A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (10 page)

Chuck G. Armstrong.

Lourdes was crying into the phone receiver. It was Saturday, August 28, two days before Alex was scheduled to attend an 8 a.m. Introductory Psychology class at the University of Miami. Two days until the $1 million offer from the Mariners would offi cially turn to dust.
The injury Armstrong mentioned in his letter had unhinged Lourdes and Alex and made them eager to make a deal with the Mariners. On July 28, as Alex lounged in a dugout during a junior national tournament in San Antonio, Texas, a fl uke throw— a wild warm-up toss by a second baseman— had smacked him in the face.

Alex’s right cheekbone collapsed. Three days later, a surgeon had to treat Alex’s face like a dented fender and pop it out with a screw.

The injury was not serious or long term, but it scared Alex. It was a reminder of how fragile a career can be. The panic it churned up for him and his mother prompted Lourdes to put in an emergency call to a family friend.

She always leaned on Arriola. He was listening to Lourdes and could hear her voice tremble as she asked him for advice. He was a well-respected former city manager of Miami who worked for a $1-a- year salary because, as a self-made man who had sold his business, Avanti Press, for millions, he didn’t want to take taxpay-ers’ money. “I’m a wealthy guy,” Arriola says of his decision to get involved in Alex’s stalled negotiations. “I had nothing to gain.”

He was a doer, not a talker, a selfl ess man with a rescue gene, and Lourdes needed him. “We’re poor people; we can’t just turn down a million dollars,” she sobbed into the phone. “Joe,” she pleaded, “do the best you can. Screw Scott. Screw everything. You gotta help us.”

Arriola promised to do what he could. He rented a hotel room at the Marriott next to the Miami airport and huddled with Boras in a marathon session, looking for some fl exibility in the agent’s position. “We talked for hours,” Arriola recalls. “I don’t know how many hours, but, like, zillions of hours.”

Arriola fi nally had to call Lourdes and tell her Boras wouldn’t move off his numbers. “She said, ‘No, you gotta get this done for me.’ ” Arriola walked down the hallway to Boras’s room and said, “You guys are out.”

Boras was furious. He called Arriola a traitor, even though he
had brokered the introductory meeting between Boras and Alex.

“They were really pissed,” Arriola says. “I was like, Hey, I brought you into the game; so what the hell are you talking about? I didn’t care; I was doing it for the family. If the mother would’ve said, ‘Stay out of it,’ I would’ve stayed out of it, but when she said, ‘I want you to help me,’ I did.”

That evening, Arriola moved to a different hotel, the Grand Bay in Coconut Grove, and met with the Mariners. He negotiated with team offi cials, including Arguelles and Benny Looper, a scout director, well into the night. They drank coffee and rubbed their tired eyes. By 3 a.m. Monday, fi ve hours before Alex’s fi rst college class was scheduled to begin, they agreed on a three-year deal worth $1.269 million. The package included a $500,000 bonus, a major-league deal and a guaranteed call-up in September 1994.

Alex was relieved and gave Arriola the green light. The deal meant that Lourdes could fi nally exhale and concentrate on her dream: owning her own immigration assistance offi ce.

Arriola picked up the phone and called Boras to tell him Alex had decided to sign.

“They’re fucking crazy,” Boras fumed. “He should’ve gone to school. I could have gotten them $3 million in a couple of years.”

“Don’t you get it?” Arriola said. “These are poor people.

They’ve never seen this kind of money. They’re starving.”

It was a pointless argument, because Boras never factored emotion into his deals. The teen’s insecurities, which had worked in Boras’s favor for three months, ultimately undermined the super-agent. Alex looked up to Boras, was in awe of his celebrity, but he wanted to please his mother. She had been through so much.
They
had been through so much.

Alex wasn’t like so many other teens, who withdraw from their parents in order to establish their independence and identity. As soon as he was able to afford it, he bought Lourdes a home with a nice driveway and put a Mercedes in the garage. For years, Alex
would fi nd sanctuary in her home, returning to Kendall during the off-season to be with his mother. “She’s my best friend,” Alex once said. “I love spending time with her.”

On August 30, Mariners executives, including team president Chuck Armstrong, were pacing the marble fl oor of the Grand Bay Hotel. It was 2 p.m. and their press conference to announce the signing of Alex Rodriguez had been scheduled for 1 p.m., but Alex was nowhere to be found. This was Boras again, taking one last piss on ceremony.

