A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (24 page)

Fueling that speculation was the fact that 2004 was the fi rst season MLB conducted steroids testing with penalties. One trainer says testing was easy to beat back then, but many players decided to junk the steroids in favor of human growth hormone. It was a youth potion of sorts. Players healed faster. Felt younger. Hit farther. HGH wasn’t yet banned— it couldn’t even be detected in a urine sample— and it was in plentiful supply through various antiaging clinics and underground Internet sites.

Testing turned out to be not as rigorous in 2004 as intended.
In an agreement made between the Players Association and MLB, there was a moratorium on testing after the 2003 testing results for the 104 who came up positive were seized by federal agents.

The twist: those players were told about the moratorium but not told how long it would be in effect. But Gene Orza, the union’s chief operating offi cer, was never one for decorum when it came to steroid rules. The exhaustive investigation of baseball’s steroid era by George Mitchell stated that Orza was a known obstruction-ist. In March 2004, he openly mocked the call for a crackdown.

“I have no doubt that [steroids] are not worse than cigarettes,” he said. Some players say the union even tried to intimidate those who tried to warn that there was a steroid problem.

Between mid-August and early-September 2004, according to the Mitchell Report, Orza violated an agreement with MLB

and tipped a player that the moratorium was over, that he would soon be tested. The player was not named in the report, but it would later be revealed in a book by the convicted steroid distributor Kirk Radomski that it was former Oriole David Segui. Radomski was an important fi gure during the steroid era as a supplier to major leaguers— including Yankees. Twenty-two former and current Yankees would show up on the Mitchell Report, edging out the Rangers as the clubhouse leaders in doping. Alex had always had trouble resisting peer pressure.

Seven of the documented Yankees would be directly tied to Radomski.

One of his clients was the volatile Kevin Brown. In 2003, as a pitcher for the Dodgers, Brown was suspected of using steroids, according to a Dodger executive memo cited in the Mitchell Report.

As Radomski relayed to Mitchell investigators, he knew Brown well, sent several orders of performance-enhancing drugs to him over a three-year period and considered his client an expert on human growth hormone. In June 2004, when Brown was a Yankee, an express mail receipt addressed to Brown was on a package from
Radomski with a return address for Brown’s agent, who at the time was Scott Boras.

In late 2004, one player says, Alex was seen with HGH in the company of Brown. It was possible, the player says, that Alex was interested in using growth hormone as a way to help him perform at a high level during the upcoming playoffs. Through his lawyer in the summer of 2008, Brown denied sharing HGH with Alex.

When confronted with the same information by a reporter from
Sports Illustrated
in September 2008, Alex said he didn’t want “to throw Brown under the bus.”

Months later, he would deny ever having taken HGH— what some players viewed as the safe alternative to steroid use. Alex was certainly aware of how risky steroid use would be. According to three players, Gene Orza also tipped Alex about upcoming drug tests at the end of 2004. “The union was going to take care of the superstars,” one of those players says. “The big boys made the big money, and that was the bread and butter for the union.”

One more win. That’s all they needed. In game four of the 2004

ALCS, the Yankees were just three outs from sweeping the revived Red Sox when an unexpected hiccup from ace reliever Mariano Rivera allowed them to push the game into extra innings. The Red Sox won it in the 12th. The next night, in game fi ve, the Yankees missed another opportunity to clinch as the Sox won in the 14th inning.

The temperature for game six was 49 degrees, with a wind that made it feel 10 degrees colder; fi rst pitch was set for 8:19 p.m.

The Red Sox, leaning on the camaraderie that had been the source of their second-half return from the grave, did their best to stay loose— and occasionally, goofy— as they fought to keep their mi-croscopically thin hopes against the Yankees alive. Their bleach-haired leader, Kevin Millar, remains a folk legend for supposedly
passing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s around to teammates as a pregame warmup that night.

Alex had done nothing against Boston, going 1 for 5 in game four and 0 for 4 in game fi ve. Here was his moment: It was the eighth inning, and Red Sox ace Curt Schilling, pitching bravely and brilliantly despite a tendon injury to his ankle, had left the game in the seventh, leading 4–1. Bronson Arroyo was on the mound in relief when Jeter stroked an RBI single to cut the lead to 4–2.

