A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (2 page)

Self-absorption focused him.

Alex trotted down the tunnel. A moment later he stretched out his arms and walked toward the place where the Yankees’ All-Star third baseman had created his most life-sustaining identity: the batter’s box. Alone in this chalk-lined rectangle, Alex was the greatest ever to play the game.

What August slump? In the ninth inning against the Rays that September night, Alex made history. He drove a 2–2 pitch off reliever Troy Percival deep to left fi eld, arching higher and higher,
until it disappeared over the foul pole. It appeared to glance off the “D-Ring” catwalk in the eyes of third-base umpire Brian Runge, who signaled it a fair ball. Home run. The Rays were livid. Manager Joe Maddon joined his catcher, Dioner Navarro, on the fi eld to argue the call, believing the ball had drifted foul.

Only a week earlier, after a series of botched home run decisions during the 2008 season, Major League Baseball had taken an HD leap of technology and instituted instant replay. This was its fi rst tryout. The umpires shuffl ed into a dugout tunnel, reviewed the play, and just 2 minutes and 15 seconds later reconfi rmed the call. Alex’s 31st homer of the season and his 549th of his career was in the books. Not only had he moved past Mike Schmidt for sole possession of 12th place among all-time home run leaders, he became a trivia question: What player was part of MLB’s fi rst ever use of instant replay?

After the game, an 8–4 victory by the Yankees, reporters gathered around Alex for his thoughts on the review. He was in great humor, which is always when he’s the best, most likable Alex.

“There are probably eight hundred players in the big leagues.

And the odds of me being in some controversy are probably two to one,” Alex said, drawing a chuckle from reporters. “It’s funny, somehow I fi nd myself in these situations all the time.”

Yes. As shortstop Derek Jeter would one day admit, “It’s always something.”

For fi ve seasons in New York, Alex had tried to puncture the Plexi-glas resistance of the Yankee faithful. They could see him, even admire him, but he never touched them. There was no tactile connection there. Many fans celebrated his obvious talent but were alienated by three hardened perceptions: He was disingenuous; he
failed in the clutch; and, most of all, he wasn’t a leader like Derek Jeter.

“Jeter doesn’t put up close to the stats Alex puts up, but Jeter is a tremendous team captain and has won four championships,”

explains Bill Haselman, who was a teammate of Alex’s in the minor and major leagues. “You have personalities that are more team-oriented in a Derek Jeter, and then more self-driven in statistics with Alex Rodriguez. And it’s pretty clear-cut. I think people see that. I think Alex tries to be a good team player; it just doesn’t come as natural as it does for Jeter.”

The issue of the inauthentic Alex was at least publicly confi ned to persona, not the veracity of his performance in January 2009, when former Yankee manager Joe Torre and
SI
senior writer Tom Verducci combined to write
The Yankee Years
. It was a thoughtful narrative about Torre’s dozen years in pinstripes, fi lled with emotion and joy, four World Series championships, and, ultimately, a painful parting in 2007.

What the spring-loaded New York press pounced on most, however, was chapter 8, “The Issues of Alex.” As his manager for four seasons, Torre said, “Alex monopolized all the attention. I don’t think that’s important. We never really had anybody who craved the attention. I think when Alex came over he certainly changed just the feel of the club, whether or not that was because of certain assumptions people had just made by Alex being there, that he was this kind of player.”

That disclosure didn’t titillate like the rest of the chapter. Verducci expanded on Alex’s high-maintenance ways and also detailed his case of Jeter envy, writing, “The inside joke in the clubhouse was that Rodriguez’s preoccupation with Jeter recalled the 1992 fi lm
Single White Female
, in which a woman becomes obsessed with her roommate to the point of dressing like her.” Alex, Verducci wrote, was also given a nickname by teammates: A-Fraud.
This was catnip to the tabloids. On the back page of the New York
Daily News
dated January 27, there was a photo of Alex in a wide-mouth laugh with the headline “Joe Who? Friends: A-Rod Laughs Off Criticism Because He Was Never Close to Torre.”

It sounded good: Alex, impervious to negativity. Just beaded up and rolled off. This coating was not so much a function of a man growing callous after repeated media hits, often self-induced, as much as it was Alex’s devotion to Kabbalah. In September before the Rays game, he had mentioned feeling more at ease with imper-fection. Did he really believe that, or was he simply parroting his new celebrity peer group?

