A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (31 page)

with two double plays, two strikeouts and a throwing error in the Yankees’ 7–3 loss. . . .”

“I pretty much screwed it up every way you can,” Alex said after that game.

The Yankees were 11–12 in August at that point, and Alex was hitting .246 with runners in scoring position. “It’s terrible,” he said.

“I have absolutely no excuse.”

To friends, he seemed lost. “In a fog,” one friend says. He came dangerously close to missing the fi rst pitch of a game on August 30— a cardinal sin in professional baseball. He needed a police escort to get to the stadium in time.

In late September, Alex’s divorce was fi nalized in Miami. Cynthia drove Alex to the Opa-Locka Executive Airport, a private strip with a wood-paneled lobby where the wealthy wait while their private jets are pulled up close to a pair of sliding glass doors. Alex’s jet was ready to fl y him back to New York, and a couple of his friends, Pudge Rodriguez and Gomez, were already on board.

Alex cried in the car next to his ex-wife, friends say. He was confused.
Why was he doing this? What was wrong with him?
He
told Cynthia he loved her, and adored their children. He said that several times, but he still got out of the car, boarded his plane and took off.

Alex and the Yankees had a September to forget— not that anybody would let them— and were eliminated from the playoffs September 23, which meant they played out the last week of the season with no hope. “A wasted season,” Derek Jeter told the
New
York Post
.

Neither Jeter nor Alex played the fi nal game of the season, the back end of a doubleheader with the Red Sox, who were gleefully moving on to the postseason. Alex ended the 2008 season with decent numbers— .302, 35 homers, and 103 RBIs.

Three days after the season ended, Alex was once again dominating the headlines: “Madge Splits with Ritchie, Turns to A-Rod”; “Madge Wants Child with Baseball Star.”

Alex had never had a good postseason, but he was having a very good off-season. In mid-November he was on the red carpet with Kate Hudson and P. Diddy for the reopening of the opulent Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Where Sinatra once romped, Mariah Carey now vamped.

Alex’s green eyes blazed in the pop of paparazzis’ fl ashbulbs as he ignored the shouts from the ravenous entertainment press asking: “Where’s Madonna?” All weekend, celebrity-site bloggers chirped about Alex’s escapades inside a curvaceous hotel brimming with celebrities and models. A-Rod was either surrounded by Madonna’s gal-pal police, had Gwyneth Paltrow on his arm (to keep him from wandering), or he was being brazenly stolen from Madonna by the fl irty Hudson, who was spotted hugging his waist a little
too
tightly.

Alex was now in an Entertainment Tonight world, where he’d always wanted to be.
Romero’s gym, where Alex has spilled so much sweat over the years, is just a half hour away from the Fontainebleau. A framed picture of Alex, Romero, Cynthia, Cynthia’s brother Constantine Scurtis and a friend, Ray Corona still hangs on the gym’s gray walls. All fi ve are leaning forward, arms outstretched behind them, hands clinging to the railing of a concrete bridge, poised to jump into the water about 15 feet below. Alex would later call it the greatest day of his life. He had conquered two fears with one leap: height and water.

The only person in that photo who still stood beside Alex was Corona. Alex had divorced Cynthia, fi red Scurtis as the chief of his real estate empire and been “fi red” by Romero, his former trainer.

On the morning of Monday, November 17, as news of A-Rod’s Fontainebleau dalliances went viral, Romero took a cutout of Alex Rodriguez— a life-sized photo of a focused player in pinstripes, his body coiled for a swing— and threw it into the dusty road that leads to his gym.

For an hour or more, unwitting drivers in cars and trucks ran over the cardboard cut-out. “Someone doesn’t like that guy, do they?” said one observer. “A-Rod is getting
trashed
.”

There were tire marks all over his image, but Alex was still recognizable. He hadn’t fallen apart yet— at least not the cardboard version of him.

Epilogue

As I stood inside the University of Miami weight room on the fi rst Thursday of February 2009 and looked through a window, I could see a group of young athletes in hoodies and sweats trotting around a practice fi eld.

Alex Rodriguez was standing just a few feet from me but he didn’t notice them. That’s probably because he was intently focused on the question I’d just asked him, and mulling the implications of its unnerving buzzwords:
positive test . . . steroids . . . 2003
. He said nothing for several seconds and then turned toward me. He shrugged and nodded his head at the same time, as if torn between two reactions:
I don’t know what you’re talking about
and
I know
exactly what you’re talking about.

