bouton published his tell-all Ball Four in 1970, each succeeding season chronicle has been more graphic than the one before. The first entry in the 1987 baseball biography race came from Lenny Dykstra, a part-time centerfielder for The New York Mets. According to the Harper's index, the word "fuck" appears 160 times in the slim volume. That's a lot of profanity for a player with 127 hits in his career.

Roger Clemens, on the other hand, last year won 24 games, was the American League Cy Young Award winner and Most Valuable Player and set a major-league record by striking out 20 batters in one game. No fucks, no damns, no errors.

Norman Mailer '43 said tough guys don't dance. I guess good guys don't swear.

CLEMENS BEGINS his chronicle of last season with what he thought was its most important event, the birth of his son Koby. It's hokey, it's honest and it's heartfelt.

When Roger gets mad, he doesn't head off on an outrageous drinking bout with Billy Martin like Mickey Mantle did. Our hero goes jogging with his wife.

The book reveals no big secrets and is probably too cornball for an audience of Harvard sophisticates--what with its emphasis on fastballs and family--but it's a charming story, nonetheless.

"The 1986 season was more than any twenty-four-year-old should have been able to even dream of....It was thrilling for my entire family, because the one thing that my mother, Randy, and everyone knows is that I'll never forget that I'm a small town kid from Ohio and Texas whose family is--after the Lord--the reason for whatever good has come my way."

Roger Clemens is a great baseball player; neither he nor his co-author, ace baseball reporter Peter Gammons, are great writers. But the book's decent enough to read to your children. Imagine a five-year-old Dykstra fan hearing this piece of prose from his hero before bed: "We just said, 'Fuck it.' But it didn't work. Kevin Gross shoved the bats up our asses. We got shutout."

Call me a purist or a prude, but it's nice to see a baseball book about hard work, dedication and, most of all, baseball.