In 2008, he had become a dedicated follower of Kabbalah, a mystical teaching of Judaism that has, by some accounts, been larded with self-help guidance for insecure celebrities. Alex visited the Kabbalah Centre in New York on occasion and once, in the fall of 2008, was seen by parishioners lifting the Torah during Yom Kippur.

“I don’t think anyone in his family was happy about it,” one associate of the Rodriguez family says. “He drifted away. Even when he was there, he wasn’t there. Know what I mean?”

He started to isolate himself. He didn’t call relatives and friends as much. He dropped trainers and associates. It was a jarring religious transformation to those close to him.

Alex was raised a devout Chris tian but was introduced to Kabbalah in the winter of 2007 after meeting Guy Oseary, a publicity specialist and manager for Madonna. To some experts, classical Kabbalists are a very separate variety from the postmodern, Hollywood-esque Kabbalah followers consisting of movie stars and pop icons like Madonna and Britney Spears.

“All kinds of people fi nd their way in the door of the Kabbalah Centre,” says Allan Nadler, the director of Jewish studies at Drew University. “All kinds of lost souls with all kinds of problems . . .
dumb, good-looking people who don’t know what the meaning of life is.”

Alex searched for meaning constantly as if the right catchphrase from a self-help book could ground him in a normalcy he at once longed for and feared. Normal people aren’t famous. A normal life isn’t big enough. Normal isn’t eye-catching or exciting or seductive or dangerous.

“The classical Kabbalists were people who fasted two days a week at least, engaged in all kinds of self-mortifi cation and self-denial, almost a monastic set,” Nadler says. “The Kabbalah Centre seems to have turned that on its head. What they tell people is that it’s good to indulge yourself, to fi ll yourself with the pleasures of the world in a very directed way. They kind of replace the asceti-cism of classic Kabbalists with a certain hedonistic element. It’s all about feeling great about yourself.”

Alex’s pleasure pursuits were notable by 2008— marked by indulgence in a fast life with fast company— and worry began to set in for those who cared about him.
How could he be so careless? How
could he be so soulless? Who was he now?

“I think that he’s just gotten caught up in all the media hype, and I guess you start believing your own press, and believe you are almost godlike,” Alex’s longtime trainer Dodd Romero said in the summer of 2008. “That’s a dangerous thing to be acting and living. You’re going to cause yourself to fall. I think that’s where he’s at. I think Mike Tyson was on his way to being the greatest boxer of all time. He self-destructed. There’s a strong possibility Alex could go through with that.”

Alex self-destructive? He had an answer for that. He used Kabbalah as a shield from scrutiny (what he would call negativity) that enabled him to withstand anything— even the winter of 2009.

No one could penetrate Alex’s armor. He was inoculated against evil forces by a piece of red string. In 2008 and 2009, he
was often photographed wearing the accessory— actually white wool dyed red— tied around his left wrist. For Kabbalists, it is a tool that provides protection from infl uences that might cause harm. It had steeled him against the thorns of Torre’s book in January. He would rely on the red string’s strength again in February and March.

In the summer of 2008, Alex’s profi le in the New York tabloids had taken an exponential leap. At
Sports Illustrated,
we wanted to know why. Our main interest was why this self-described family man with a newborn daughter was running around town with Madonna. But in the course of reporting that story, I (and my colleague David Epstein) found a more complicated tale of a mul-tilayered life that went far beyond the headlines. This book is the result of our investigation.

A palm-lined parking lot stretched the distance between the University of Miami’s Hecht Athletic Center and its baseball complex, which was still bathed in construction dust on February 5, 2009, at the end of renovations that were, in large part, underwritten by Alex’s generous $3.9 million donation to the Hurricanes’ program.

He hadn’t attended UM, but his DNA was ribboned with Hurricane orange and green. He was a proud product of the Miami suburbs, and, as a fervent Hurricanes fan as a child, he used to climb the fences to watch baseball games. He signed a baseball letter of intent with the University of Miami, which would have made him an offi cial Hurricane if he had not chosen to sign a contract with the Mariners after he was drafted number one in 1993.

