A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (22 page)

Alex knew he had some fence-mending to do. A day before the press conference announcing his trade in New York, Alex jetted to Tampa on his private plane to pick up Jeter, who was working out at the Yankees’ spring training facility. Jeter still felt betrayed by the article. As Buster Olney wrote in his book
The Last Night of the
Yankee Dynasty
, Jeter told Alex that that kind of public criticism wouldn’t fl y in a media market where every utterance is picked apart for days. The bottom line: Jeter would welcome Alex to the Yankees if Alex could keep his mouth shut.

Alex went overboard with Jeter, taking it to the point of awkward fawning. A week later, in a spring training site interview on the
Today
show, Alex smiled when Matt Lauer asked about his relationship with Jeter. He said, “He’s like a brother to me. I mean, we’ve been out to lunch this week three or four times already. And I think they have to see us hold hands and go to a movie so they
know that we’ve made up. When we’re fi fty years old, they’re going to say, ‘Well, Alex and Derek: Are they arguing? Are they best friends? Are they brothers?’ We’re just having fun with it now.”

Alex was at it again. Overplaying his hand, embellishing. Trying to please everybody and pissing everyone off in the process.

Chapter Eight

The curtains in George Steinbrenner’s Tampa offi ce, four fl oors above the Yankees’ spring training diamond, were closed tight (as usual) and the thermostat was at 62 degrees (as usual), creating a vampire’s paradise: cold, dark and foreboding. This was how The Boss liked his offi ce. He loved wearing turtlenecks in June and windbreakers in August.

On February 17, 2004, Steinbrenner leaned back in his cave and watched a live feed from Yankee Stadium of the noon press conference announcing that Alex Rodriguez had been traded to his Yankees.

The joy Steinbrenner felt watching the scene— A-Rod in a pinstripe tie slipping into a Yankee jersey, with Derek Jeter and Manager Joe Torre by his side— sent a charge through him. Baseball’s It Player was his. Yes sir, The Boss probably thought, I’ve still got
it. By snaring Rodriguez, he had managed to outwit the Red Sox, dominate the tabloid covers (front and back) and reestablish his vitality as The Boss. Once again, he’d snatched baseball’s biggest prize: the game’s most talented player, a matinee idol–type Reggie Jackson had said was “so good-looking, he’s almost pretty.”

Steinbrenner, as one employee recalls, spent the day with his chest puffed out and a tear in his eye. He was increasingly tenderhearted at 73, and creeping thoughts of mortality forced even the mighty Boss to indulge in a bit of introspection. His friends were dying on him; how long did he have? Two months earlier, at the funeral of NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Otto Graham, Steinbrenner, fatigued from the heat of the stuffy church and light-headed from skipping breakfast, had collapsed. As attendants rolled him through the hospital corridors on a gurney, as described in
Sports Illustrated
, they pulled a sheet over his face in a well-meaning attempt to veil his identity from hallway gawkers and the media swarm. But The Boss wasn’t dead— and landing A-Rod was proof that he was still a dominant force in baseball.
The
dominant force.

“I don’t think there was any doubt about the talent we were getting,” says Steve Swindal, a former general partner of the Yankees. “It felt like an emotional boost for everyone.”

The Boss reveled in what was unfolding at Yankee Stadium from two thousand miles away. Steinbrenner knew that staffers there had already placed an audio loop of Alex’s home runs against the Yankees on the phone for callers placed on hold. He knew Al-ex’s new number 13 jerseys were being bought two at a time, that ticket sales had already spiked and that the ratings for his lucrative YES Network would soon be swept skyward by the A-Rod boom.

This deal was good for the Yankees and good for the game.

Baseball needed a diversion grand enough to shove steroids off the stage in the same way it had once needed a big-money trade involving Babe Ruth to paper over a gambling scandal. The sports
news this off-season had been dominated by the BALCO debacle.

Superstar sluggers such as Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi were photographed outside of a San Francisco courthouse as they bolted through a wall of microphones and cameras to testify before a grand jury.

Alex was accustomed to being hailed as the savior of baseball— although he had been a little niggardly with the miracles thus far.

He had been the Golden Boy in Seattle after the 1994 strike, the Mighty Turnaround Artist when he had signed with Texas, and now, in New York, he was A-God.