He hadn’t made the deal— which had prompted Alex to tell him he would get only a 2.5 percent commission instead of the usual 5 percent— but he was still in the ear of his client: Make them wait, he said. A few minutes before Armstrong was about to bolt for the airport, Alex walked in— 75 minutes late.

He was wearing a sleek suit in the faintest tint of green, with a crisp white shirt and red-and- white tie. His mother wore a Christmas tree–green dress with pearl and gold buttons down the middle. Susy had looped a double strand of pearls around her neck, and Alex’s brother, Joe, wore the colorful baseball-card tie Alex had had around his own neck on draft day.

“I was twenty-nine when this began,” Arguelles joked on that day. “Now I feel fi fty.”

Alex cheerfully (if belatedly) slipped on a Mariners cap in front of a bank of TV cameras. “I’m glad the negotiating is over,” Alex said. “I never wanted this to be a bad thing and have people think wrongly about me.”

He knew his image had been tarnished by his summer of sometimes clumsy machinations, even though most of the media’s ire had been directed at Boras. Not that Boras cared. He came out swinging the day Alex signed, with Susy as his mouthpiece. “I’m not that excited about it because I don’t think he got a fair deal,”
Susy told a reporter after she had returned home from the press conference. “He wants to play professional baseball, and I guess that’s the reason he signed.”

From start to bitter end, Susy had been played expertly by Boras. He knew she wanted to go to law school, and he had fl attered her endlessly about her negotiating skills with the promise of a job at his fi rm. “Every time he talked to Susy, it was, ‘Oh Susy, I’m going to do this for you; I’m going to do that for you,’ ” recalls Arriola. “She was important to him then. And he didn’t do anything for her.”

Alex had made his deal with the Mariners by breaking from Boras, but he kept him as his agent. He was not the nurturing father fi gure Alex craved, but he was calculating and smart, ruthless and fearless. Together they would make many more big deals and generate many more headlines. And controversies.

Screw Arriola, Boras thought. His impulse for revenge seemed to know no limits. Not long after Alex signed his contract with the Mariners, Boras stepped in to have it voided. Boras fi led a grievance with baseball against Arriola. He convinced Alex that his deal had been wickedly mismanaged by Arriola and his son, Rich, who had just graduated from law school.

Arriola was mystifi ed. How could Boras fi le a grievance against him? And for what his son had done, which, in fact, was nothing?

“He said that [Rich] had misrepresented to Alex that he was a lawyer,” Arriola says. “And he didn’t.”

Boras claimed that the Mariners and Arriola had misled Alex into believing his deal was guaranteed for fi ve years, not three.

The players’ union was on Boras’s side— specifi cally, his dear friend Gene Orza was on his side. “Sometimes you get the feeling that Boras is more important to the union than the players,” says one major league player familiar with Boras. “It’s that screwed up.”
In a memo to Chuck Armstrong from Roger Jongewaard, dated February 28, 1994, Armstrong said: I have come by some information that has run the gamut before actually falling into my hands. The chain so far runs like this: I was told by a reporter who spoke with Peter Gammons, who talked to Gene Orza who said that we [Orza] will defi nitely not lose the Rodriguez case. He goes on to say that he’s never been so sure of anything in his life.

How he intends to win the case, nobody knows. I realize this is
second hand information but thought you might be interested in
hearing it.

Orza was wrong. Boras couldn’t win. The grievance languished in baseball’s arbitration system but was eventually dropped in 1996

when Alex signed a contract extension with the Mariners. In hindsight, Arriola had negotiated a good deal for Alex, which got him to the majors and onto his next deal more quickly.

“You can say whatever you want, but at the end of the day that meant an extra $25 million for Alex, right?” Arriola says. “By the way, I have never even accepted a cup of coffee from either one of them.”

Alex never apologized to Arriola.

Chapter Five

Alex Rodriguez was suffering from a writer’s block of sorts in forming his own baseball identity, wanting badly for his career to be a living folktale but completely frozen on how to start the narrative.

