A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (12 page)

Callahan tried to fi nd a fl aw in Rodriguez,
anything
, but it was a futile search. “He doesn’t just sign autographs for anyone who asks in the hotel lobby— he thanks the pests,” Callahan wrote. To close the piece, he added, “Someday, Rodriguez may bat .400 and hit 60 home runs, but for now he is doing the next best thing: He is living up to expectations.”

On the day before the game, the All-Stars were taking batting practice at the Vet when Cal Ripken, Jr., walked up and introduced himself. Alex later told Fannin that the legendary shortstop had
said, “Hi, my name is Cal Ripken, Jr. I couldn’t wait to meet you.

I’ve heard so much about you.”

Those were the exact words Alex had heard in his mind back in April, when he was visualizing his dreams of success. He immediately phoned Fannin from the stadium locker room, excited and in awe over the power of S.C.O.R.E.

Alex, who still had a poster of Ripken at his mother’s home, later described the thrill of that moment to reporters: “Imagine a teenage girl going out to dinner with Madonna,” he said. “That’s kind of what it felt like for me during batting practice.”

Turning on the charm and modesty, Alex added, “You can compare me to high school kids, but not these guys.”

A good quote, but Alex Rodriguez knew he belonged. After all, hadn’t he envisioned all this back in his Milwaukee hotel room.

August was a cruel month for the Mariners. They went 12–17, while their division rivals, the Texas Rangers, got hot, winning 9 of 10

games in one stretch. The worse the Mariners played, though, the better Alex played. He hit .435 in August, with nine home runs.

He was on everyone’s “get” list. The newspaper reporters, ESPN correspondents and radio talk-show hosts all lined up for time with him. This was his opportunity to maximize his visibility in markets far bigger than Seattle. And he understood the power of exposure.

On August 19, he was in a limo on his way to the
Late Show
with David Letterman
. He called Fannin from the car to tell him where he was heading— again, just as he had visualized.

What he hadn’t foreseen was the hectic schedule he’d have to endure. He had fl own from Seattle to New York on a midnight fl ight to be on Letterman’s show. Then, a few hours after sitting on Dave’s couch, he was in a helicopter, zipping over the Hudson
River to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where he sold autographs and memorabilia on QVC.

Griffey, who’d been swept up in the same kind of publicity whirlwind nearly a decade before, was concerned. He saw that he needed to help Alex understand that being fresh for the team and at his peak mentally and physically were the most important elements of being a superstar. At Yankee Stadium the next day, before the Mariners played in a marquee matchup on national television, Junior sat down with Alex in the cramped visitors’

locker room.

“The only question with him is: Will he burn himself out with all the extra stuff? So far, he’s handled it well. I just wanted to make sure that baseball comes fi rst,” Griffey said later. “He did Letterman and QVC. That’s not an off day, especially when we have a big series coming up. I just tried to get an idea where he’s at. I wanted to make sure he’s okay. He’s a big part of our lineup.”

It turned out that Junior had little cause for concern; the Mariners beat the Yankees three out of four on the road, and Alex went 8 for 20 with two home runs.

By September, marriage proposals started fi lling the mailboxes at the Mariners’ front offi ces, some written in crayon, other spritzed with expensive perfume. All were addressed to Alex— or A-Rod, the handle that was quickly becoming a favorite of headline writers.

The nickname fi rst appeared in the spring of 1996 when Alex was spotted writing “A-ROD” in capital letters on his equipment to mark it. His teammates picked up on the moniker and so did Dave Niehaus, the longtime voice of the Mariners. “It just seemed natural to me,” he said. “And it stuck like glue.”

It was marketing genius. Alex was now a one-name wonder boy. Crowds gathered just to marvel at his batting practice swings;
at team hotels, the line of fans for his autograph was now as long as— if not longer than— the line for Ken Griffey, Jr.

Griffey knew what Alex was going through. In 1987, Junior had been a 19-year- old drafted out of high school as the number one pick. He was the son of Reds legend Ken Griffey and had an uppercut swing so smooth it appeared to be happening under water. Junior generated awesome power with his bat and amazed fans with his ability to suspend himself in the air as he stretched his body full out for highlight-reel catches in centerfi eld.

So Junior knew what it was like to be the talk of baseball and the great hope of a generation. He also understood the perils of a fawning press eager to deify you on your way up and just as eager to bury you on the way down.

