A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (25 page)

The book lays out a paint-by- numbers approach to capitalizing on the freewheeling lending practices of banks back then, a giddy time for loan institutions that were routinely chopping up low-interest, exotic mortgages. Values were peaking when Alex jumped in with both cleats. “When I landed my well-publicized 10-year, $252 million contract, I set about fi nding an investment vehicle that would ensure my fi nancial fi tness long after baseball,”

Alex said in his one-page foreword, adding that de Roos’s book had given him the “confi dence to form Newport Property Ventures. I began by investing in a small duplex in an emerging area of South Florida, which led to the acquisition of several other income-producing properties.”

He purchased properties in bunches between 2004 and 2006.

Alex’s brother-in- law, Constantine Scurtis, who served for several
years as Newport’s president, signed more than $50 million in mortgages for properties in Tampa, according to county records.

Scurtis once explained the Newport strategy to a business reporter in Tampa. “None of these complexes will be converted [into condos],” he said. “We have very high standards and plan to put a lot of money into fi xing them to give the tenants a better place to live.”

Tenants say they rarely witnessed such efforts and hardly ever saw their celebrity landlord. Alex was known to have made only a couple of scouting trips to the properties, with at least one drawing the attention of renters. As Scurtis recalled, “People were coming out on porches, yelling, ‘Hey, that’s A-Rod.’ ”

If they were to see him today, they’d probably be yelling, “Hey, A-Rod, can you fi x my cracked toilet?” On a website that rates apartments in Tampa, one renter at Newport Villas wrote, “A-Rod fi red all the nice people in the offi ce and his crew knows not a damn thing they are doing; I’m leaving. At least the old management would not have lost everybody’s rent. They sent me a letter stating they were evicting me fi ve months after they lost my rent.”

The recession in 2008 gutted the value of Alex’s investments.

By early 2009, Newport Property Ventures had lost about $10 million in paper value on its Tampa-area properties. A Dun & Brad-street small-business analysis in early 2009 said Newport Property Ventures was not in danger of collapse but was rated slow in making payments to creditors.

Alex also took a major hit on his personal properties. He lost nearly $4 million on the listing of his Miami estate by 2009. Even the value of his personal jet plunged. He is blessed in that he can absorb such losses better than many other rich people, because he has his ironclad Yankees contract and endorsements pouring in at least a combined $27 million a year for the next decade. Alex didn’t like to lose even a dime on anything, though, because all stats are
important to him. He measures himself by numbers: his net worth determines his self-worth.

Alex was angry when the
New York Times
ran a story about his real estate holdings in the fall of 2007, but a year later he would tell the reporter of the piece in private, “You think you made me out to be an ass, but I should thank you. More people want to do business with me than ever before. I have a name.”

His career as a slumlord creates a paradox that perfectly captures the Good Alex/Bad Alex war: He pinches the needy with substandard housing, then tries to help those very people with his AROD Family Foundation— at least until the charity stopped being charitable.

Alex launched the foundation in 1998, updating its activities over the years via a shimmering website that had photos of Alex reading to children and handing over donation checks the size of surfboards. The foundation’s motto read, in part, “dedicated to positively impacting families in distress.”

From 1998 to 2008, Alex Rodriguez earned more than $200

million in salary alone. Over those 10 years, according to available 990 tax records, his foundation contributed, on average, $13,000 a year. By 2008, the foundation was an untended garden. The state of Florida temporarily dissolved the charity in September of that year for failing to fi le an annual report and for not paying a penalty of $61.25. The fi ne was later paid, and the foundation was shuttered a short time later. By the winter of 2009, the once-glossy website for the AROD Family Foundation was no longer accessible.

Alex isn’t the fi rst athlete to watch his noble ambitions fi zzle, but this failure must have been particularly galling for him, if only because the thorn in his psyche, Derek Jeter, has had so much success with his charity. Quietly, over an 11-year period dating back to 1997, Jeter’s Turn 2 Foundation had donated more than $15 million to community education programs. According to 10 years of
tax records, Jeter wrote checks for a total of more than $2.3 million to help underwrite the foundation.

There was Jeter again, always besting him, even as the humble do-gooder. It never ended.