The UM staff and fans delighted in their A-Rod ties. He was part of the heart and soul of the campus and a ubiquitous fi xture around the athletes’ center in the off-season. Alex was easy to fi nd
on a chilly morning. Not far from where workers were polishing off a new marquee, alex rodriguez park at mark light field, there was a conspicuous sign of Alex’s whereabouts: a hulking black Maybach worth around $400,000 bore a silver license plate frame engraved alex rodriguez on the bottom.

It was freezing by Miami standards, about 39 degrees, prompt-ing citrus growers to fret over the damage to their crops. “What’s colder,” one athlete asked another as they walked by, “Miami or Santa’s ass?” They were convinced Miami would win.

The icy dew made a workout in the Hecht facility far prefer-able to fi elding short hops on a fi eld. Alex must be inside. For years, Alex spent the better part of his off-season workouts pumping iron next to varsity athletes. He once allowed a newspaper photographer to snap an essay of his sweat ethic to underscore his work ethos for all to see.

His presence at UM wasn’t a secret. I certainly knew of it as I walked into the lobby of the athletes’ center, identifi ed myself and asked the college student working the front desk if she knew whether Alex Rodriguez was around.

She checked the offi ce of Andreu Swasey, the strength and conditioning coach at UM, who often guided Alex’s regimen.

“He’s not there,” the receptionist said. “Let me try someone else.”

She made another call or two and verifi ed the obvious: “He’s in the varsity weight room.”

An athletic department offi cial offered up the winding direc-tions to reach the other side of the Hecht complex. A few minutes later, after a couple of wrong turns, I walked into a sprawling but nearly empty varsity weight room that smelled of rubber mats and cleanser. I showed my business card at the door to a gentleman in a glassed-in offi ce.

“Is Alex Rodriguez around?” I asked.

“In the back,” said a man in a Hurricanes jacket.
I walked past two athletes churning pedals on stationary bikes, but hardly anyone else was around. Alex cut a tall fi gure near the back wall at 6-foot- 3, 225 pounds. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and sweat pants, working out with a trainer and a friend as lyricless music vibrated in the background. A good beat was sometimes all that was needed to push the last pound. In rhythm with the thumping, Alex stretched out his arms behind him, a fl ex that made his triceps look as if they were stuffed with coils.

He caught someone walking toward him out of the corner of his eye. He turned, looked over his shoulder and pursed his lips.

He was not pleased to see me inside a place he had trusted was his sanctuary.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said more than once.

“I have a couple of questions for you, important questions,” I said.

He relented reluctantly but was not unpleasant about it. He didn’t know why I was there, and that seemed unfair. What I knew would be devastating to him. All he knew was that I was bugging him. Blind question. Hated it. But my job was to ask.

He rested his forearm on a parallel bar used for triceps dips and leaned in to listen with a bored sigh. He mentally fl ipped through possible topics, all annoying to him, but not unexpected.
Was this
about Joe Torre and the book? Or maybe it was about Madonna?

Could be another Derek Jeter question?

It could have been any supermarket tabloid topic du jour. But it wasn’t.

This was about steroids. This was about lies. In December 2007, Katie Couric had interviewed Alex about several topics, including steroids, because the Mitchell Report had just been revealed. She had specifi cally asked Alex if he had ever been tempted to use steroids or growth hormone.

Alex had been completely composed. Hours earlier, anticipat-ing the Mitchell Report question, he had practiced his response with his concentric circle of handlers prior to the interview. He had looked straight at Couric and said, “I’ve never felt overmatched on a baseball fi eld. . . . So, no.” Experts at facial expression would later point out the slight twitch in Alex’s left cheek as he spoke, indicat-ing a possible lie. But he was very convincing to the home audience, who applauded his purity amid a bunch of ’roided-up stinkers in the news.

Whatever Alex was— postseason choker or phony teammate— he didn’t seem like a typical steroid user. His stats were fairly consistent. His hat size hadn’t grown. His body hadn’t expanded over-night. In fact, I’d written an article with a colleague clearing Alex of the steroid allegations made by Jose Canseco in the spring of 2008. But in the process of a follow-up personality profi le on Alex, we began hearing other rumblings. “He’s not so squeaky clean,”