When Alex joined the Yankees, Dodd Romero had already been training him for a year in Texas at a fee of about $3,500 a month.

But Alex had many caretakers for his body— he purposely kept a separation between them, hardly ever mentioning anything about Presinal to Romero. There were fewer tales to remember that way— Presinal was the private workout genie, and Romero was the well-known, highly regarded public cobbler of Alex’s body.

Romero had grown up in a Miami neighborhood of small, low-slung houses, some with barred windows, close to the violence-scarred housing projects. The area’s high crime rate wasn’t enough to scare away college scouts, who were easy to spot driving up and down the local streets in rental cars, making visits to high school blue-chippers. Romero’s neighbors in the late 1980s had included the running back Alonzo Highsmith and receiver Randall “Thrill”

Hill— both fi rst-round NFL draft picks out of the University of Miami. Romero knew a lot about the NFL through his father, Ray Romero, who had starred at Kansas State, and, according to league historians, had become only the 11th Hispanic player in the NFL

when he played for the Philadelphia Eagles in 1951. He had lasted only one season.

Ray had moved his family to Miami when Dodd was in grade
school with little planning or even familiarity with the city— he had bought their home through the mail. It didn’t take long, though, for the Romero family to become a focal point of a neighborhood.

Everyone knew Dodd, a rippling six-foot- six with a body poured from concrete. “He was big like that for a long time,” recalls Hill.

“The side yard of his house was like a scene from a
Rocky
movie— he had all this weight equipment out there, used and rusted, but it worked. It didn’t matter how hot it was, Dodd was out there lifting.

You could hear it— the barbells rattled all day long, till sunset.”

Dodd didn’t follow his father into football, choosing to dabble in boxing, where, as one former competitor, Jim Warring, says, “He fought angry” and was thought by some to be on steroids.

Everything changed for him when he found his calling as a fi tness evangelist after his baby daughter Gianna nearly died of a liver disorder in 1999. He says he left her hospital bed and went to a church, where he prayed for three days. “I made a deal with God,”

Dodd once said. Days later, after an 18-hour surgery, he and his wife, Sabina, saw Gianna regain her smile, her skin color and her future.

The ordeal prompted Romero to incorporate spirituality into his training methods. He attracted many athletes as clients but was very selective, choosing only those he felt a connection to— and even then, he would work only on his own terms. “I had lunch with him,” says the rodeo roper Stran Smith, “and he told me at the end of it, ‘Not now, brother. I’ll call you when it’s right.’ He did, and I couldn’t be happier.”

Alex passed Dodd’s test of character in 2003. When Alex moved on to New York, Cynthia continued to work out with the bodybuilder Jenny Worth, who worked for Dodd. Although Dodd and Worth were steeped in the gym culture and surrounded by steroids, both professed to be clean. Many of Dodd’s clients say he is a paragon of pure living, a product of manic workouts and a
meticulous diet. He orders poached egg whites, no oil. He orders vegetables, no butter. Other observers are skeptical.

“I was surprised when he went to [Romero],” says Joseph Dion, who trained Alex in the late 1990s. “He was into that [bodybuild-ing] world, and that was a totally different thing.”

As close as Romero was to Alex, he professed having only a cursory knowledge of Presinal in a series of interviews with a
Sports
Illustrated
reporter in the summer of 2008. He noted how deft Alex was at living separate lives. “There’s Alex,” says Romero, “and then there is A-Rod. I knew Alex, I didn’t know A-Rod.”

Alex is the vulnerable one with a soft spot for people in need.

A-Rod is the manufactured one with a ruthless business sense. Together, they seemed to form baseball’s version of The Talented Mr.

Ripley, able to assume whatever identity was required to advance, succeed and win. Alex was a clever chameleon with the New York media when he joined the Yankees, often whispering to tabloid reporters off the record even when he had nothing especially tantalizing to say, in a strategy to disarm them. How could they criticize him when he made them feel special?

