Congress ensures there’s no lull

At first look, all is good in our world of sports.

Super Sunday was pretty much that. It was a shockingly competitive game that canonized another Manning brother, correctly so, and saved us from Boston winning everything in pro sports this season, after all.

Beware of omens, Celtics.

The Lakers have a new player and new hope. The Clippers have internal turmoil and we’re used to that.

College basketball is now officially in its long run to the Final Four. UCLA is even better than usual, and USC has a nice team with some surprises yet to come.

The Ducks have Teemu Selanne back and can still make a run. The Kings are lousy and we’re used to that.

And pitchers and catchers will report next week.

Some people use Groundhog Day to find out when the warm days will come. Sports fans have spring training.

It is February, and all this is both cyclical and predictable.

What isn’t is what is happening in Washington, where we get back to the grim business of undressing our sports heroes in public.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will be taking sworn statements and depositions from five prominent figures in baseball, its most recent look into the illegal use of performance-enhancing drugs, mainly steroids and human growth hormone.

On Monday, star pitcher Andy Pettitte submitted to committee questioning, and today fellow star pitcher Roger Clemens will appear before the committee. The former trainer and alleged drug-provider for Pettitte and Clemens, Brian McNamee, is scheduled for Thursday, and another former trainer, Kirk Radomski, on Feb. 12.

The fifth player in this drama, former major leaguer Chuck Knoblauch, had his turn in private before committee members and/or their lawyers Friday.

This will lead to a public hearing before the House committee Feb. 13, and if you think the Super Bowl was exciting, wait till you see this.

Clemens, Pettitte and Knoblauch were among the baseball players named as drug users in the Mitchell Report. McNamee and Radomski provided much of the material under which many players were named, including Clemens, Pettitte and Knoblauch.

Pettitte has ‘fessed up to the Mitchell Report findings, Knoblauch has seemed to nod acceptance of the charges and Clemens has been screaming foul for seven weeks.

The stakes are high for all, especially for the biggest name in the group, Clemens. Each will be told that anyone who lies will risk prosecution. With prosecution can come jail time, the scenario Barry Bonds is facing. For Clemens, any sort of credible revelation that he did cheat, despite his loud and long protests, would bring ruination of his reputation.

In case there is any doubt about the effectiveness of Congress getting action in this huge public fishbowl that it is properly allowed to operate, hark back to May 17, 2005. In that 11-hour marathon session, this committee did the following:

* Threw the fear of God into Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and union chief Donald Fehr about their sport’s drug problem, from whence came Selig’s request for George Mitchell and his band of legal warriors to come up with the report that is now the eye of the hurricane.

* Got Rafael Palmeiro of the Baltimore Orioles to utter his now famous words: “I have never used steroids, period.”

Three months later, Palmeiro tested positive and now resides outside of Major League Baseball.

* Put the bright lights on home run hero Mark McGwire, who uttered his famous words: “My lawyers have advised me I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family and myself. I intend to follow that advice.”

McGwire now resides, mostly, on Orange County’s Shady Canyon Country Club golf course, where he is, presumably, looking for new lawyers.

The stakes are incredibly high in this game, and the best team, Congress, usually wins.

There are those who criticize our politicians for wasting time on sports issues, when they should be spending every waking moment on the economy and getting the troops home. That was an issue this week, when Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) chastised NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for doing a Rose Mary Woods with the videotapes of the Patriots’ Spygate scandal from earlier in the season.

Is Specter showboating, grabbing a timely opportunity for some personal publicity? Does the sun set in the west?

Are the leaders of the House committee that is taking on baseball, Tom Davis (R-Va.) and Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), doing a bit of the same?

Perhaps.

But would our elected officials have enough of a public mandate to do such things if professional sports in the United States was squeaky clean and above reproach?

Professional sports is a multibillion-dollar cog in our economy. Like it or not, its heroes become role models for our children. It generally preaches entertainment, character-building and family values while it focuses on its real core motivator. Greed.

So, Reps. Davis, Waxman and your committee, do your work. Nobody else quite has the power to get this done correctly. We want to know. We have a right. We buy lots of tickets and patronize lots of sports advertisers.

We’d love for Clemens to convince us he was wronged, that all those strikeouts came from his right arm and not from a bottle. We want to hear the whys from Pettitte and Knoblauch, and the hows from McNamee and Radomski.

We’d be fine if February were its usual quiet and predictable time in sports. Not this year.

We know that committee meetings like this are seldom matters of rocket science.

Not this year.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.