Alex was up next, staring at the same pitcher who had plunked him in July to start that brawl. He exhaled, stepped into the box and then jumped at the fi rst pitch with a long swing that just nicked the ball, squirting a dribbler to Arroyo’s left. The pitcher fi elded it and raced to the base path to tag Alex. As he put his glove against Alex’s arm, Alex, like a cat pawing at yarn, slapped the ball out of his glove. Jeter raced home on the play to cut the Boston lead to 4–3. Yankee Stadium was trembling from the crowd’s roar as Alex stood on second.

Alex’s “triumph” didn’t last long. The umpires huddled and then correctly called him out for interference. A run was taken off the board, and Jeter was ordered back to fi rst base. “That was junior high baseball right there at its best,” Schilling said after game six, a 4–2 win for the Red Sox. They would go on to become the fi rst team ever to come back from a 3–0 defi cit and then go on to win their fi rst World Series title since 1918.

The Red Sox were the feel-good story of the postseason, and maybe the decade, but that one play left Alex labeled a bush-league player— the ultimate insult for someone obsessed with his image.

In the locker room after game six, he feigned incredulity at the interference call. He acted as if he didn’t know the rule. He acted as if he couldn’t believe what had transpired. He acted.

Years earlier, he had told a reporter, “I’ll even cheat to win.”

Chapter Nine

Putting on the Yankee pinstripes was very good for business at the headquarters of AROD Corp. (est. 1996), the umbrella Alex used for everything from such high-gloss investments as his Mercedes dealership in Houston to his charity, the AROD Family Foundation.

Whenever Alex was asked to justify his otherworldly paycheck, he would talk enthusiastically about the joys of entrepreneurship and the satisfaction gained from delivering hope to struggling families. “I can’t run away from [my salary],” he said upon becoming a Yankee in February 2004, when his salary was listed at $22 million. “I think we’ve been put in this situation, Cynthia and I, from a philanthropic point of view, to help thousands of kids.”

Alex wrote seven-fi gure checks for the University of Miami’s athletic program and made more modest donations to Boys & Girls
Clubs and UNICEF. Over the next couple of years, as the richest Yankee ever, he promised to give a lot more. He clearly enjoyed portraying himself as a great philanthropist.

But Alex managed to complicate even the simple act of charity, which became yet another tug of war between Good Alex and Bad Alex. Good Alex sang “Do-re- mi” at FAO Schwarz with his daughter as he signed his children’s book,
Out of the Ballpark
, for fans in July 2007. Bad Alex was captured by paparazzi that same month, sneaking around Toronto with the exotic dancer and fi tness competitor Joslyn Morse. Good Alex yanked a young Yankee fan out of a car’s path on the streets of Boston in September 2005.

Bad Alex snubbed children he had agreed to greet at a Dominican baseball celebration outside Yankee Stadium in 2008. “The problem was that he had so many hangers-on, his entourage, that you didn’t get within twenty feet of him,” says Steve Winiarski, the coach of the travel team at that event. “You were walking by and they’re all surrounding him, so not one kid got to see A-Rod there.

Plus he wasn’t paying attention. He wasn’t waving to the kids.”

There are photos of Alex that day in a brown T-shirt and jeans running from the children asking for his autograph. His bodyguards— mostly friends employed by Alex— repeatedly yelled at the youth leaguers, “Stay away!”

The dichotomy defi ned his life. Good Alex extolled the purity of baseball in front of the crowds. Bad Alex cheated the game by using steroids in the shadows.

He pursued his investments with the same confl icted soul. He projected a Mister Rogers benevolence, but he was more like Mr.

Potter in
It’s A Wonderful Life
.

The headquarters of Newport Property Ventures in Coral Gables, Florida, occupies a stucco building with a marble-tiled entrance. Alex has an offi ce on the second fl oor, fi nished with granite, and he sits behind a fancy desk so large that one employee calls it a landing pad. This isn’t just a front or a tax shelter or a place for
him to duel with “The Boys” on PlayStation. Alex is in that offi ce regularly during the off-season, but there is no mention of him, or even AROD Corp., in the company’s brochures or on its website.

But if you walk up to the receptionist and ask, she’ll tell you Alex is the founder and CEO of this real estate empire, which in 2009

owned 28 apartment complexes in fi ve states.