By the spring of 1996, the now 20-year- old Alex had earned a major-league roster spot in fewer than three years after draft day, but now what? The accelerated promotion of Alex from minor-league outposts such as Appleton, Wisconsin, and Calgary, Al-berta, to a certifi ed Mariner was a bit dizzying, enough to induce errors and whiffs.

He was foundering. At the outset of his fi rst full season with the Mariners, Alex was hitting a dismal .105. He needed a faith healer for his psyche. Fortunately, he knew who to call.

In a downtown Milwaukee hotel room, with April nearing its
chilly end, a motivational guru in a sharp, tailored suit asked Alex to close his eyes to envision his future. Visualize three goals, Jim Fannin told Alex in a sedate voice lightly fl avored with a southern drawl.

Alex responded instantly: “I want a batting title this year.”

“He took possession of it in his mind,” Fannin recalls. “He saw it. He felt it.”

Alex next visualized himself being selected to the All-Star team three months away. “What do you see?” Fannin asked him.

“I see Cal Ripken, Jr., walking across the diamond, sticking his hand out and telling me, ‘I couldn’t wait to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.’ ” This was an odd bit of crystal ball reading by Alex, because as a high school player, he had in fact shaken the hand of Cal Ripken, Jr. He just never believed Cal would remember that moment. Alex was just another upstart. He wanted to be famous enough for Cal to approach him. Not the other way around.

Finally, as Fannin listened further, Alex imagined himself becoming a household name. He conjured a moment in which a voice on a soundstage of a late-night talk show introduced him: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Rodriguez, the major league’s newest superstar.” Alex laughed at the vision but could hear the applause.

Fannin told him if he could hear it in his mind, he could make it real.

Jim Fannin believed in the power of visualization in part because of what it had done for him. He was making a very comfortable living as a mental coach for some of the biggest sports stars in the country. Contrast that to his childhood: he’d been reared among the working poor in Appalachia, where his home had ply-wood sheets covering the fl oors because termites had attacked the fl oorboards.

“At age twelve, I met this awesome guy who was a custodian at a YMCA tennis facility outdoors in Kentucky,” Fannin recalls.

“He was an eighty-three- year-old African-American man, and he
showed me some things about energy that were life-changing. He taught me how to visualize success.”

Fannin says the development of his mental strength comple-mented his athletic gifts and gave him a way out of eastern Kentucky. In the 1970s, with his tall frame and surprising agility, he earned a tennis scholarship at East Tennessee State University, where he majored in marketing and psychology. After graduating, he began working with tennis players as a life coach— long before that term gained both popularity and scorn— and later developed his S.C.O.R.E. System, a way to achieve success rooted in what can only be described as magical thinking: Just believe.

In the 1980s, an ophthalmologist for the Chicago White Sox spotted Fannin preaching the gospel of positivity at a workshop and asked him to help the players on his team.

After that introduction to major leaguers, Fannin quickly became a cult fi gure in baseball, worshiped by some and derided by others. One major-league player sarcastically calls Fannin “Doctor Feel Good for the weak,” but players who relied on him include pitchers Orel Hershiser and Randy Johnson. But no one was as devout a follower as White Sox second baseman Joey Cora, who was traded to the Mariners in 1995. His new double-play partner the next season? Alex Rodriguez.

“Alex marveled at Joey’s discipline,” Fannin recalls. “And he should have. Of all the athletes I’ve coached, and I’ve coached some of the best, probably no one was more disciplined than Joey Cora.

To the point of being anal, to the point of being obsessed. He really got the most out of his talent.”

Cora had bought into Fannin’s strategy of fi nding the perfect state of mind for performance, what he calls “the zone.” “The zone needs stress,” Fannin says. “You can’t get into it without stress.”

To get into Fannin’s zone an athlete applies his acronym for success: Self-Discipline, Concentration, Optimism, Relaxation and Enjoyment. S.C.O.R.E.
“As important, if not more important, than anything else, is optimism, which includes trust and confi dence and belief,” Fannin says. “But you also need relaxation.”

In his fi rst full season in the majors, Alex wasn’t loose at all.

He was tight, his mind was spinning. He couldn’t S.C.O.R.E. if he couldn’t breathe.

At the start of spring training, Alex had been anointed the Mariners’ starting shortstop, the presumptive heir to Ken Griffey, Jr.’s, legacy at the plate and a can’t-miss idol on Madison Avenue.