He moved past me, picked up a weight plate the size of a pie tin and placed it on a barbell, then said, “You’ll have to talk to the union.” I asked if the information could be wrong, if a mistake could have been made, if he’d taken a tainted supplement. He twisted his mouth but said nothing. I could feel him struggling against himself— one part afraid to answer, one part dying to fi ll the silence. So I tried one more time, asking if there was something more he wanted to explain. “I’m not saying anything,” he said as he turned his attention to the barbell.

There was one more question, though. I asked him about being tipped on a 2004 drug test by Gene Orza, the COO of the Players Association. He looked at the trainer standing beside him and said, “Get someone. She’s not supposed to be in here.”

There was no need. I was ready to leave. I took a business card out of my jacket and offered it to Alex. His buddy Pepe Gomez took it. “Call me if there is something I need to know,” I said, “something else you want to say.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said gripping the barbell as he prepared for a lift.

A half hour later, I saw Gomez walk across the UM parking lot to his Porsche Cayenne. He grabbed gloves and a couple of baseballs from the back and headed toward a fi eld, where Alex awaited.

Later that Thursday, Alex kept an appointment for an interview and cover-photo shoot with
Details
magazine arranged by Guy Oseary. The resulting story was yet another sign of Madonna’s infl uence. Where in a 2001
Esquire
cover story Alex was shown blowing bubble gum, the
Details
photo spread had him in all his muscle-shirt glory, like Narcissus, kissing his refl ection in a mirror. The next day, he jetted on his private plane to the Bahamas, where he was seen in the VIP room at Aura nightclub, drinking Grey Goose and nibbling the ear of a woman lying across his lap.

In photos posted on the internet, Alex looked glazed, blissfully out of it. No worries, apparently.

Over those two days, Alex never called me to talk about the fact that he had tested positive for steroids in 2003. Players Association Executive Director Don Fehr did not respond to my detailed messages about that drug test. Alex never even called the Yankees to warn them that the story was about to break.

On Saturday, February 7, a story about Alex’s steroid use, written by David Epstein and me, was posted on SI.com at 10:15 a.m.

Within a half hour, an alert about the information was stripped across the top of newspaper websites and was a bulletin on CNN; by that evening, it was a lead item on the network newscasts. The
New York Times
placed the story on page one of the Sunday morning edition amid articles on President Obama’s stimulus package; and the front-page headline of the New York
Daily News
screamed out a-roid! with a red box that indicated “11 pages of coverage”

inside.

Somewhere beneath this deluge was the now-rattled Alex Rodriguez. “He’s a mess,” one associate said. “Shocked.” But why was he so surprised? Had he really thought the union would protect him yet again?

If so, he was wrong; the union lords abandoned him. For years, they had enabled his use of steroids, advising Alex and others on how to use steroids safely and tipping them about upcoming drug tests— but Fehr and COO Gene Orza said nothing that weekend while their golden goose was getting cooked.

Alex was true to form in this crisis: He turned to his large support group, which included his handlers and his bankrolled pals, “The Boys,” as well as the celebrity manager Guy Oseary, his agent, Scott Boras, advisers from the William Morris Agency, the publicist Richard Rubenstein and two lawyers.

By Sunday evening, with the addition of Outside Eyes—an inside-the-Beltway crisis-management operation—Alex’s ’Roid Response Team took on the crowded look of a clown car. Outside Eyes’ founder, Reed Dickens, played a prominent role in the 2000

Bush-Cheney campaign, and earned a reputation for his scorched-earth style. Outside Eyes boasted of its on-site “war room” and
rapid-response instincts. Its point man for Assignment A-Rod was Ben Porritt, whose main qualifi cation seemed to be his camera-ready hair.

The day the news broke on SI.com, executives at ESPN reached out to Boras in an effort to nail down “the get” with Alex, the fi rst interview. Team Alex agreed, but who would do the interview? Boras realized that was the crucial detail for his side, and Alex chose someone he knew: Peter Gammons, a veteran reporter, regarded as a solid interviewer, but not a probing one.

