A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (14 page)

Seattle players didn’t think Sucart was suspicious, just weird.

No one imagined then that he would one day be fi ngered as the mule for Alex’s steroids. Alex’s Mariners teammates had their doubts about Alex’s power, but, as one player says, “No one that I know of actually saw him shoot up, but he did take greenies.” In the late 1990s, before they were banned in 2006, amphetamines were placed in dishes inside clubhouses as if they were hard candy.

Alex, who has admitted to using Ripped Fuel, a stimulant also later banned, was no different from many other players.

But some extra pep to get through a late-season doubleheader and injecting something that would give you the power to deposit a fastball over the opposite-fi eld fence were perceived differently by players: many of them considered greenies a necessary survival tool when facing the grind of 162 games; steroids helped individuals infl ate their stats as a way to get paid more.

Those who knew Alex believed his power surge was chemically enhanced in 1998.

“Look at Alex’s body,” Canseco says. “It was obvious: He was taking steroids.”

In his 2007 memoir,
Vindicated
, Canseco wrote that he had hooked up Alex with performance enhancers in the late 1990s
through a Canadian dealer turned fi tness trainer in Miami he called Max. “That’s me,” Dion says. “And that’s really funny because I hate steroids. I’m against them a hundred percent.” Dion denied being a steroid supplier but does remember Alex asking him a lot of questions about steroids: What drugs were most toxic?

Which were most effective?

Alex had a more sophisticated knowledge of steroids than he ever let on to the public. Throughout his career, he consistently played the naïf when this issue came up. As late as 2002 he asked reporters, “What are steroids?” His media training was paying off: Look everyone in the eye, he was taught, and turn on the faux sincerity. Not everyone was fooled. Teammates and competitors suspected Alex of taking steroids as early as 1992, when they saw his body change dramatically. The damning evidence that Alex Rodriguez had juiced during his career wouldn’t surface for another decade. During those 10 years, he expertly— and cynically— spun tales to make himself seem too good to be true. He was a model of embellishment, depicting his upbringing as a mythical struggle, stretching his natural talent into something surreal and awe-inspiring. He craved being bigger than life.

By the fall of 2000, he was in a position to parlay his fable into a fortune. He was a free agent, ready to be feted. Alex and Boras were expecting to land a monumental contract, but they were looking for more than just a hefty payday. He had already trademarked a company name— AROD Corp.— in 1996 and planned to use his impending free-agent bounty as part of a grand opening that would extend his name and fame— his brand— throughout the Western Hemisphere not just through Nike commercials and car endorsements, but also through assets and acquisitions. Alex was angling to become baseball’s Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. He was going for transcendence.
It was the ultimate vanity publication. The 73-page binder was midnight blue; the gold lettering on its front cover read alex rodriguez: historical performance. Scott Boras printed more than 100 copies of the tiny tome (at a cost of $35,000) and handed them out at the baseball general managers’ meetings on Amelia Island, Florida, during the fi rst week of November 2000. The binder was an elaborate sales brochure stuffed with glossy photos and glittering stats. The table of contents tells you that this was a book with a very limited audience, and a very narrow subject— All About Alex:

Ch. 1— ARod: Actual and Projected Performance Ch. 2— ARod vs. Hall of Fame Shortstops Ch. 3— ARod vs. Current Major League Shortstops Ch. 4— ARod vs. Jeter and Garciapara Ch. 5— ARod: History 40/40 Season Ch. 6— ARod: Leadership Qualities Ch. 7— ARod vs. All Current Major League Players Ch. 8— ARod vs. Griffey and Bonds Ch. 9— ARod vs. Top 10 All-Time Offensive Leaders Ch. 10— ARod vs. Top 10 Paid Players of 2001

Boras ladled up a bushel of shimmering stats but also made his case with quotes from media and baseball types, giving the binder the feel of a movie poster plastered with rave reviews printed in bold type. Alex was the “Hope Diamond of baseball’s free-agent jewels,” said John Henderson of the
Denver Post
. “If you were to build a franchise, that’s the guy you’d start with,” said Phillies former manager Larry Bowa. Alex was compared to Michelangelo by Seattle center fi elder Mike Cameron and to a “baseball da Vinci”

by
USA Today
’s baseball writer. Dan Le Batard of the
Miami Herald
supplied the coup de grâce: “Rodriguez has nothing less than the game in his grip. He is everything you want in an athlete-ambassador— graceful, charming, handsome, polite, hard-working and absurdly, hypnotizingly talented. . . . Yes, Alex Rodriguez can save baseball.”

