A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (32 page)

I went back to the guard shack. The guard told me I didn’t have to wait for the police, but I wanted to know the rules regarding access to the island in case I had to come back. Offi cer Juan Rivera arrived a few minutes later and confi rmed that Star Island was public and there were no special rules regarding access to it.

There was no citation, only an incident log item to note that an of-fi cer had responded to a call.

“There’s no follow-up,” Miami Beach police detective Juan Sanchez told the New York
Daily News
in a story with the headline “A-Rod Strikes Out. Cops: No Record of Trouble with SI Scribe.”

Sanchez added, “She was not arrested. She was not cited. It doesn’t go on her record. It’s not even entered into our system.”

Alex’s fabrications about me were no more credible than the ones he told about his failed drug test, and his suspect semi-confessional on ESPN did not get good reviews. On February 10, the front-page headline of the
New York Post
accompanying a picture of Alex read, “Liar. Cheat.” In the New York
Daily News
it was “Body of Lies.”

My cell phone rang the afternoon of February 11. It was Ben Porritt, dialing from a number that showed up on my caller ID as Newport Property Ventures. He was at Alex’s Coral Gables offi ce.

Porritt told me that Alex wanted to personally apologize. Then he put me on speakerphone.

“Hey, Selena, what’s going on?” Alex said.
His apology “for what I thought you committed” unfolded awkwardly and with contradictions. He said his “staff at Star Island” had given him misinformation about the police log, yet he continued to call it a “citation.” There were several things he neglected to apologize for, including his misogynistic stalker accusa-tion and the trespassing whopper.

I didn’t say much— I had no idea who else was gathered around the speakerphone in that Coral Gables offi ce— but near the end of the conversation I told him, “I get it. I understand.”

And I did. Alex couldn’t just say, “I’m sorry that I lied.” He needed to blame it on his staff. He needed to blame it on his own panic. He needed to be the victim.

“My life will never be the same,” he told me.

Alex then embarked on his Forgive Me Tour. He wore the red Kabbalah string on his left wrist, just beneath the black band of his watch, when he spoke to alumni on February 13 at the University of Miami’s Dinner on the Diamond, where the décor was an ode to the romance of baseball, with Cracker Jack, baseball cards and miniature bats on the tables. Alex probably would have preferred staying out of sight for a few days, but he was not about to cancel on these people.

“He was nervous,” says an associate of Alex’s. “But he also thought, ‘Hey, I’m loved here,’ so I think that helped.”

He had come for the offi cial unveiling of Alex Rodriguez Park at Mark Light Field. This was
his
fi eld in many ways, part of a renovation underwritten by his $3.9 million donation. This was
his
crowd as well, many of them boosters who hugged their benefactor that night.

Alex was glib at the podium. “I want to welcome my friends in the back,” he said of the many members of the press wedged into the back of the room. “We travel together just like a family— a
dysfunctional family.” He paused as if waiting for a rim shot, then continued, “As you know, it’s been a really quiet week for me, so it’s nice to get out on a Friday night.”

He maintained his composure throughout his remarks and even managed to look defi ant as he gestured with a pointed fi nger in the air to emphasize his devotion to UM.

Alex had that red string wrapped around his wrist again— this time beneath a silver watch— when he reported to Yankees spring training on Tuesday, February 17. This would be his fi rst press conference since the news had come out. It was to be broadcast live.

A blue tent was set up outside George M. Steinbrenner Field.

There were folding chairs for about 150 media members and standing room for 50 more.

At 1:38 p.m., about 18 minutes late, Alex walked into the tent wearing an untucked navy blue button-down shirt and cream-colored pants. He clinched a rolled-up statement in his hand as he took a seat at the dais with Yankees manager Joe Girardi and General Manager Brian Cashman to his right. To Alex’s far left stood Porritt, one of Alex’s lawyers, and Don Hooton, whose son, Taylor, had died in 2002 as a result of steroid use. To Alex’s far right, some of his teammates, including Jorge Posada, Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte, looked on. Some had come to support Alex. Others seemed to be there out of curiosity. One player was overheard saying to another about the proceedings, “. . . a train-wreck- type thing.”

The players, many of them with their arms folded across their chests, watched dispassionately for the next 38 minutes. Jeter sat slumped in his chair, as if numbed by A-Rod’s high drama.