Newport has six properties in Tampa, most within a 10-minute drive of the Yankees’ spring training site. One complex off Dale Mabry Drive is even called Villas of Legends Field, a reference to the old name on the Grapefruit League stadium now called George M. Steinbrenner Field.

The entrance of the Newport Riverside complex, several three-story buildings, is behind a stand of oak trees. The wrought-iron fence around the front of the complex had recently been hit with a coat of black paint, but missing spindles gave rickety white banis-ters on the staircases the look of a gap-toothed smile. A dishwasher without a door sat next to a window with cardboard duct-taped over a broken pane. Two residents showed a visitor a showerhead with only a trickle of water fl owing and opened a closet to reveal a “smell that wasn’t quite right” because of
something
inside the wall.

“Probably something dead but we can’t get anyone to look into it,”

says the tenant, Mira Bay.

Other residents told tales of cockroaches high-stepping through kitchen cabinets, of carpets stained a decade ago and never cleaned.

“My mom comes here and she ain’t no rich person, but she thinks I live in the projects,” says Miguel Ruiz on the landing of Building 201. “She’s scared to come over here, for real. . . . Honestly, I was raised in a ghetto and I was brought up a little better than this.”

Not all of the Newport properties in Tampa are in such shabby condition. One resident at Newport Villas said he believes the lawns there were being mowed more often since Alex’s company
had taken over. A tenant at the Villas of Legends Field was pleased to report that the parking lots seemed a little cleaner these days.

Other buildings showed signs of a slow-footed management team. Mattresses were stacked near Dumpsters at Newport Villas, screen doors were ripped at Newport’s Normandy Park and the plumbing was a common complaint at Newport Horizon.

“My toilet hasn’t worked right in six months,” says Rosa Mendez. She and many of her fellow residents had no idea their landlord was Alex Rodriguez, but those who did had a simple question: Why would A-Rod, who has nearly unlimited investment options, choose to be a slumlord? “He’s got everything, so why take money off our backs?” asked Roberto Santiago of Newport Riverside, adding, “Why screw with us?”

The answer is complex. Other athletes might be satisfi ed with conservative investments, happy to live on interest accounts and deferred income. But Alex didn’t want to be “comfortable”: he wanted to be a deal maker on par with the titans he reads about in
Forbes
and
Fortune
.

Alex was willing to gamble a sizable portion of his contract for the rewards of superwealth and for the power and celebrity that come with that status. He wanted to be recognized as a savvy Master of the Deal in his corporate circle of high-fl ying friends.

As one former business associate explains, “There is a part of him that is in a race to do something on a large scale with the money he has— like being his own Trump. He sees numbers in this case, not the people in the apartments he owns. Is he tone deaf? You could argue that, but, like any businessman, he saw an opportunity to grow his fortune and be a big player.”

There is another impulse here: Alex wants to be viewed as the rarest of creatures: the thinking man’s jock. His father was a smart, savvy, well-educated man. His half brother Victor Jr. is a decorated Air Force engineer. His mother and other siblings possess sharp minds.
Alex acts self-conscious about his vocabulary and his wit with reporters, often lamenting the fact he chose pro ball over college.

His lack of classroom knowledge bothers him, creating yet another niggling insecurity. Alex envies Ivy Leaguers— he once asked a reporter, “What kind of SAT do you need to get into Yale?” The reporter shrugged as Alex continued, “I’d like to see Yale.”

The Ivy League connotes the kind of status Alex craves. When he was in Boston, he liked to walk among the textbook-toting brai-niacs on the Harvard campus. His friends say he has tried on glasses to see if he’d look smarter in frames . . . despite his fi ne vision.

“He seemed fascinated by my Ivy League degree, declaring that he would love to graduate from Harvard one day,” Doug Glanville, a former Ranger teammate who attended the University of Pennsyl-vania, wrote in a
New York Times
op-ed piece. “He talked about it too much for it to have been just a fl eeting thought.”

Playing for the Yankees doesn’t leave much time for pursing a Harvard MBA, so Alex got his business education elsewhere. In August 2004, he wrote the foreword for a book by Dolf de Roos,
Real Estate Riches: How to Become Rich Using Your Banker’s Money
.