As Boras darted about the massive lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, pressing his tendentious compilation on every general manager and owner he could buttonhole, he’d explain that signing Alex Rodriguez was the smartest move they could ever make. “It’s not about value,” he told them, “it’s about presence. We believe Alex is the best shortstop in baseball history at age twenty-four, and maybe the best player. I don’t think the average fan realizes that, and that’s what this book is for.”

Scott Boras had thrown open the doors of his showroom and was welcoming all shoppers, but the team he was really looking to hook was the New York Mets. They had the money, the market and the need. The franchise was suffering from an inferiority complex, always looking up to the New York Yankees. The Mets played in Shea Stadium, built on the cheap in 1964, where a Volkswagen-sized Big Apple rose from behind the outfi eld fence like a gopher’s head to celebrate home runs. Just beyond the outfi eld wall of Yankee Stadium lies Monument Park, where fans can kiss the bronze plaques of Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

The Yankees attracted the elite from Park Avenue. The Mets were beloved by Vinny from Queens. The Yankees had all those rings, all that history and all that star power in Derek Jeter. This last intangible would always be a maddening source of jealousy for Alex; when people argued about the game’s best shortstops, Alex wondered how Jeter even got into the conversation. Statistically, Alex trumped him in every category. Every category but one. On November 12, with his Yankee contract almost certain to be extended, Jeter’s agent, Casey Close, spelled out the differences between Alex and Jeter in what would become the anthem of the anti– A-Rod Army. “Is the best player the most valuable player or the one with the best stats?” Close asked a
Newsday
reporter.

“Derek’s value increases because he makes 24 other players better. I think Alex in part does that. I know Derek does that. After a career is over, what is remembered is whether a player won or lost. Jordan will be remembered for winning. At fi rst it was, sure he can score, but can he win? Michael never really got credit until he won.”

The Mets hadn’t won a World Series since 1986. The Yankees had won four between 1996 and 2000— that last one against the Mets in a fi ve-game “subway series.” The Mets had come so close that season, and they believed they were one superstar away from winning it all.

With a glee usually reserved for children on Christmas Eve, the Mets opened negotiations with Boras as soon as the free-agent signing period began on November 11. Two days later, however, Mets General Manager Steve Phillips issued a stunning update on how the talks were going: They weren’t. The Mets no longer wanted A-Rod. Mets owner Fred Wilpon had decided that his demands for special treatment would make him a clubhouse killer, and Phillips agreed. “I have serious reservations about a structure in which you have a 24-plus- one man roster,” Phillips told the press. “I don’t think it can work, and those reservations are enough for me to back off. . . . I do buy Scott’s arguments that we probably haven’t seen the best of [Rodriguez] yet. It’s not about an individual, it’s about 25 players that join together as a team, and that is something that, when compromised, it becomes diffi cult to win. That’s even before considering the 12-year contract and the escalators and the outs every three, four years.”

Alex and Boras had badly overplayed their hand. In a meeting with club offi cials, Boras had handed Mets executives Alex’s wish list: the use of a private jet, a hotel suite on the road, a personal marketing staff with an on-site offi ce, unlimited use of the Mets
logo, a catered luxury box for friends, a promise that the team’s ad campaign would center around him, and a guarantee that his image would be plastered on more billboards around New York than Jeter’s.

“That was the fi rst I’d heard of anything like [those demands],”

Phillips recalls. “I felt bad for the ‘twenty-four- plus-one’ comment because Alex got labeled. But we had Mike Piazza, who was a superstar in his own right, and he was the lowest-maintenance superstar you’d ever see. That’s what we were used to. Every once in a while his dad and his brother showed up. There was no entourage.”

The response was supportive of the Mets’ decision to cut off talks. Bill Madden of the New York
Daily News
wrote, “Boras, in particular, has seemingly accomplished the impossible in changing the perception of Rodriguez from a class act, team leader and baseball ‘purity’ to a greedy, ego-driven private corporate entity.”

Alex was crushed and over the next couple of days called Mets players, urging them to push the team to return to the negotiating table. “We never reengaged,” Phillips says. That was it. Game over.

Boras was stunned. Few GMs had the nerve and owner support to call him out. Suddenly, Alex’s dream team was off the board.