Alex was fi nally convinced that he’d put some distance between himself and the Yankees’ Captain Perfect in 2005. During his off-season in Miami, after pushing the misery of the ALCS loss to the Red Sox out of his mind, he attacked his training regimen with a new fervor. He went on endless bike rides with his trainer Dodd Romero on county highways, through orange groves and across waterways that fi ngered toward the Atlantic.

He was serious about everything. He was now a father with the birth of his daughter, Natasha, in November, and he was determined to grow up. Alex adored Natasha but was also taken aback at how much of Cynthia’s attention was funneled to their newborn, not to him. Alex knew it was wrong to feel that way.
What kind of
man has these thoughts?

He found comfort in his workouts among training partners who offered him constant assurance and attention. “How do I look?” he’d ask them, standing with his hands on his hips, feet shoulder-width apart.

“You look great, man,” they’d say.

Alex let nothing disrupt his rigid routine. Early one morning, not much past dawn, he was driving to the gym when he got a fl at on his luxury ride. He didn’t yank out a spare or wait for the AAA; he phoned a friend. Within minutes, he was on his way to a workout in that friend’s car while someone else handled the tire jack.

Just another perk that comes with having friends paid to provide a 24-hour valet ser vice. Alex never made himself a sandwich; never fetched his own coffee; never picked out his own clothes. He didn’t even order his own soup.
“His wife always ordered for him,” says a waitress at the Bagel Emporium, Alex and Cynthia’s favorite breakfast and lunch spot in Coral Gables. “He never said a word. He never made eye contact with any of the waitresses.”

Employees there describe him as increasingly dismissive over the years. Not so much as a “hello” when he walked in. This was a sign of what friends describe as Alex steadily “drifting completely away from normal.”

Alex didn’t have time for chit-chat with waitresses; he was obsessively focused on reclaiming his status as the best player in the game. He pushed himself hard in the gym, ran daily against the resistance of thick bungee cords and added more protein to his diet— anything to improve on 2004. “By far the toughest year of my career,” he said, adding, “New York is a handful, and I just felt I tried to please too much. I’m more comfortable now.”

When the gates to the Yankees’ spring training facility were swung open in February, Alex was ready. He’d packed an extra 15

pounds of muscle onto his six-foot, three-inch frame. As George King of the
New York Post
wrote, “Thanks to a winter of pumping iron, Alex Rodriguez’s chest looks like something out of an NFL

locker room”

Not that anyone had kicked sand in his face in 2004. He weighed 210 pounds that season. Now he was at 225. Alex’s extreme winter makeover heightened suspicions among Yankees— some of whom knew of his steroid use in Texas.

Some teammates began to privately call him “Bitch Tits,” a reference to what they perceived to be his now slightly rounded breasts. These players had been around enough dopers to know that this disconcerting side effect— what doctors call gynecomastia— was common among steroid users. Look at Alex’s shirtless photos and the 2007
Letterman
skit on YouTube, Canseco says. “That’s where you see the bitch tits. It’s right there.”

In Texas Alex had used a variety of steroids, including
Primobolan— a drug, experts say, that isn’t associated with gynecomastia. Which means he must have been using something else now. There were several other candidates— including Winstrol and Dianabol— but those drugs weren’t easy to fl ush from the system in time to avoid detection, even with advance warning of a drug test. And
not
fl unking the drug test was crucial now.

There would be no more free passes in 2005. MLB now mandated stiffer penalties— including a 10-day suspension for a fi rst positive. It would have been extremely risky for Alex to inject or ingest anything anabolic, but there were biochemical loopholes for cheaters. By 2004, players were turning to HGH— banned but undetectable— and low dosages of steroids to stay under the radar of the tests. Designer steroids were also a possibility.

There were, in other words, plenty of ways to game the system, but overall, the threat of testing seemed to be working. Many players showed up at spring training as scaled-down versions of their former selves. They seemed to have shrunk during the off-season.

That made Alex stand out even more.

As one former steroid user says, “You could look around the league that year and tell guys were losing weight, [because] they were off the stuff. Alex
gained
weight.”

Dodd Romero says Alex never took steroids around him, but no one could vouch for what he did in the Dominican Republic during his visits there in the off-season. Alex was still working part-time with the banned trainer Angel Presinal in the D.R. but had ended their regular-season sessions when he was traded to New York.

