A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez
Read A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez Online
Authors: Selena Roberts
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Biography
| A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez | |
| Selena Roberts | |
| Harper (2009) | |
| Rating: | ★★★☆☆ |
| Tags: | Non-Fiction, Biography |
Alex Rodriguez is the highest-paid player in the history of baseball, a once-in-a-generation talent poised to break many of the sport's most hallowed records. In 2007 he became the youngest player, at 32, ever to hit 500 home runs, solidifying his status as the greatest player in the modern game, and months later he signed a contract that would keep him with the Yankees through the end of his career.
His reputation changed drastically in February 2009 when Selena Roberts broke the news in Sports Illustrated that A-Rod had used performance-enhancing drugs during his 2003 MVP season with the Texas Rangers. Her report prompted a contrite Rodriguez to admit illegal drug use during his 2001–2003 seasons with the Rangers, who had signed him to the most expensive contract in Major League Baseball history.
Although he admitted to three seasons of steroid use, the man teammates call "A-Fraud" was still hiding the truth. In the first definitive biography of Alex Rodriguez, Roberts assembles the strands of a bizarre and extraordinary life: from his boyhood in New York and the Dominican Republic through his near-mythic high school career and fast track to the big leagues, the whole of A-Rod's career mirrors the rise and fall of the steroid generation.
Roberts goes beyond the sensational headlines, probing A-Rod's childhood to reveal a man torn by obligation to his family and the pull of his insatiable hedonism, a conflict—epitomized by his relationship with Madonna and devotion to Kabbalah—that led to the end of his six-year marriage. Roberts sheds new light on A-Rod's abuse of performance-enhancing drugs, a practice he appears to have begun as early as high school and that extended into his Yankee years. She chronicles his secretive real estate deals, gets inside the negotiations for his latest record-breaking contract with the Yankees, and examines the insecurities that compel him to seek support from a motivational guru before every game.
In
A-Rod,
Roberts captures baseball's greatest player as a tragic figure in pinstripes: the man once considered the clean exception of the steroid generation revealed as an unmistakable product of its greed and dissolution.
A-ROD
THE MANY LIVES OF ALEX RODRIGUEZ
For Laura and David
Contents
1
The Good Son
15
The Phenom of Westminster
33
The Number One Hit
51
Like a Virgin Client
63
The Perfectionist
79
Mr. Two-Fifty- Two
99
The “B-12” Code
129
The Trophy Date
159
The Risk Taker
177
10
The “Fuck You” Tour 199
11
The DiMaggio Wannabe 215
On September 3, 2008, Alex Rodriguez lounged on a leather couch in the visiting clubhouse at Tropicana Field, the domed stadium of the Tampa Bay Rays. From a distance, the massive structure’s roofl ine looks tilted, as if it’s an optical illusion.
Which is appropriate, because weird things happen at The Trop. High fl y balls ricochet off catwalks; some go up but never come down. And on this night The Trop was the site of something especially bizarre: baseball’s version of an upended world order.
The coupon-clipping Rays, with the second-lowest payroll in the major leagues, held the top spot in the American League East, and the Yankees, all $200 million of them, had dropped to third, 11
games out of fi rst.
August had been dreadful yet exhilarating for Alex. He was reveling in his summer-long status as the Tabloid Prince of New York. On newsstands, the snarky details of his breakup with his
wife of six years, Cynthia, were split-screened with images of his new E! life as Madonna’s boy toy. The game’s greatest, richest player had hit .337 in July and .243 in August for the Yankees but seemed unmoved by the parallels of his swoon: the bigger his celebrity, the worse his stats.
He couldn’t have been more pleased with his new label as Bachelor Number One of Gotham. He said as much as he stood up from the couch in the clubhouse when I approached as a writer for
Sports Illustrated
. No, he didn’t want to be quoted for a profi le in the magazine that my colleague and I had been working on because he was certain it would be negative. (He didn’t particularly like me or any other of the half-dozen media members he spoke of dismissively.) So, no, he didn’t care to explain himself at all. Except that he did.
The tenderhearted pleaser in Alex had not gone completely dormant during his transformation from the wholesome family man to the swingin’ single guy. He still wanted to be understood and embraced and loved. In his new form, in any form.
For several minutes, he rubbed the handle of a bat as if a genie could be coaxed from its barrel. In his Yankee uniform, Alex looked his interviewer in the eye as much as possible and spoke of feeling liberated— as if he’d just peeled off a mask. This was a new Alex. He was emphatic as he detailed three self-revelations: He was the happiest he’d ever been; he had learned to embrace his fl aws; he didn’t care what anyone else thought of him.
“In Seattle, when I played there, I acted perfect and everyone loved me,” he said of his late 1990s career with the Mariners. “Now I’m not perfect, and I love it.”