The interview was scheduled to take place Sunday around 8 p.m. at Alex’s rental estate on Star Island in Miami. Alex was prepared to blame his positive test result on a doctor who had prescribed medication for a neck injury. But without explanation, the interview was postponed until Monday at 11 a.m. and then pushed back to 1:30 p.m.

The delays bought Alex time. He knew he hadn’t been discreet about his steroid use in Texas. He knew his “doctor’s excuse”

wouldn’t fl y.

Just before the sit-down with Gammons fi nally began, Alex stood at the bottom of a stairway with his ex-wife, Cynthia. Both had red eyes from crying. Alex had a red string wrapped around his wrist— the Kabbalist’s inoculation from negative energy. And he had Cynthia, who was— as always— a steadying infl uence amidst the tumult. “God, she rescues him every time,” says a friend of the Rodriguez family. “He doesn’t know how lucky he is. One day, she won’t be there.”

As Alex entered the dogleg-shaped living room with cameras set up in one section and monitors in the other, no one on the ESPN crew knew what was about to happen. Boras had only told the producers that Alex would “communicate with sincerity and remorse.”

That prediction was proved wrong with Gammons’s fi rst question.
Gammons: Alex, this weekend
Sports Illustrated
reported that in 2003 you tested positive for testosterone, an anabolic steroid known as Primobolan. What is the truth?

Alex: When I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me, and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day. Back then, it was a different culture. It was very loose. I was young. I was stupid. I was naive. And I wanted to prove to everyone that, you know, I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time. And I did take a banned substance. You know, for that I’m very sorry and deeply regretful.

Rangers Owner Tom Hicks was outraged when he heard this.

Pressure? That’s what made him do it? “I feel absolutely betrayed,”

says Hicks. “I think he deceived me. We had conversations about the [steroid] subject. He assured me that he wanted to break every record in baseball, and to do that you have to play for 20 years and he had too much respect for his body to do that kind of thing. So I’m almost at a loss for words.”

Hicks had given Alex everything. Alex had wanted fawning; he’d gotten fawning. He’d wanted the richest deal; he’d gotten the richest deal. “He damn sure wouldn’t have gotten a ten-year contract if we had any reason to suspect he was using performance-enhancing drugs,” says Hicks.

In his 42-minute interview with Gammons, Alex also blamed the “loosey-goosey” attitude towards steroids in Texas, and the GNC vitamin and supplement chain for stocking the banned substances he took, whatever those were. He talked vaguely about an epiphany during spring training 2003, when he realized after an injury that he needed “to stop being selfi sh, stop being stupid and take control of whatever you’re ingesting.”

It was all an artless fabrication. Alex’s one honest emotion surfaced several minutes into the interview, when he talked about the
stain on his reputation. “I couldn’t feel more regret and feel more sorry because I have so much respect for this game,” he said, his voice catching, “And I have millions of fans out there that . . . will never look at me the same.”

And then he blamed the messenger for his woes.

I was sitting in my attic offi ce, fi nishing the article on Alex for
Sports Illustrated
, when I heard him lurch off message and accuse me of three crimes in 30 seconds: Alex: “What makes me upset is that
Sports Illustrated
pays this lady, Selena Roberts, to stalk me. This lady has been thrown out of my apartment in New York City.”

Reality:
SI
reporter David Epstein and I watched Alex maneuver around a member of the paparazzi on the sidewalk in front of his Manhattan apartment in the summer of 2008 as part of a profi le I was writing for the magazine on his new life as a celebrity.

That was it.

Alex: “This lady has fi ve days ago just been thrown out of the University of Miami by police for trespassing.”

Reality: I identifi ed myself wherever I went at UM and never spoke to any police offi cers there.

Alex: “And four days ago she tried to break into my house, where my girls are up there sleeping, and got cited by the Miami Beach police. I have the paper here.”

Reality: I told an employee manning the gate at a guard shack in front of Star Island who I was and that I was heading to Alex’s rental home. She told me the neighborhood was private and I couldn’t enter. I knew she was wrong and told her the island
was a public right-of- way. She didn’t budge. I suggested we call the police to end the stalemate. While I waited for Miami’s fi nest, the guard was told by her superior that yes, it was a public road. She then apologized to me— “We have celebrities here. We have to be careful”— and opened the gate. I drove one lap around the neighborhood loop, but didn’t stop because Alex’s Maybach wasn’t in his driveway.