“Nao was his go-to,” says a baseball source, referring to Presinal by his nickname. “When all else failed, he went back to Nao.”

Alex’s extra 15 pounds were rock hard, as was his confi dence.

“This will be a great year,” he told reporters at the start of spring training. His mind, however, was wandering, and wondering. He was shaken early in spring training by the furor over teammate
Jason Giambi’s vague apology for using steroids. Giambi had been exposed by his grand jury testimony in the BALCO case, which had been reported in the
San Francisco Chronicle
in December 2004, and spring training was the fi rst chance the beat reporters had to corner him.

In a Clintonesque “What is the meaning of ‘is’?” moment, Giambi tiptoed through an opaque confession at a press conference at the opening of spring training. His decision to come forward and address the issue would become the template for other steroid-ensnared players—including Alex—in the years to come.

“I was the fi rst,” recalls Giambi. “And trust me, fi rst is not always the best. It was tough. It was uncharted water. One side is saying this or that. I’m just glad I did the right thing. I said what I could.

I weathered it.”

Giambi, noticeably slimmer that season (which gave him the look of an ice sculpture after the party), never mentioned the word “steroid” but said he was sorry just the same. Still, the scene left Steinbrenner fuming. “The Boss really didn’t want his players to have anything to do with steroids,” says one Yankee source. “He was old-school work ethic and thought of steroids as cheating.

Now, the rest of the Yankees brass . . . from them, you’d hear that the steroid issue was nothing more than a media witch hunt.”

Yankees President Randy Levine and GM Brian Cashman feigned concern about steroids when they were on camera but scoffed at the congressional circus around the subject in private.

In February 2005, Jose Canseco’s steroid tell-all,
Juiced
, hit the stores. To Alex’s great relief, it did not out him as a user. The book did prompt the House Government Reform Committee to drag in MLB executives, along with Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Curt Schilling and Canseco for questioning. McGwire, considerably thinner than when he’d last played— the Incredible Shrinking Slugger— was nearly in tears when responding to a question about his past and the use of performance enhancers. “My lawyers have
advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family or myself. I intend to follow their advice.”

It was a devastating moment for McGwire, but it was all just political theater to the Yankees’ front offi ce. Its antidoping message was simple: Don’t get caught.

The only Yankee executive a steroid user had to fear was The Boss. A few days after Giambi’s press conference, Steinbrenner requested some time with his All-Star third baseman. “The Boss wants you,” Alex was told. He tensed up. “Alex kept asking, ‘Is this about steroids?’ ” one Yankee staffer who witnessed the moment says. “It was weird. Why
would
it be about steroids?”

As Alex walked toward Steinbrenner, he huffed and puffed just as he did before a tense at-bat. He couldn’t be sure what Steinbrenner knew about his usage, although Alex believed the union and his agent had kept that secret buried deep.

But what about the Boras and Orza camps? Were they leak-proof? Alex had no idea as he stared at George Steinbrenner’s square jaw. Alex considered The Boss an almost mythical fi gure, a tough guy who, unlike Hicks, didn’t favor Alex over any other Yankee.

One longtime friend of Steinbrenner’s says, “George had great affection for a lot of his players, but he never mentioned Alex. It’s like he didn’t feel a connection to him.”

This could be bad, Alex thought, but as soon as The Boss started to speak, Alex relaxed. Steinbrenner merely wanted to give him a motivational speech, something on the order of, “Earn your pinstripes.” That’s it? Alex was visibly relieved, say witnesses.

A few days later, Alex found himself under siege by people far more critical than Steinbrenner. During spring training, Alex took shots from the Red Sox camp, where Curt Schilling, Trot Nixon and David Wells called him “a phony” because of the infamous glove-slapping incident in the playoffs. Nixon also mocked him
for being a shameless self-promoter after Alex told a television reporter about his grueling 6 a.m. off-season workouts, which he said lasted six hours. “[Alex] said he’s doing all this while six hundred players are still in their bed,” Nixon sniped. “I say, ‘What’s wrong with me taking my kid to school? I’m not a deadbeat dad, you clown. I work out for three hours in the weight room, and I hit for another two or three hours [later in the day]. What makes you so much better?’ ”