“There was an interesting dynamic growing between Junior and Alex,” recalls Woody Woodward. “I think Junior wanted to protect him but I’m not sure how that was perceived by Alex.”

Junior tried to reach out to Alex. They played video games such as Mortal Kombat together, but there was always a distance between them. From his leather lounge chair in the Mariners’ clubhouse, Junior witnessed the season unfold and the adulation of Alex grow. Junior was on his way to a 49-home- run season despite missing 22 games with injuries, but he knew who the new prom king of the clubhouse was. “He’s a heartthrob because he’s this young, clean-cut, handsome dude, just like I used to be,” Griffey told the
Los Angeles Times
. “Cute, you know. . . . I hope he doesn’t get some of what I get: 45 or so bombs and 135 ribbies and people say, ‘Just Junior having a Junior year. Nothing special.’ I accept it and don’t worry about it, but I don’t want him feeling he has to do this every year or he’s come up short.”

A rivalry developed over the next three years. The more popular Alex became, the more passive-aggressively Junior reacted. He groused about a T-shirt night for A-Rod, pointing out that the Mariners had never feted him on a special giveaway promotional.
He was upset when, as both players inched toward free agency, he was constantly being compared to Alex. “We are on totally two different pages,” Griffey told reporters. “He’s young, single. He doesn’t have to worry about certain things. Besides, he gets to hit in front of me. One day, I’d like to hit in front of me, too.”

“There was defi nitely tension in the clubhouse because Junior had been the king for so long,” one former Mariner says. “A-Rod said all the right things, but I believe Junior never trusted him.

Maybe he saw something he didn’t think was real.”

Junior acted as if Alex were hoarding all the adoration from fans, as if Junior were last year’s model. He clearly resented it. He told
Sport
magazine, “When a player gets more than their share [of attention], then they say about me, ‘You’re not the star of this team.’ But I’m the guy who has to take responsibility.”

The implication: Junior helped the team win while Alex helped himself to the endorsement money. He was in milk ads, was plugged into Nike’s ambitious advertising and marketing plans and was being feted for signing over large checks to children’s charities, including the Miami Boys & Girls Club.

Alex knew he was in danger of being overwhelmed by all the demands on his time, and he regularly called people he trusted for advice and reassurance. He reached out to Jose Canseco all the time, sometimes talking to him for four or fi ve hours about baseball and life and the demands of fame. “I knew him as well as anyone back then,” Canseco says. “What do I realize now? He was never who he pretended to be.”

Junior seemed to have sensed that as well. His petulance toward Alex was clearly rooted in distrust. One former teammate of both players says, “[Alex] always said publicly how much he looked up to Junior, but Junior knew Alex was playing both sides in the clubhouse. He wasn’t honest during that MVP shit.”

The MVP voting for the 1996 season exposed in Alex a dichotomy between the media-trained darling who measured ev-ery word and the hurt child who needed to hold the trophy. The Mariners were contenders for most of the season but sputtered in September, losing six of their last eight games and squandering a 10-game winning streak that had pulled them to within one game of the Rangers for the division lead. Alex also lost steam at the end, hitting .259 over the last 14 games of the season.

Even with that stumble at the fi nish line, Alex put up astounding numbers his rookie season. He hit .358, with 36 home runs and 123 RBIs. At 21, he had put up the best batting average ever for a major leaguer so young. Alex was 11 days younger than his nearest competition for the record: Shoeless Joe Jackson, who hit .408 in 1911. He won the batting title— beating out Frank Thomas, who fi nished with a .349 average. Again, just as Alex had envisioned it back in April. Now many people were touting him as the American League MVP.

Alex deftly and diplomatically discouraged such talk, pointing out that a large part of his success was due to the fact that he was hitting in front of a great hitter and a great leader, Ken Griffey, Jr.

“I don’t see how I can be MVP when I’m not the MVP of my own team,” Alex said as the season neared an end.

With that brilliant and calculating ploy, Alex hoped to appear modest and magnanimous— but he didn’t mean to lose MVP votes because of it. He was furious when he learned that he’d fi nished second to Juan Gonzalez, who’d led the Rangers to a division title with a .314 average, 47 home runs and 144 RBIs. Gonzalez took the MVP by a record slim margin— 290 points to 287— which meant that Alex missed out on being the youngest player to win the award by one fi rst-place vote. The cruelest twist: writers in Seattle who voted for the MVP had placed Griffey— who was fourth in the voting with 188 points, including four fi rst-place votes— ahead of Alex.

