He strode through the Yankee clubhouse at 4:20 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 10, hat pulled down over his brow, a gift bat for a friend's kid in his hand, his favorite blue ostrich cowboy boots on his feet. All eyes -- players', coaches', writers' -- turned toward Roger Clemens, who dropped off his stuff, smiled at the picture of Rube Marquard posted in his locker by the PR department, then disappeared to prepare for his start that night against his former team, the Boston Red Sox. With a victory, which everyone thought was a lock, the Rocket would be 20-1 on the season, surpassing Marquard's 19-1 in 1912 for the best start in major league history.

Seemed like a big deal at the time.

But then came rains of unexpected violence, washing out the sellout and portending a deluge that New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani would describe as "more than we can bear." In the days that followed -- the longest week in most of our lifetimes -- sports and baseball and the Yankees mattered not at all. The Stadium was cordoned off, its flags flying at half-staff, its huge message board proclaiming, "God Bless America."

When it was finally, mercifully time to resume the games, the eyes of New York would turn toward Roger Clemens. Not so much to see if he would win his 20th, but to escape the nightmare for just a few hours. No matter what happened, the best would be standing on the mound representing the best. As Joe Torre often says, "Where would we be without him?"

He's from Texas. He's been labeled a has-been, a mercenary, a jerk, even a rube. He's hated in three metropolitan areas, and only recently have "Clemens 22" jerseys been spreading around the seats of Yankee Stadium. Yet if you had to pick one New York athlete at this moment to embody the city's indomitable spirit, its mixture of arrogance, excellence, obsession and generosity, you couldn't do much better than this 39-year-old cowboy. Roger Clemens, New Yorker.

How'd that happen?

***

When William Roger Clemens is enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, what should they put in his display case? You know, besides the six (or more) Cy Youngs, the 20-K balls, the other mementos for the milestone strikeouts and victories? They could include some running shoes to pay tribute to his dedication to conditioning. Throw in those Ninja Turtle shoelaces he used to wear to please his Kids (capital K). Maybe a vial of flop sweat from an opposing batter. The hamburger bun he once threw at a Boston sportswriter. Oh, and a certain bat fragment.

As it happens, the Hall of Fame already has a bunch of his stuff. Among the many sides of Roger Clemens is his boundless beneficence. "He's as generous as anyone I've known since I've been here," says Hall of Fame vice president Jeff Idelson. When Idelson called Clemens, then with the Red Sox, to ask for souvenirs from his second 20-strikeout game (Sept. 18, 1996, against the Tigers), the pitcher told him he'd already shipped several items, including catcher Bill Hasselman's mitt -- Clemens said he couldn't have done it without him.

There's an ornery side, too. Ask anyone who's faced him. Or tried to talk to him on the day of a start. And his dealings with the members of the fourth estate have often been contentious; the Boston Herald liked to run his sometimes twisted syntax verbatim just to make him look foolish. Clemens and Boston Globe columnist (and Magazine contributor) Dan Shaughnessy also had an adversarial relationship. But in 1994, when Shaughnessy's 8-year-old daughter, Kate, was being treated for leukemia, a large FedEx box arrived at their home from Katy, Texas. "The driver saw the names Clemens and Shaughnessy and suggested we check to see if the thing was ticking," Shaughnessy recalls. "It was a giant white teddy bear. Kate [now healthy] called her Clementine."

He has a genuine sense of history, partly because he's made so much of it, partly because he has a schoolboy's curiosity. Among his most prized possessions at his home in Katy is a ball signed by Cy Young. He was thrilled to meet Hank Thomas, the grandson of Walter Johnson -- a pitcher whose career paralleled his own. On Sept. 5, when he beat the Blue Jays to go to 19-1, he apologized for not knowing more about Marquard. "I'll have to read up on him," he promised.

