Say it ain't so, Debbie, please say it ain't so

Now it's personal, at least for me.

At high noon today -- actually at 8:30 this morning -- Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee will duel before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Congress' hearings into performance-enhancers in baseball no longer are about something as trivial as sports.

If the testimony ever gets around to Debbie Clemens, what will be on trial is the sanctity of male chauvinist fantasy.

Seriously, this will be a blow to baseball if Mr. Clemens proves to be a liar and a cheater. But it'll be a blow to all mankind if Mrs. Clemens is Body by McNamee.

As you know, McNamee alleges that he injected him with banned substances so he could pitch into his 40s. He also alleges that in 2003 he injected her with pose enhancers for Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition.

Mrs. Clemens was 39 years old and the mother of four. The photo was taken in New York's Central Park. She wore a bikini and stretched a baseball bat behind her head.

Shoot me if you want for being so keen on the details, but I happen to have studied the photo for hours for, you know, research purposes.

I even contacted Paris Hilton and received this comment on Mrs. Clemens: "Hot!"

Indeed, Debbie was a poster girl for all us dirty old men who think every 20something woman looks like a grammar-school girl. It was comforting to imagine 39 for women is the new 36-24-36.

It's one thing for Playboy centerfold photos to be touched up and Playmates to be artificially upsized and downsized.

It's quite another thing for Debbie Clemens to be exposed, so to say, as a bogus beauty in a bikini.

The whole Sports Illustrated swimsuit saga has been ridiculed enough lately, being called everything from prudish to antiquated when compared to other magazine spreads.

I mean if Debbie Clemens is a fraud, what's next, finding out that SI cover girl Elle Macpherson is a man? That Kathy Ireland's eyebrows are glued on? That Christie Brinkley wasn't really too good-looking for Billy Joel? That Tyra Banks acquired her complexion in a tanning salon? That Petra Nemcova is really Betty McGillicudy from Brooklyn?

Tell me anything about anyone, except don't tell me Cheryl Tiegs was anything but real from nose to toes.

And don't tell me a 39-year-old mother of four has to be needled before posing in a swimsuit for Sports Illustrated.

Mrs. Clemens wrote on her personal Web site before the SI shoot, "I had major anxiety … I decided I had to give it everything I had."

Hopefully she merely meant diet, the treadmill, weightlifting, tuning, toning. Hopefully she did it all to Aretha Franklin belting out, "You make me feel like a natural woman … woman …"

Listen, this is serious stuff. The most serious of anything that could come out of any steroids/HGH investigation.

It wouldn't bother me as much to find out that Roger Clemens and everybody else in baseball from Barry Bonds to batboys performed on enhancers.

Nor would it bother me to learn Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are dead, and pro wrestling and Roller Derby are fixed.

Just don't let the House hearings reveal that Debbie Clemens, representing all SI models, was to cheesecake what Jose Canseco is to beefcake.