A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (29 page)

They settled on
60 Minutes
. To secure the interview, Katie Couric had been in touch with Alex through the fi nal stages of his contract negotiations. He liked her, and wanted her to like him.

She later confessed that during one of their talks Alex had asked, “What team do you think I should play for?”

For his Couric interview, Alex wore a dark blazer and white button-down shirt to project a conservative image. Cynthia again was by his side, wearing a black dress and visibly pregnant. Both were asked about the controversial timing of Alex’s opt-out of his deal with the Yankees.

“When I realized things were going haywire, at that point I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got to be accountable for my own life,’ ”

Alex told Couric. “This is not the way I wanted it to go. So I got behind the wheel.”

Couric asked Cynthia how the opt-out gambit had changed Alex. “He wasn’t used to having to take such initiative, such action, especially in this arena,” she said. “It’s something he wasn’t used to doing, and he actually had to pick up the phone, make the calls, make some decisions and stand behind them, be confi dent and be sure.”

Couric then asked about steroids, but Alex was ready for her.

He had prepared for this question. He had actually been a bit unlucky with the timing of the
60 Minutes
broadcast. Just a day before his sit-down with Couric, the Mitchell Report had been released,
and it included the names of dozens of players, including Roger Clemens, who were linked to steroid allegations. Alex wasn’t on the list, but his advisers had coached him on how to talk about the frenzy surrounding the Mitchell Report.

“For the record,” Couric said to Alex on camera, “have you ever used steroids, human growth hormone or any other performance-enhancing substance?”

“No,” Alex said, his eyes locked on her but with a slight twitch of his left cheek.

“Have you ever been tempted to use any of those things?”

He looked away for an instant, as if to contemplate the question he’d already been prepped on, then replied, “No.”

“You never felt like ‘This guy’s doing it, maybe I should look into this too? He’s getting better numbers, playing better ball’ . . . ?”

“I’ve never felt overmatched on the baseball fi eld,” Alex said with a steady voice. “I’ve always been [in] a very strong, dominant position, and I felt that if I did my work, [which] I’ve done since I’ve been a rookie back in Seattle, I [wouldn’t] have a problem competing at any level.”

He paused, took a breath and then, with another twitch of his left cheek, said, “So, no.”

It was a lie. Psychologists who study body language and physi-ological cues say those twitches of his left-cheek gave him away. But he told the fi b well. He answered confi dently and without equivo-cation, just as he’d been trained. He had emphatically declared on national TV that he was not a drug cheat.

The truth was that Alex’s baseball career and almost every other part of his life consisted of one artifi ce atop another— a pileup of deceptions— that was about to come crashing down all around him.

Chapter Eleven

The Material Girl began whispering sweet, pseudo-mystical nothings into Alex’s ear in December of 2007, instantly mesmerizing him. They got to know each other through Madonna’s close friend, Miami nightclub impresario Ingrid Casares, just after the
60 Minutes
interview.

Alex had always been attracted to older women, powerful people and hard bodies. In Madonna, he hit the trifecta—she was an icon, in great shape and nearing 50. “In his eyes, the higher the infl uence of the female, the better he scored,” says Dodd Romero.

“I think that’s why he’s intrigued with Madonna. In his material mind, he’s moving up the ladder.”

Alex wanted to impress Madonna, and what better way than to adopt her belief system. He started attending ser vices at the Kabbalah Centre of New York and L. A. where Madonna, Demi Moore,
Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears worshiped. He told friends this postmodern, self-help version of Kabbalah would change his life— and free his swing in the playoffs. All he had to do was learn to become “an empty vessel.”

“That’s a well-known Kabbalistic expression,” says Rabbi Allan Nadler of Drew University’s Jewish Studies Program. “What it means is you have to empty yourself of egotistical, sensual and especially carnal desires. That’s the classic view. But The Kabbalah Centre turns that upside down. It says anything getting in the way of your happiness is what you need to empty yourself of, like family obligations. And that’s where it’s perverse. Somebody gave Alex pseudo-license to leave his family.”

Alex hadn’t left Cynthia and his kids by the time spring training opened for the 2008 season. In fact, he happily staged an elaborate show of familial bliss in a studio in Miami, where the Yankees television network— YES— was fi lming a hagiographic feature on Alex for a show called “YESterdays.”

