A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (13 page)

“Wait,” Alex said. “Aren’t you worried; aren’t you gonna wait and see if I’m okay?”

Alex was accustomed to being rescued, whether the lifeline came from a family member, friend or self-help adviser. Cynthia, rolling her eyes, waited in the parking lot, slightly annoyed but a little bit intrigued, wondering what ploy Alex would pull out next.

Instead, he went in headfi rst. He told her that he didn’t get it: How come she had never accepted any of his invitations to go out for a meal?

Cynthia explained that she wasn’t the spontaneous type. She was structured and lived on a tight schedule. “Why don’t you take my number, and this way you can call me and it can be planned,”

she told him.

“I don’t want your number,” he said. “I have literally asked you out a dozen times, and you say ‘No’ every time. I am very busy. I am leaving for Japan soon. If you want to see me, here is my number.”

Alex was leaving for Japan on October 29th with a group of major-league All-Stars for exhibition games to promote baseball in Asia. He told her he’d be back in Miami by early November.

A few weeks later Cynthia called him. “And that was it,” she said.
They dated for six years. Alex knew that she was good for him.

“She kept his head on straight,” says a friend of Cynthia’s. “She told him ‘No’ enough so that he really paid attention to what she thought. He respected her.”

Alex wanted her to move to Seattle to be closer to him, but, as a daughter of a traditional Greek Orthodox family, she refused to be his live-in girlfriend. Her family wasn’t so sure of Alex, anyway, in part because he wasn’t Greek.

Alex was sure of Cynthia, though. He valued her intellect, her moral compass and her dedication to her body. The last was important to him. Friends say he has always been obsessed with fi tness, his own and that of others. The gym world of carved muscle and mirrors was a refl ection of how much importance Alex placed on superfi ciality. Numbers and stats were like muscular bodies: the more defi nable, the better.

Alex seemed to fi t a steroid user’s psychological profi le to a T.

He wasn’t simply interested in power and confi dence but also in the vanity. He looked up to Canseco’s brawn with awe, though he didn’t want a thick look for himself. He liked sinewy. He liked defi nition. He was a virtual disciple of the Miss Fitness competi-tions.

“He defi nitely has an appreciation for fi tness and what people in my industry do,” says a former Miss Fitness America, Amy Fadhli, who, in 1998, met Alex through Canseco’s wife, Jessica, who was also a fi tness competitor. “He’s into the whole fi tness lifestyle.

He knew who I was. He read the magazines, the fi tness publications.”

Alex fl irted with women who made their living by building muscle, but, as Fadhli knew, he was planning to marry Cynthia one day. She was two years older than Alex. “He always said he liked older women,” says Fadhli. “I do remember that.”

Chapter Six

MR. TWO-FIFTY- TWO

The arc that tr aces Alex Rodriguez’s rise to superstardom neatly parallels the one tracking the abuse of steroids in baseball.

The popularity of performance enhancers among everyday ball players— not just sluggers but pitchers and utility fi elders, too— began taking hold when Alex was in high school. As player stats became more infl ated and the paychecks were distorted to match, Alex was emerging as one of the best players in the history of Major League Baseball. He could fi eld for show and hit for power without fatigue. He was the product of an artifi cial bubble.

The Johnny Appleseed of Generation Steroid was Jose Canseco, the handsome, swarthy, Miami-reared superstar with action-hero pecs who dated Madonna in 1991 and, one year earlier, had signed a fi ve-year, $23.5 million deal with the Oakland Athletics— the largest contract in baseball history at the time. He was a pioneer
of steroid use, its shameless poster boy and a tireless proselytizer.

As he moved around the league, from Oakland to Texas to Boston and then on to the Blue Jays and Yankees, he spread the gospel of Better Hitting Through Chemistry. Many of his converts became the top hitters and pitchers in the game.

His dependence on steroids was obvious, an open secret even in those early days before HGH was in the headlines and steroid abusers were called before Congress. In 1988, Canseco’s hulking physique inspired the
Washington Post
columnist Tom Boswell to write, “[He] is the most conspicuous example of a player who has made himself great with steroids.” Hostile fans began to taunt Canseco with chants of “Steroids! . . . Steroids!” but he laughed that off; he knew he’d lost endorsements because of the steroid rumors, but he also knew that performance enhancers had quickly transmogrifi ed him from a skinny, 15th-round draft choice into the most feared hitter in baseball. As he would later write in
Juiced
, his fi rst of two tell-all memoirs, “using steroids made me a better ballplayer— and, as everyone soon found out, my expertise on steroids could make other players around me a lot better, too.”