Alex’s reputation had been tarred and feathered in Texas, but his rehab tour was off to a terrifi c start in New York. He envisioned himself as a stylish, sophisticated New Yorker and aggressively played that role, striding along Park Avenue with Wall Street tycoons, dining at Nobu, shopping at Bergdorf, hanging out with the De Niro crowd. He convinced most members of the media that he was a perfect fi t for New York. As part of that charm offensive, he invited
Sports Illustrated
’s Rick Reilly, one of the nation’s most popular columnists, into his Manhattan apartment. Reilly was smitten. “In 2004 A-Rod is The Man,” he wrote then. After praising Alex’s exquisite taste, he added, “Where were the revolving beds? The tubs shaped like martini glasses? The home-wrecking French maid?”
Alex was putting on such a good show that some writers wondered if they had confused the dynamic of his relationship with Jeter. Perhaps it was Jeter who was jealous of Alex, not vice versa?

Alex pretended to be thrilled to talk about his relationship with Jeter, while Jeter mostly demurred. Alex happily reminisced about sleepovers the two had had during their fi rst years in the league and earnestly referred to Jeter as his “brother.” Jeter was clearly feeling less fraternal, and his responses to questions about A-Rod were polite but guarded.

Alex once said of his closeness with Jeter, “It’s like we’re looking in the mirror.” Well . . . they both played shortstop, both were talented and handsome, and that’s where the similarities ended. Beyond their divergent styles on the fi eld— Alex had a long uppercut of a swing built for power, and Jeter slapped and poked to conjure up hits— they were disparate in demeanor and background. Alex, reared by a single mom, had leaned on a bevy of substitute fathers his entire childhood. Jeter had been raised in a disciplined home with a father who was a drug and alcohol counselor and where structure was a virtue. He had grown up seeing his parents in the stands for his games. At 28, Alex was already playing for his third team (and had gone through two ugly baseball “divorces” to get there); the Yankees were the only team Jeter, 29, had ever known.

Alex was as rootless as Jeter was grounded. “I think the biggest thing is that Jeet knows who he is,” says former Yankee Jason Giambi. “He doesn’t blow his own horn. He sets examples behind the scenes. He doesn’t do something and then tell the media, ‘Hey, look at me lead,’ to be validated.” Alex wanted to please everyone; Jeter suffered no fools. Alex put up stats that impressed even folks who didn’t follow baseball; Jeter owned four World Series rings that he rarely wore in public. “The Jeter thing ate Alex alive,” says one Rodriguez friend. “It was always about Jeter.”

They also had different styles on the social scene. Jeter was famously cool, smooth and respectful, operating with the dignity
of discretion; Alex was always trying too hard, pushing too hard, in the lens too often. The guys who went clubbing with Alex say there was one pickup line he used repeatedly, even on women who knew nothing of baseball: “Who’s hotter, me or Derek Jeter?”

In conversations with his publicists and even during his negotiations with the Mets in 2000, it would come up again and again: “Who’s more popular, me or Jeter?”

Here, Alex was the better hitter, the superior athlete, the richest player— and on and on. He would put his celebrity up against Jeter’s. He would put his stats up against Jeter’s.

He had put his body through
everything
to best Jeter. Yet he was consumed by one gnawing, galling, undeniable difference between them: Jeter was clean.

As the season began, Alex struggled both at the plate and in the fi eld. His subconscious was bedeviling him. He talked daily to his motivational guru, Jim Fannin, religiously recited self-help hai-kus to free his mind and wore a focused look at the plate. Inside, though, he seemed to be coming unglued. The tip was the dramatic exhale he made every time he stepped into the batter’s box.

“When I saw him up at bat [in 2004], he used to blow out all the time,” says Charlie Zabransky, the longtime clubhouse attendant at Yankee Stadium. “I said, ‘What’s wrong with this guy? He’s got something on his mind. [He] can’t concentrate.’ ”

In his most pressured moments— his fi rst month as a starter in Seattle, his fi rst month as Mr. 252 in Texas, and now as a new Yankee— Alex fought through fi ts of self-consciousness. Hyper-aware of the photographers recording his every move, he would not make an ugly swing for a hit out of fear of looking awkward. (He is known to listen for shutter clicks while at the plate, while most hitters automatically block out the white noise.) Teammates say he is the vainest hitter they’ve ever known. As
former manager Joe Torre would later write, “When it comes to a key situation, he can’t get himself to concern himself with getting the job done, instead of how it looks. . . . There’s a certain free-fall you have to go through when you commit yourself without a guarantee that it’s always going to be good. . . . Allow yourself to be embarrassed. Allow yourself to be vulnerable.”