“It hurts not to get a fi rst-place vote from my own town after the season that I had,” Alex said.
A couple of reporters challenged him: Wasn’t it Alex who had proclaimed Junior the MVP of the Mariners? He seemed shocked that he would be held accountable for his words, but, in a brilliant but perverse twist on modesty, he declared, “If I can lose the MVP

every year because of my humility, I will lose it every year.”

Somewhere, a media trainer slapped her forehead in exaspera-tion: Humble people don’t say they’re humble.

It was a romance born in sweat and pursued on a treadmill.

Alex Rodriguez trained diligently out of dedication to his game but also out of vanity. Whenever he was in Miami, he could be found working out in a gym. He enjoyed the sweat and effort and reward intertwined in the gym culture of hard bodies. “Alex can’t stand fat people,” one friend says. “He really can’t be around them.”

The popular Body & Soul gym in South Miami was a veritable catwalk for buff and beautiful boys and girls, which was why Alex liked to work out there. One day, in the winter of 1996, a blond woman with expressive brown eyes caught his attention. Alex saw that Cynthia Scurtis wasn’t like some of the other women in the gym— she didn’t come to socialize or fl irt, she came to push her body.

“I was on a treadmill,” Cynthia once said. “And he came up to me. He [had] scouted out my plan in the gym. He said, ‘I know you are gonna go over there and stretch. Do you mind if I wait for you over there?’ So this kind of went on for a few days.”

Cynthia was a 23—

year-

old psychology teacher at Gulliver Prep— the same elite academy she had attended while growing up in the affl uent Miami neighborhood of Coconut Grove. After getting an undergraduate degree in psychology at Ohio State, she had moved back to Miami to be with her tight circle of friends and even tighter family, which was prominent in the local Greek Orthodox Church. Her grandfather had moved to Miami in 1944 and founded Florida’s fi rst Greek Orthodox church, St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral.

She had grown up just 10 miles from Alex but in a much more affl uent neighborhood than the one Alex had been raised in. She was Alex’s type: smart, strong-willed, no-nonsense and uncommonly fi t.

Each day, Alex grew more interested in her. She was disciplined and didn’t seem at all distracted by his attention. “I wanted to see her routine,” Alex said. “And I wanted to see what time she came in. See how consistent she was. Sure enough, she was like a machine. She would come right after work and get on the treadmill and do her abs.”

She would pass him and nod. Cynthia wasn’t returning his affection, which only drove him to be more insistent. He was a baseball player. She knew that but wasn’t impressed. She could see how everyone else in the gym reacted to him. “I knew he played baseball because everybody in the gym would say, ‘Do you know who that is?’ I didn’t grow up in a sports-oriented family. I wasn’t aware that you could have an entire livelihood off a sport. So when they would say, ‘Oh, he plays baseball,’ I would always think, ‘I wonder what else he does?’ ”

Alex circled her for weeks as she kept rejecting his unsophisticated pickup lines. For all of Alex’s media training, he was socially awkward. “I can remember going out with him in Seattle,” says a former Mariners teammate. “He couldn’t talk to a woman without another guy with him. He’d call me and say, ‘I’m at this club.

Come help me.’ He’d say the cheesiest stuff to girls— lines you’d hear on bad TV.”

All Alex knew he’d learned on TV. Alex hadn’t had a father to teach him the fundamentals of dating. This state of arrested development was obvious to Cynthia.

“One day I am leaving the gym, and there he is in the parking
lot,” Cynthia said. “And he says, ‘Listen, you’ve got to help me. I have run out of gas.’ And I’m going, ‘Oh, yeah, right.
This
guy ran out of gas.’ ”

Alex wasn’t asked to prove it, but he was prepared to look help-less. He had a small red gas can in his hand. “Can you just take me around the corner so I can get some gas?” he asked Cynthia.

She was skeptical— wasn’t this guy trying a little too hard?— but she opened her car door and let Alex get in. They drove two blocks to the gas station and returned to pour a gallon or two into Alex’s tank. Cynthia had done her Good Samaritan deed for the day and decided that she could now leave.