Canseco even injected his wife, Jessica. After being urged for months to try steroids, Jessica allowed Jose to put the needle to her in 1996. “Finally, I let him do it,” she wrote in
Juicy
, her answer to her ex-husband’s confessional. “One shot wasn’t going to do the trick. . . . He shot up my other cheek. It was even worse than the fi rst time. I couldn’t understand how Jose had withstood that kind of pain on such a regular basis over the course of so many years.”

He endured that pain for obvious and substantial rewards: money, power, celebrity. He kept a stash in a duffel bag in his bedroom closet, and he would happily dip into that valise whenever a baseball buddy wanted a jolt of strength and confi dence. Canseco was bold but not reckless: He advised players to buy their steroids over the border— from either Mexico or the Dominican Republic— and taught them how to mix, or “stack,” performance enhancers to
gain the desired effect. He preferred the steroids Deca-Durabolin and Winstrol, with a low dose of testosterone.

He boasted in
Juiced
that he had mentored Mark McGwire in the 1980s and then injected Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro and Juan Gonzalez with steroids in the 1990s. All of those players had morphed into awesome power hitters under Jo-se’s tutelage— and needle. Pudge and Gonzalez won MVP awards in the late 1990s; McGwire was credited with saving baseball by drawing fans back to the game after the 1994 players’ strike with his conquest of Roger Maris’s single-season home-run record in 1998. Jose was a generous man— he was willing to help, he wrote, “anyone who was interested.”

One of Canseco’s youngest and most ardent acolytes was Alex Rodriguez. Friends say they got to know each other around 1993

when Canseco would visit his old stomping grounds at the Boys & Girls Club of Miami. Alex had grown up there, too. He was 18, a high school hotshot with pro potential everyone could see.

Canseco was coming off an MVP-caliber season. In their own version of a Skipper and Gilligan relationship, Alex tagged along behind Canseco, taking all direction from him.

Alex was starstruck. He would, throughout his career, use Canseco as his template: Alex would use steroids, put up big stats, sign the richest contracts, and even date Madonna. “He wanted to be me,” says Canseco.

For years, Canseco treated Alex like a little brother. They went everywhere together in the off-season. In 1994, when Alex was 19, Canseco fl ew him to his homeland of Cuba, where they visited refugees at the Guantánamo Bay U.S. military base. In the winter of 1996, a writer from the
Seattle Times
noted in an off-season story, without drawing the obvious implication, that he’d seen a cache of unidentifi ed powders, pills and vitamins bunched on the kitchen counter at Alex’s home. The reporter also described Alex and Canseco’s bond: “So trusted is Canseco that if Alex had to go
home to entertain some reporter, Canseco could head off to a restaurant and do the most intimate thing: order sushi (for the both of them).” The point? Only the closest buddies could know each other’s tastes so well.

“He was seventeen, eighteen. I took him into my home,” says Canseco. “He wanted to do everything I did. He wanted everything I had.” Alex quickly came to treasure Canseco as yet another fi ll-in for his father. “Jose has taught me a lot about life and baseball,” he once said.

In his late teens and early twenties, Alex worked out with Canseco in the off-season, often using the $1.3 million gym in Canseco’s

20,000-square- foot

Mediterranean-style

mansion

outside Miami, where he kept exotic animals on the manicured property and used the gym as both a training ground and a home chemistry lab.

Alex had just been introduced to the steroid culture. At Westminster High, between his sophomore and junior seasons, he transformed his body with an extra 25 pounds and added an eye-popping 200 pounds to his bench press.

There was no question that Alex’s gym-rat ethos— in early, out late— was part of the reason for this change, but the added power and muscle seemed aided by synthetic means. “Was he on steroids in high school? I think probably so,” says Canseco. “I worked out with him when he was 18. He could lift almost as much as I could.”

If Alex had any questions about performance-enhancing drugs, he knew just who to turn to: Canseco.

When Alex got to the big leagues, he hired Canseco’s trainer, Joseph Dion, a no-nonsense ex–military man who had grown up in Miami. For almost four years each off-season, Alex rented a house near the beach in the Dominican Republic resort of Casa de Campo and trained with Dion. Alex, his girlfriend, Cynthia, and Dion spent days charging up nearby hills and churning through the beach sands on training runs. Dion and Alex worked on stretching and fl exibility and used a medicine ball to create a retro-style workout glorifi ed in the
Rocky
fl icks.