The show was to shoot Alex interacting with his family— which included the pregnant Cynthia, Alex’s half brother Joe, and half sister Susy— and some of his friends in a “This is Your Life”

format.

“Please welcome the man the world knows as A-Rod, the third baseman of the New York Yankees, Alex Rodriguez,” the host, Michael Kay, began.

Kay turned to Cynthia, who assured viewers that A-Rod was mortal, sometimes. Yes, he left his socks on the fl oor— like anyone else.

“You actually experienced him not being so smooth at the birth of Natasha, right?” asked Kay.

“As tough and big as he seems,” Cynthia said, “he is really
wimpy around doctors or any type of medical situation. I don’t know why I thought the birth of our child would be any different.

In the middle of the night, I realized that I needed to go to the hospital. I wake him up. The fi rst thing that comes out of his mouth is ‘Can we call your mother?’ I stared. ‘No, let’s wait and make sure that I am in labor. You know, it’s the middle of the night.’ Finally, a few hours later I said, ‘I think you can call my mom now.’ And the color came back to his face.”

There is laughter on the set.

“Then forget it,” Cynthia continues. “I was, like, not even having a baby.
He
was the one. The one nurse had a cold cloth on his head. The other nurse had the blood pressure on his arm. And my mother was, like, rubbing his back.”

“Really?”

“No, it was crazy,” Cynthia said.

“I was terrible,” Alex interjected.

“And he passed out on a couch,” Cynthia said. “And I am there, in the middle of labor, and really, I am not being paid much attention to besides the doctor and a couple of nurses. And he is there moaning.”

“Get out!” Kay blurted out, laughing.

“She is right,” Alex said.

Cynthia said, “In between pushing, I am going, ‘Honey, are you okay?’ ”

YES aired the
A-Rod Family Hour
for only a month before pulling it from their rotation. By then, his home life was no longer suitable for young viewers.

Alex began spring training in 2008 with a new $300 million contract and a carefree air. There was another Joe running the Yankees show now. Joe Girardi had replaced Torre, and the young pitchers
Joba Chamberlain, Ian Kennedy and Phil Hughes were drawing most of the attention from the New York beat writers as the season got underway.

Alex played steady but unspectacular ball for a team that bounced around .500 in the early going. In late April, he injured his quadriceps so he was out of the Yankees lineup when Cynthia gave birth to the couple’s second little girl, Ella, on April 21 in Miami. He fl ew home for three days, then walked into the Yankees clubhouse with pink-wrapped cigars for everyone that read it’s a girl! ella alexander rodriguez 4-21- 08.

One Yankee source says Alex returned from Miami looking tanned and rested, with new blond highlights, as if he’d been to a spa.

A second round of fatherhood didn’t ground Alex. He now seemed restless, hitting a tepid .286 in April and .293 in May.

His mind was adrift and his marriage was falling apart. Alex told friends he wanted his freedom. “Mentally, he was already single,”

says a former confi dant.

In May, Alex dined at a Hooters restaurant perched on a deck above the paddleboats and dinner cruise yachts bobbing in Baltimore’s touristy Inner Harbor. It was about four blocks from Camden Yards, where the Orioles were hosting the Yankees in a three-game series. He had been here before.

He had told the woman at the front desk that he wanted to be seated at a specifi c table, the one near the restroom, the one with an old photo of Mickey Mantle posing next to a Hooters girl on the wall. He also said he he preferred a Latina waitress. The staff here knew Alex, and greeted him with smiles even though they knew he always left the same tip: 15 percent. “The girls have their issues with him,” one manager says. “I don’t really want to say he’s an asshole. He’s defi nitely, well, rude.”

He spoke mostly in Spanish, but several waitresses heard—
and understood— the remarks he made about the women on staff, particularly one he found unattractive. “What is
she
doing working here?” he quipped, “Her father must own Hooters.”

“I’ve been a fan of yours forever,” a passing waitress said to him as he sat at his table.

“Can I have blue cheese?” he replied, ignoring her.

“He says he’s entitled to whatever he wants,” recalls one waitress.

He fi nished eating and then, as he bolted for the door, he told a waitress, “Nice ass.”