His devotion to his four sons -- Koby, 14; Kory, 13; Kacy, 7; and Kody, 5 -- is legendary. Not to mention expensive. After the Blue Jays game, he flew from Toronto to Houston on the private jet he shares with golfer Justin Leonard to see Koby play in a football game. "Defensive end, like his dad," Clemens says. He flew back to New York the next day.

His wife, Debbie, calls him "my biggest child," and indeed, there is a sense of arrested development about Clemens. Psychologists would point to his having witnessed, at age 9, the fatal heart attack of his stepfather. But if he is still a kid, he is usually a happy, dutiful, empathetic one. Once, when he was visiting Children's Hospital in Boston and one of the kids didn't believe he was Roger Clemens, he ran down to Fenway Park and returned in uniform.

If all this reads like a plea for sympathy, well, so what? For 18 major league seasons, he hasn't generated the warmth commensurate with his heat, and frankly, it's not right. He gave Boston three Cy Young seasons, one of them accompanied by an MVP award (1986), then left town Rocket non grata, considered over-the-hill by GM Dan Duquette and called "The Texas Con-Man" by the writers.

He signed with Toronto, thinking the Blue Jays would be the organization that would give him the world championship the Red Sox never could. He gave them two Cy Young seasons in a row (21-7, 20-6), but when the Belgian brewmeisters who bought the club from Labatts showed they were more intent on saving than winning, he and his agents, the Hendricks brothers, invoked a smart little clause in his contract and demanded a trade. The night of his 19th victory, as Clemens came off the mound in the eighth, the boos of the Blue Jays fans blanketed the smattering of applause. "He worked his butt off here for two years," says Toronto Sun columnist Bob Elliott. "Guess they'd rather have someone like David Wells, who partied between starts."

Actually, the Astros could've had Clemens just as easily as the Yankees got him. Nice story: Local boy comes home to end his Hall of Fame career. But no, the Astros were not willing to part with Scott Elarton (since traded to Colorado). So Yankee GM Brian Cashman landed the Rocket on Feb. 18, 1999, for Wells, Homer Bush and Graeme Lloyd.

For two years, though, the Pinstripes didn't quite fit Clemens. "He had some leg problems," says Torre, "but he also wasn't as aggressive as he'd always been. I think he was just trying to fit in." Clemens doesn't agree, but Yankee reliever Mike Stanton, who pitched with him in Boston, said he wasn't the same old Rocket: "Part of it was injuries, but part of it was becoming a Yankee. It happens to everybody who comes over here for the first time. You see the facade, you see the monuments, you see the flags, you take the field where Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle played. You try to be worthy of the uniform, and sometimes you try too hard." Clemens shut down the Braves in the '99 Series clincher, but his over-the-top celebration on the field afterward rubbed some hardcore fans the wrong way. Where'd he been all season? they asked.

And nobody liked it the next July when he beaned Mike Piazza of the cross-Triborough Mets. The brushback is as much a part of Clemens' repertoire as the two-seamer, the four-seamer and the split-finger, but he throws at the letters, not at the head. When he sent word to Piazza that he was sorry the pitch got away, Piazza told him to go to hell, and Clemens didn't bother making any further inquiries.

In the meantime, though, he was finally figuring out this Pinstripe thing -- that he could be both himself and a Yankee. After coming off the DL in July, he went 9-2 with a 3.00 ERA in his last 18 games. He got hammered in two starts of the division series against Oakland, but in Game 4 of the ALCS against the Mariners, he pitched one of the finest games of his career, allowing no runs, one hit and two walks while striking out 15. Cut to Game 2 of the 2000 World Series, top of the first inning, and enter Piazza.

Clemens' story -- and he's sticking to it -- is that he first thought the barrel of Piazza's broken bat was the ball and picked it up to throw it, only to discover it was lumber and not leather. At which point, he threw it away in disgust, unaware that Piazza was in his line of fire. Most New Yorkers saw it as an act of insanity -- at the beginning of another dominating Clemens performance -- and indeed Torre grew peevish out of having to defend it. But when a player is as laser-focused as Clemens is, when every game to him is Texas-Oklahoma, well ... rationality gets knocked on its ass.