Alex saw the Mets— and, more important, New York— as the ideal stage for him to perform on. He wanted the competition, not just on the fi eld but in the streets. He wanted to go headline-to-headline with Jeter. He kept telling the press he wanted to be part of a winner, but, as one former teammate says, “Alex only wanted to be treated like number one, the richest player in baseball, in the biggest fuckin’ city in America.”

The Texas Rangers watched the fallout from Perk-Gate and cheered. Good, they thought, If Alex wants preferential treatment, we will give him preferential treatment.
In one afternoon of cruising around Dallas in a convertible Mercedes SL500 driven by Rangers owner Tom Hicks, Alex experienced the sensory splendor of big money. “Everyone was looking at us,” an awestruck Alex later told a friend.

Hicks had shrewdly realized that Alex needed to be courted as if he were a titan of industry, not a prom king. Other general managers took Alex to dinner; Hicks ferried him to the world of power brokers.

At 54, Hicks was a tall straw of a billionaire at a slim six-foot-fi ve, but he loomed even taller thanks to the thick heels on his embossed cowboy boots and his aura of success. He was a home-grown Texan, the son of a radio station owner, whose amiable style had made him a natural as a disc jockey during his teens. He had spun records singing about big dreams under his moniker “The Weekend Wonder Boy” and earned another nickname on the high school football fi eld: Ice Pick, for his spindly frame. A master of leveraged buyouts, Hicks had made millions investing in distressed companies. He was already on the Forbes 400 list in 1998 when he purchased the Rangers for $250 million from a group led by George W. Bush. In some reaches of Dallas, Hicks was the more luminary name of the two.

“It’s not every day an executive signs autographs at the ballpark,” the
Texas Monthly
writer Skip Hollandsworth pointed out after watching Hicks being swarmed at Rangers batting practice.

As the subject of glowing features in the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
, Hicks refl ected the American obsession with charismatic corporate czars. Executive giants such as General Electric CEO Jack Welch— whose books would later be on Alex’s nightstand— were gaining on Hollywood A-listers as household names worthy of
People
magazine profi les.

It was a heady time for CEOs as one conglomerate after another paid millions to celebrity execs to boost profi ts and, just as
important, the company’s image. In late 2000, Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard Business School professor, told
BusinessWeek
, “We’ve made this a superhero job. Boards look at the CEO as a panacea and get fi xated on the idea that one single individual will solve all of the company’s problems.”

It was no different for some baseball teams. Hicks admired A-Rod as his stellar CEO, his savior-in- stirrups. In three seasons as an owner, Hicks had watched the Yankees dismantle the Rangers, sweeping them in the 1998 and ’99 playoffs. The fi nal indignity came the next season, when the Rangers lost 91 games and left Hicks wincing with embarrassment. “We had lost to the Yankees, and we had just signed a new $500 million–plus contract with Fox Sports Net,” Hicks recalls. “So we were trying to take the next step.”

It was a cool Sunday, November 25, 2000, when Hicks stretched out his hand to greet Alex and his girlfriend, Cynthia, upon their arrival in Dallas. That night they dined in front of an ornate fi replace and beneath coffered ceilings at the chic Mansion on Turtle Creek restaurant.

The next day, Alex had lunch with Rangers players Rafael Palmeiro, Rusty Greer, Kenny Rogers and Manager Johnny Oates, viewed video of the team’s minor-league prospects and toured the team’s tricked-out stadium, the inelegantly named The Ballpark in Arlington.

Alex then slipped into Hicks’s Mercedes and they went for a leisurely drive, past the art museums and the bell tower of SMU and by the boutique stores of prestigious Highland Park, where Hicks resided in a mansion with a two-story pool house. Hicks had done his homework, so he knew a few of Alex’s favorite things: Armani suits, fi ne dining, Picasso. That’s why his tour of Dallas played up the sophisticated aspects of the city and ignored the strip malls, cheap suburban sprawl and every greasy spoon that decorated its entrance in a stagecoach motif. Hicks and Rodriguez rolled on to the wealthiest stretch of Texas, Preston Hollow, where oak trees
formed canopies over gated entrances to $20 million estates. The neighborhood has been home to the billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens, the Cowboys icon Roger Staubach, George W. Bush and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Hicks drove Alex past Wal-nut Hill, where renovations on the 30,000-square- foot French châ-