America at Large:So how, exactly, does a 34-year-old pitcher with a record of 40-39 over the previous four seasons abruptly blossom into baseball's most dominant force and run up a 162-73 record over the next 11 years? "It's not impossible," Roger Clemens told Mike Wallace. "You do it with hard work!" And with that, Wallace moved on to the next question, writes George Kimball.

An estimated 18.2 million Americans had their television sets tuned to 60 Minuteslast Sunday night. That's about five million more than usual for the venerable programme, which in this instance benefited from both a strong lead-in - the AFC play-off game between San Diego and Tennessee - and a compelling, all-sleazeball line-up of Pervez Musharraf, John Martorano and Clemens.

It should probably be noted here that both the Pakistani president (who said of Benazir Bhutto's death, "I think it was she to blame alone. Nobody else. Responsibility is hers.") and Martorano (a long-time Boston thug-turned government informant who admits to having single-handedly executed at least 20 people, including some friends of mine) emerged as more sympathetic - and more believable - than did Clemens, the steroid-addled pitcher who since the release of former Senator George Mitchell's report on doping in baseball has threatened to displace Barry Bonds as the poster boy for better living through chemistry.

It should also be noted that over the course of an interview that consumed barely a dozen of the programme's 60 minutes (minus ads), it became apparent to many that we were watching the reputation of yet another icon implode in the face of the steroid scandal. We're not talking about Clemens' reputation here, but that of the 89-year-old Wallace.

Wallace, a 60 Minutesfixture since the show's inception 40 years ago, won 20 Emmy awards over a storied career in which he enjoyed a reputation as a journalistic bulldog. At his peak, it was Wallace's relentless grilling of Gen William Westmoreland that reduced the military architect of America's Vietnam policy to on-camera tears, but on Sunday he didn't even try to lay a glove on Clemens in what was by any standard a fawning interview in which he all but slavered over his subject.

Clemens, it should be noted, had deliberately chosen Wallace, a stipulation of his agreeing to the interview as part of a damage-control operation orchestrated by his attorneys. The 60 Minutessegment was followed a day later by a one-sided "press conference" in Houston, in the course of which Clemens stomped off the stage after complaining to assembled reporters, "I got another asinine question the other day about the Hall of Fame. You think I played my career because I'm worried about the damn Hall of Fame? I could give a rat's ass about that. If you have a vote, you keep your vote."

(We do. And we will.)

The centrepiece of Mitchell's case against Clemens came in the testimony, under oath, of the pitcher's former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, that on numerous occasions, beginning in 1998, he injected Clemens in the buttocks with both Winstrol and human growth hormone.

Wallace tossed the question to Clemens like a softball, and when Roger responded "that never happened", the venerable newsman failed to pursue the issue. Rather, he accepted at face value Clemens' explanation that what McNamee shot him up with was nothing more than lidocaine ("for my joints") and vitamin B-12.

Lidocaine is a local anaesthetic. You've probably had it in your dentist's office. It is administered topically, not systemically.

"The only reason you'd get a shot of lidocaine in your buttocks," pointed out a doctor friend, "is if you had a sore ass."

Vitamin B-12 has no demonstrated therapeutic value, but "B-12" has long been a code name for steroids in the culture of sporting drug cheats.

It sounded suspiciously as if Clemens might be laying the groundwork for a Barry ("I thought it was flaxseed oil") Bonds defence by suggesting he didn't know what was in McNamee's syringes.

"Brian has a master's degree in sports medicine," Earl Ward, the lawyer retained by McNamee pointed out. "He knows the difference between lidocaine, B-12 and testosterone. What he injected into Roger Clemens wasn't lidocaine or B-12. It was testosterone."

What Wallace might have asked Clemens, but didn't, was that if everything was on the up-and-up, why weren't the injections administered by a physician or by a team trainer and not by his personal guru? And why was it done at Clemens' homes in Toronto and New York instead of in the trainers' room? And why, for that matter, did he wait until June to report to his teams in the last two seasons, the first in which players have been subject to steroid testing?

Clemens also claimed to Wallace that he had no inkling he would be named in the Mitchell Report until it appeared, and that had he known he was about to be implicated he would have reconsidered his refusal to co-operate with Mitchell's investigation.

This was a bald-faced lie. Apparently warned, Clemens had through his lawyers dispatched private investigators to interview McNamee in the hope of determining exactly what his former trainer had told the feds - several days before the report was released. Mike Wallace must have known about this, but he never even tried to bring it up.

Judging from the response of my colleagues, no one seems to have been persuaded by Clemens' counterattack. The widespread reaction has been that his 60 Minutes interview was a pack of self-serving lies, and that his blame-the-messenger conduct at the "press conference" was that of a seriously disturbed individual trapped by his lies and trying to weasel his way out.

Clemens and McNamee have been summoned to appear before a Congressional committee next week. Clemens and his erstwhile trainer, it turns out, had a phone conversation last weekend, which Clemens secretly taped and played as part of his orchestrated press conference.

Some members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform were less than thrilled by this development. At least one of them suggested that the Clemens-McNamee conversation might represent witness-tampering, and possibly even suborning perjury.

If Clemens appears before Congress and tries to sell them the same bill of goods he passed off on Mike Wallace, his future in the Hall of Fame may be the least of his worries. As Barry Bonds is only beginning to learn, enhancing one's career with drugs might be damaging to one's reputation, but lying about it under oath can get you put in jail.