Alex was nervous. He sipped from a bottle of water. He looked at his statement, curled from being clinched so tightly, and then began to detail his “recollections.” This time, he told a far different steroid tale from the one he’d shoveled to Peter Gammons a week earlier.
“Going back to 2001, my cousin started telling me about a substance that can be purchased over the counter in the [Dominican Republic],” he said. “In the streets it’s known as ‘boli.’ It was his understanding that it would give me a dramatic energy boost and was otherwise harmless. My cousin and I, one more ignorant than the other, decided it was a good idea to start taking it. My cousin would administer it to me, but neither of us knew how to use it properly, providing just how ignorant we both were. It was at this point we decided to take it twice a month for about six months. During the 2001, 2002 and 2003 seasons, we consulted no one and had no good reason to base that decision. It was pretty evident we didn’t know what we were doing. We did everything we could to keep it between us, and my cousin did not provide any other players with it. I stopped taking it in 2003 and haven’t taken it since.”

He ended his lengthy opening remarks with a clumsy bit of stagecraft as he tried to thank his Yankee teammates. He couldn’t speak. He pursed his lips, pushed back from the table, sipped water and took a deep breath. It was an awkward 38 seconds of silence.

Rodriguez then answered questions from the media but on his terms, set by Team A-Rod, not the Yankees: He would answer no follow-ups; he would talk for only a half hour. “All these years I never thought I’d done anything wrong,” he said. But when
New
York Post
columnist Mike Vaccaro asked why, then, he had been so secretive about his use of steroids, Alex replied, “I knew we weren’t taking Tic Tacs.”

The almost universal response from those under that Yankee Big Top was “Hogwash.” They didn’t buy that emotional “thank-you” to his teammates, or his latest twist in his steroid tale. First he’d said that the temptation of GNC supplements was the culprit, now the culprit was something his cousin had bought in the D.R., “boli.” Whatever that was. Primobolan or Dianabal or Deca-Durabolin?
Not even his oft-repeated defense that he’d been “young and stupid” held up. He kept saying he had been 24 and 25 when he “experimented,” but Alex was 26, 27 and 28 from 2001 to 2003, with a wealth of steroid expertise behind him.

The next day, New York
Daily News
columnist Mike Lupica summed up Alex’s dubious effort with this: “At this point, you want Alex Rodriguez to fi nd a cousin, any cousin, who will inject him with truth serum.” And in the
Bergen Record
, Bob Klapisch asked Alex, “Why are you so afraid of the truth— the unlawyered, bedrock account of your life with steroids?”

Afterward Cashman, perhaps fed up with the A-Rod Opera, was candid when asked if the organization regretted signing Alex to a 10-year, $275 million deal in 2007. “We’re not in a position to go backwards on this,” he said. “We’ve got nine years of Alex remaining. . . . And because of that, this is an asset that is going through a crisis. So we’ll do everything we can to protect that asset and support that asset and try to salvage that asset.

“This story is going to be with Alex for a long time,” Cashman said. “It’s going to be with him forever.”

Poor Yuri Sucart. Alex hadn’t named him in that press conference, but he had fi ngered a cousin as his “boli” mule, and
ESPN Deportes
discovered that this was Sucart and went knocking on the door of his Miami home less than 48 hours later. Sucart had spent a decade laying out clothes for Alex each day. He had washed the luxury cars, cleaned up the party messes and tipped the strippers— all to be included in Alex’s jet-setting world of decadence. And now he stepped forward as the one who would take this bullet for Alex.

“What A-Rod said at the press conference,” Sucart’s wife, Car-men, told
ESPN Deportes
, “is what happened and that is all.”

The explanation was too simple-minded to be plausible. To suggest that Sucart had simply ferried just “boli” to and from the
D.R. was problematic, because steroid users stack their dope— they use, for instance Deca-Durabolin or Winstrol or Primobolan together with testosterone— and take drugs such as Clomid to keep them from morphing into a woman. Alex had called it amateur hour when his cousin injected him, but he was an experienced hand when it came to using steroids.

“He turned out to be an asshole,” says Joe Arriola, the respected Miami public servant and longtime friend of the Rodriguez family. “Alex was stupid for what he said and how he said it [in the press conference]. He should’ve said, ‘Yep, I did it,’ and not blame anybody else. His cousin, and the D.R. and all that bullshit.