“He worked the hardest of anyone I’ve ever had,” says Dion.

“He was very hungry.”

After three hours of sweat, they would separate. Dion never socialized with Alex after their daily sessions ended. Alex had plenty of family and friends on the island, and scores of major leaguers gathered there in the off-season. Some went there to kick back, others played winter ball to stay sharp and more than a few made the trip to purchase readily available steroids in a country where they were legal. A player could buy Dianabol, Winstrol or Deca-Durabolin over the counter at corner pharmacies.

Dion says he never saw Alex buy steroids in the D.R. but admits, “Alex and I, we led two different lives there.”

That off-season spent working out in the Dominican Republic produced tangible results: Alex added 10 pounds of muscle before the 1998 season. In April of that year,
Muscle & Fitness
magazine declared that Mark McGwire, Jeff Bagwell, Juan Gonzalez, Glenallen Hill and Alex Rodriguez had the “Best Physiques in Major League Baseball.” This hot-bod list of 1998 would eventually become a handy guide of baseball’s more prominent users— McGwire, Gonzalez, Hill and Bagwell would be linked to performance-enhancing substances in the media— but Alex managed to dodge public suspicion on that front for many years. Even his longtime critic, the pitcher Curt Schilling, would describe Alex as one of the few clean sluggers in baseball, attributing his success to the fact that he was a “genetic freak.” Rodriguez was convincing as an untainted hero because of his awe-inspiring work ethic and the fact that, unlike typical steroid users, his body wasn’t cartoonish in size.

Alex had no desire for the Paul Bunyan look. He didn’t need to be a behemoth at shortstop, where his range would have been compromised by playing at the size and shape of a barge. He simply needed power to layer upon a hitting talent so distinct that baseball
people could
hear
the difference when he took his cuts. “When we looked at his size when we signed him, we thought he could be a twenty-fi ve-plus home-run guy,” says Woody Woodward, Seattle’s general manager when Rodriguez played there. “But then in batting practice, you could hear something special, like you could with Albert Pujols or Manny Ramirez. There was a different sound when the ball came off his bat. Alex is one of those guys that if you close your eyes you can hear a difference, something deeper.”

In 1996, at age 21, Rodriguez, hit .358 with 36 home runs and became the youngest player to win an American League batting title since Al Kaline hit .340 as a 20-year- old in 1955. He also was the fi rst AL shortstop to capture a batting crown since Lou Boudreau in 1944. And only Mel Ott, Ted Williams, Frank Robinson and Tony Conigliaro had hit more than 30 home runs at a younger age.

It was a wonderful season: 36 homers made a nice exclamation point. Yet it wasn’t enough. All around him, players were getting stronger and more powerful as baseball’s steroid era seemed to spread from obvious locales— like the Oakland A’s— to other teams.

“Alex never looked up to the workmanlike guys on a team— the everyday, hard-nosed player. He idolized the sluggers because they got all the attention,” says one former Mariners teammate of Alex. “They got all the press.”

Alex was mesmerized by the fawning, nonstop ESPN coverage of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa as they riveted America with their race to top Maris in 1998. Alex saw a disco-ball effect as fl ashbulbs popped in stadiums during each home-run trot. McGwire, a redheaded lug who ran the bases on the tips of his toes, was striding closer and closer to Maris. Alex admired virtuosity and discovered it in himself.

Almost obscured by the McGwire-Sosa buddy fl ick, Alex, at only 23, had become the third 40–40 player in major-league history, joining Barry Bonds and Canseco by hitting 42 home runs and stealing 46 bases for Seattle in 1998.
He was unstoppable. He was the toast of Seattle. During the season, in private, he began to venture outside his choirboy persona. One teammate says he began jetting women from city to city to comfort him. He also began to indulge in the ultimate perk of stardom: he started building an entourage around him. Various friends— including one pal known to many of the Mariners as “Judy”— chauffeured him to and from different places Judy’s real name was Yuri Sucart, a pudgy man who would later be known as Alex’s “cousin.” His job was simple: to do whatever Alex told him to do. Judy didn’t say much. He didn’t engage other players. He was, in effect, Alex’s manservant, washing his car and even laying out Alex’s clothes each day.