This was not the urbane image Cynthia had painstakingly helped her husband project for over a decade. This was his way of lashing out at her, and all she represented. She was the symbol of the Old Alex. He wasn’t that man anymore. By the end of May, Dodd Romero had seen enough of the New Alex.

“Brother, I represent good, and what you’re doing isn’t good,”

Dodd told him. “I have to step off now.”

“What will it take to keep you? Write it down on a piece of paper,” Alex replied. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

Money was what kept people close to Alex, but Dodd, who had never asked for more than a normal trainer’s fee from Alex, picked up a piece of paper and wrote, “Find Jesus.”

Alex said nothing as Dodd walked away.

“I have never fought harder for anyone in my life— I sacrifi ced fi ve years of not making any money at all,” Dodd said after dump-ing Alex as a client. “I always said if he fi nds Christ, he’ll appreciate me. Then, one day, the pennies he has paid me . . . he’ll feel ashamed he has done it that way.”

Alex didn’t have time for Dodd, or his biblical homilies; he was seeking salvation in the arms of Kabbalah, and Madonna.

With Madonna fi rmly in his life by mid-2008, the ever-malleable Alex had changed his private thoughts and public
behavior: Where in March 2007 he donated $6,900 to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, in 2008, like Madonna, he was supporting Barack Obama. Where he had been content to live in a Coral Gables estate, Alex, in 2008, rented a mansion on Star Island—Madonna’s neighborhood. Where he used to appear regularly on the tabloid sports pages, he was now starting to contrive ways of getting his name into the gossip pages. Where before he was content to hang out with “the Boys” in Vegas strip clubs, he now upgraded to a celebrity circle, taking a helicopter with Madonna to Jerry Seinfeld’s $30 million Hampton’s estate. Where he had entered the front doors of restaurants he was, in Madonna’s company, slipping out the kitchen in a winking avoidance of the paparazzi.

By late June, a daily diet of salacious headlines appeared in the New York and British tabloids: “A-Rod Paying Late-Night Visits to Madge’s Love Nest” and “A-Rod Wooed by Madge Cult.” The papers claimed that Cynthia had found a love note written by Alex to Madonna that read, “You are my true soul mate.”

He listened to Madonna’s music. He talked of her constantly— to friends, to players, to casual acquaintances. “Obsessed, pretty much,” says one Yankee. “It was like, ‘Ok, Alex, you’re with Madonna. And I’d give you a big high-fi ve for that—fi fteen years ago.’ Hey, she looks great, but she’s 50. It’s like sleeping with your mother.”

In a
Daily News
story on July 4, Cynthia was quoted telling friends, “I feel like Madonna is using mind control over [Alex].

I don’t recognize the man he’s become.” She believed Madonna had “brainwashed” her Catholic-raised husband with her celebrity brand of Kabbalah. “It teaches self-fulfi llment to the point of becoming God,” says Nadler. “So these are gods-in- training.”

Alex certainly was acting as though he were invincible. Friends say he fanned his breakup with his wife by giving his friends permission to plant disparaging items about Cynthia in the tabloids attributable to “sources close to A-Rod.”

“People say, “Oh, it was for publicity,’ ” says a friend of Alex’s.

“Well, real people got hurt.”

Madonna was now more important to Alex than his inner-circle. Alex required a staffer on his payroll to deliver the New York
Daily News
and the
New York Post
to him on a tray at breakfast.

One day, the employee charged with that task had doodled horns on a photo of Madonna. Alex fi red him.

On July 7, 2008, after a 12-year relationship and six years of marriage, Cynthia fi led for divorce and moved from New York City to their home in Miami with the couple’s two children, Natasha, 3, and Ella, 3 months. On page one, paragraph one of the court documents fi led in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, her lawyer claimed: “ ‘Alex’ has emotionally abandoned his wife and children and has left her with no choice but to divorce him.”

The “abandonment” issue had come full circle for Alex. There was an unsettling symmetry to what he was doing with his life, and what his father had done twenty years earlier. In 1985, his father had left his family in Miami to seek a more exciting life in New York City. “I found out Miami wasn’t fast-paced enough for Dad,”

Alex once said.

Now it was Alex living fast and free in New York. “He’ll crash and burn,” Romero predicted. “Hopefully, he’ll get humbled and become a man.”