Clemens lives in Manhattan, glories in the city life. On Sept. 8, he and Debbie went to The Producers, and while signing Playbills at intermission, he noticed another autograph on the programs: that of Sandy Koufax. (He looked around for Koufax, but couldn't find him.) But until the wins started mounting this summer, he was still very much an outsider, at least as far as New Yorkers were concerned.

Not so his teammates. It wasn't just that Clemens was becoming more like a Yankee; the Yankees were becoming more like Clemens. For one thing, his intensity was rubbing off. "Not taking anything away from any of our other starters," says Stanton. "But there's an electricity on the nights he pitches, a football electricity almost. The hitters in the dugout are stoked. The fielders behind him are pumped. About the only people who are more relaxed are the guys in the bullpen: We know we won't be getting up that early."

Clemens wasn't particularly sharp early in the season. In fact, in the two victories after his first and only loss -- to the Mariners on May 20 -- his ERA actually rose to 4.39. But he and the Yankees behind him refused to lose; they've gotten him off the hook six times. Mike Mussina, with similar numbers, is just 15-11. Clemens' detractors see that as an indication that he is lucky. Everyone else, though, knows they're a different team when he pitches. "Without him," says Blue Jays manager Buck Martinez, "they're the Toronto Blue Jays."

Clemens brought one other thing with him from Toronto: assistant strength coach Brian McNamee. Clemens and McNamee first worked together there, and while Clemens was always committed to conditioning, the killer regimen Mac designed for him -- running, biking, crunching, throwing every day -- got him in much better shape at an age when most athletes are losing the fight. Andy Pettitte, who lives in Houston, has become a disciple, and has picked up four or five miles per hour on his fastball. In fact, there may not be a baseball team in better physical shape than the Yankees.

The night of the rainout at the Stadium, all but one of the players had cleared out by 10:30 or so. All but 22. He was still throwing from a mound in the tunnel at 11. The game and his expected record-breaking start had been rescheduled -- for Sept. 11 at 7:05 p.m.

***

"Debbie woke me up the next morning," says Clemens. "We live in a high-rise in midtown, and I went to the roof to see the smoke. I heard the second plane hit."

While watching the television and calling home to assure his mother, who was watching the kids, Clemens packed bags for his wife and a friend of theirs from Houston. But they soon realized getting out of town on a plane was not an option; they elected to go to Connecticut to stay with a friend.

Like so many of us, Clemens spent the next two days glued to the phone and the tube, trying to make sense of it: "I remember once taking Debbie to a dentist downtown, falling asleep in the car and waking up to see the Twin Towers above me. I can't believe they're gone. I can't believe so many innocent people are gone. I saw the bravery of those firemen and rescue workers ... I'm no hero, they are ... and I just wanted to go down there and wipe their brows and give them a drink of water."

On Thursday, Roger and Debbie and their friend got in a car and drove 1,600 miles to Houston, 22 hours straight. "The kids needed us," he says. "No matter how many times we talked to them on the phone, assured them we were all right, it wasn't the same as us walking through the door.

"They had tons of questions. What do you tell them? Pray for the families of the missing. Pray for President Bush, who's a family friend. Tell the little ones that the bad guys who did this are gone now. Tell the older boys not to worry the next time they get on a plane to New York ... that the people on the plane who look different are not the enemy, no matter what trash they might have heard. Tell them that New York City is and always will be a great place."

Clemens had just finished his first workout in days. Still unsure of where or when he would pitch again, he said, "I hope people don't make too much of my next start. There are so many other things much more important. But if it helps us move on, that's okay."

Move on. By the time Clemens is enshrined in the Hall of Fame, the city will be rebuilt, the national spirit revived. Given the way he's going, when Clemens will go into the Hall is a bigger mystery than as what. He's only been a Yankee for three years, but chances are there'll be an N and a Y on his plaque.

Interlocked.

This article appears in the October 1 issue of ESPN The Magazine.