You should take your medicine, and that’s it. But that’s how he was raised. Okay?”

The scorn that greeted Alex’s version of his Steroid Wonder Years stunned him. For several days after his press conference, he seemed to be yelling to someone offstage, “Line, please!” as he fumbled for the right words during spring training and the upcoming World Baseball Classic.
What would sound good right now? What lie will
cover the last one?

MLB offi cials also had some questions about those lies. They met with Alex on Sunday, March 1, for two hours. Alex, coached by his lawyer, was careful not to incriminate himself to the point of setting himself up for punishment by the league. He gave the baseball people nothing new of note.

He exited the meeting relieved and joined the Dominican Republic’s World Baseball Classic camp. “He needs to be about baseball, only baseball now,” a Yankee offi cial says. “I don’t know if he can do that.”

Alex certainly would have preferred “being” just about baseball, but he couldn’t show up for the WBC workouts as just another member of the D.R. team. He was news. He pulled up to the
practice fi eld in Jupiter, Florida, on March 2 in his black Maybach driven by Joe Dunand, his half brother. A handful of fans cheered his arrival, which drew a pumped fi st from A-Rod.

Two hours later he stepped onto the fi eld in a red, white and blue Dominican Republic uniform in front of a phalanx of cameras capturing his every move. As Jack Curry wrote in the
New
York Times
, “This photo-op took an awkward twist. Rodriguez veered off a walkway and peeked into the windows of a Mercedes sport utility vehicle. After a door opened, Rodriguez plucked out Natasha, his 4-year- old daughter, and kissed her. Cynthia, Rodriguez’s former wife, held Ella, their 10-month- old daughter. What could have been a quiet moment in a secluded room turned into another episode of A-Rod’s reality show. While Rodriguez snuggled with his older daughter, the cameras were a few feet from their faces. Natasha fi dgeted. Rodriguez ignored the attention, even if it was something he helped create.”

The transparency of the family-man spin was dismaying: No other D.R. player visited with their children in front of the photographers that day, and Alex knew he would be leaving the fi eld shortly to consult with doctors. Two days earlier, he had an MRI with the Yankees’ medical team after complaining about stiffness in his hip. The test had revealed a cyst. By Wednesday, March 4, Alex was on his way to Vail, Colorado, to meet with Dr. Marc Phillipon, a noted hip specialist.

The injury perpetuated the Cirque de Alex in the tabloids. Dr.

Phillipon discovered a torn labrum. But what did that mean? The fi rst word, from the Alex camp: he would have surgery and needed 10 weeks to recover. The second word, from the Yankees: he would try to play through the hip injury.

The last word was something in between. On March 9, Phillipon performed arthroscopic surgery on Alex’s torn labrum. He stabilized the cartilage in the hope of helping Alex play through the bulk of the season. Alex would remain in Colorado for rehab, with
the expectation that he’d return to the Yankees by mid-May. After the season, Phillipon said, Alex would need further surgery. Joel Sherman wrote in the
New York Post
, “Rodriguez will be in Colorado at least three weeks, away from the game and away from the Yankees. He’ll have three weeks to ponder where he is and where he might like to go.”

This would be the fi rst time Alex Rodriguez has had any downtime during the baseball season in a decade, not since a knee injury in 1999.

Alex used the baseball season to elevate his status and feed his insecurities. The baseball season had given Alex an identity since he was a little boy. Who would he be without it?

The day after his hip surgery, Alex mounted a stationary bike and started his rehab. He couldn’t wait to get back— into a Yankee uniform, into the pages of the tabloids, into the spotlight. He didn’t want to be gone long. Only one thing scared Alex more than being called a cheater—being ignored.

Acknowledgments

In pulling together the complex details of Alex Rodriguez’s life—both for a profi le in
Sports Illustrated
that evolved into a news story upon the steroid revelations, and, ultimately, for this book—I couldn’t have asked more from my colleague David Epstein. He is one of the fi nest and most persistent reporters I’ve known in my 23

years as a journalist. He was by my side through the entire journey, including a few humid afternoons in Georgia, where we killed time answering outdated Trivial Pursuit questions in a Starbucks while waiting for our own Godot.