His defi ance sounded at times forced, as if he were trying on toughness with a press-on tattoo.
Am I convincing this reporter? Am
I convincing myself ? How do I look saying this?
In this moment he was taking rebellion for a spin, having spent his spring and summer in the midst of a confetti shower of
headlines dousing his once-pristine image with tawdry tales of club crawling, Madonna squiring and stripper dalliances. I mentioned how complicated he seemed now.
“I am complicated,” he said. “Isn’t that better than being simple?”
Alex liked thinking of himself as an enigma. It made him feel more dramatic and alluring and worthy of attention. He lived like an Alister. He had “people”— one agent, one manager, three publicists, a Hollywood talent broker and an entourage— so he felt he’d arrived.
In a less-is- more philosophy, he was starting to think like a celebrity: He was not as available to the baseball media, sometimes skipping out of the clubhouse without talking after games.
“He’d still ask someone, ‘Did the [beat writers] come to my locker last night?’ ” a friend says. “He wanted to know they had wanted him.”
Alex had, in effect, adopted a Lindsay Lohan mantra about the media. Although she was besieged by the press, she once said, “I wouldn’t ever want them to
not
take my picture. I’d be worried.
I’d be like ‘Do people not care about me?’ ”
Alex needed to be needed. He liked to be at the heart of the public’s fascination. He staged paparazzi moments— sunbathing himself on a rock in Central Park, wiping his mouth with a hundred-dollar bill at an outdoor café with the lens on him, slow-ing down his car to let the entertainment press catch him— because he enjoyed the pop-culture fi shbowl.
He indulged the TMZ camera crews that followed him on the New York streets with polite “no comments.” He courted the gamesmanship, resisting their questions while at the same time craving the attention. “I thrive on the negative,” he said to me in the clubhouse that evening. “Bring it on.”
Okay, then. The topic of conversation changed. Suddenly the subject wasn’t about the adrenaline kick of freedom but about
doping— as in his. Most of the beat writers had left the clubhouse to attend Manager Joe Girardi’s daily pregame press conference in the dugout on the fi eld. It was a good time to pose a sensitive question. I asked him about information I had dating to 2004, his fi rst season as a Yankee: Alex, did you ever share human growth hormone with Kevin Brown?
His jaw jutted forward, his mouth fell open. An exaggerated response. Almost cartoonish. It was always diffi cult to read the fl ash of surprise on Alex’s face because he acted surprised so often.
Growth, as players have called HGH, is illegal to consume without a prescription— AIDS patients with wasting disease are its most common users— but it provides benefi ts that are considered performance-enhancing, such as the expedited recovery from the injuries and fatigue that bedevil players through a 162-game season.
By 2005, HGH was listed as a banned substance even though the urine-sample testing in baseball could not detect it. Brown’s interest in HGH was well known. In the 2007 Mitchell Report— an investigation into baseball’s steroid era— Brown was noted in the documents for his knowledge of HGH. He received a shipment in June 2004 from convicted steroid distributor Kirk Radomski. On the return receipt of Brown’s package was the address of his agent.
That was Scott Boras, the agent for Alex, too.
I went to Alex because a player told me he had witnessed a strange scene: Brown and Alex had had ampoules of HGH in their possession at Yankee Stadium. “I don’t know what they were doing with it,” he said. The player was very clear that he hadn’t seen either Brown or Alex inject it and reminded me that the “stuff wasn’t banned then.” That was true. What was going on, if anything?
Brown declined to comment when asked about the scenario face-to- face, but later, through his lawyer, he denied it had happened.
Alex wasn’t interested in providing any clarifi cation from his end except to say that he hardly knew Brown and wouldn’t speak about
his former teammate because he didn’t want to “throw him under the bus.”
He had to go. Conversation over.
He’d spoken his mind, unveiled what he wanted to, leaning on the vague whenever asked for specifi cs. What did “I don’t want to throw him under the bus” mean? As always, he presented a certain charm in his quest to project an unfl ustered veneer. He never cursed. He didn’t raise his voice. He even threw out a compliment despite the fact that he disagreed with some of the columns I’d written about him when I worked for the
New York Times
. He didn’t even seem that upset about the HGH issue.
“At least you asked me,” he said.
But now he had to take batting practice. Back to work. His devotion to the game was unquestionable, with a diligence that bordered on OCD: He was meticulous about his diet; he brought his own food to the ballpark. He rarely indulged in fattening training-table grub after the game. He was vigilant about his routine, spark-ing eye rolls from teammates because he danced through fancy agility drills in front of crowds during batting practice. He was fi xated on his body. Teammates would catch him gazing at himself in the clubhouse bathroom mirror.