A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (26 page)

Alex was surprised by Nixon’s reaction. “It’s the fi rst time I’ve ever talked about [my workouts],” he said, even though he’d spoken of them many times. “It’ll be the last time, too.”

It wasn’t, of course, but Alex was trying to defuse hostilities with self-deprecation, one of his favorite tactics. When columnists and reporters wrote that Alex had little support from his teammates, pointing out that no one had defended him against the Red Sox jabs, A-Rod jokingly came up with his own tabloid headline: “A-Rod Doesn’t Back Up A-Rod.”

When the regular season began, the Yankees looked old and complacent and, at 4–8, roused the ire of Steinbrenner. “Enough is enough,” he told reporters. “It is unbelievable to me that the highest-paid team in baseball would start the season in such a deep funk. They are not playing like true Yankees.”

Alex, though, was looking sharp in pinstripes. He carried the clunky Yankees on his broad back with a sensational spring. His bat was like a Pez dispenser, popping out home runs one after another. A startling highlight came on April 26, in a night game against Angels pitcher Bartolo Colon.

With a slight breeze blowing right to left and the temperature hovering around 56 degrees, Alex ignored the chill and whip-snapped a three-run homer in the fi rst inning, a two-run homer in
the third, and a grand slam off a punch-drunk Colon in the fourth.

Nine RBIs— and counting. He added a 10th RBI in the sixth inning on a ground ball single.

The negativity around Alex took the night off. As Bill Madden wrote in the New York
Daily News
, “A-Rod gave us a snapshot of the kind of towering player he’s supposed to be.” A day later, having reveled in the write-ups about his glorious night, Alex shrewdly suppressed his desire to gloat. “Nothing changed,” Alex told the
Post
. “My wife made me throw out the garbage [last night].”

It was quintessential A-Rod, a savvy bit of faux humility, conjuring an image of Alex as a sturdy homebody, a doting husband and family man who just happened to have a day job hitting baseballs out of Yankee Stadium. But its real purpose was to throw the listener off the scent. Parse it closely and you’ll see that it’s a non sequitur. Taking out the garbage has nothing to do with hitting home runs. It was his communications M.O.: misdirection.

Of course, he knew the truth: he was an insatiable hedonist.

He was fl ying girls around the country to keep him warm on road trips. He was parachuting into Vegas on convenient off days and slipping into the VIP rooms at strip clubs. He was sneaking around New York City in the pre-dawn hours. “He’s a good guy, but New York offered him a lot of temptation,” recalls former Yankee teammate Gary Sheffi eld. “A bite of the Big Apple is fi ne. You eat it all, and it’s too much.”

It seems that even Alex knew he was moving too fast, doing too much, and he sought therapy for his confl icted soul. For most people, this would be a private pursuit, but Alex was a product of the Dr. Phil generation— he went public.

On May 25, he spoke at the Children’s Aid Society in Washington Heights— close to the apartment where he had lived during the 1970s. He encouraged the children to reach out for counseling.

“I don’t think kids need to feel like an oddball,” he said. “It’s about life in general, managing life. . . . It’s not a storybook all the time.”
Alex connected with the children by telling them about his childhood, about being abandoned at age ten. By his side was Cynthia, a psychology major who told a reporter at the event that her husband had been in therapy for a year and added, “It’s because of therapeutic intervention that he’s been able to fl ourish as a person.”

Flourish, indeed. On the fi eld, he was setting records. By the end of May he was leading the league in home runs, with 16, and had a robust .318 average. Then he got hot. The fi rst week of June, he hit two home runs to push his career total to 400, making him the youngest player to reach that elite plateau. He was a few months shy of his 30th birthday. “It’s pretty humbling when you see the names of the people you’re passing,” Alex said. “It’s hard to believe.

I’m a young man out of Miami who didn’t know I could do some of the things I’ve done.” When he turned 30 on July 27, he was well ahead of the home-run pace of Hank Aaron, who had 342 homers at 30, compared to Alex’s 409.

Outwardly, Alex seemed to have it all together in 2005, perhaps by the grace of therapy. Yet friends say he didn’t know himself at all. He didn’t know if he was the Good Alex or the Bad Alex.

Was he a giver or taker? Was he a father or a swinger?

He didn’t even know if he was Dominican or American. In 1999, he had talked about how important his family heritage was to him in a book,
Gunning for Greatness
, in which he said, “I want to be known as Dominican. That’s what I am: 100 percent.”

His certitude wavered in July 2005. He hinted to Spanish-speaking reporters that he would love to play for the D.R. in the 2006 World Baseball Classic in a statement sure to please his family, particularly his mother, Lourdes. Alex felt connected to the romance of baseball in the D.R., where he fi rst learned to play the game under the eye of his father. Yet not long after he spoke of his desire to play for the Dominican he did a 180 and hinted that he’d play for the United States. It’s where he had grown up; where he
did business; where endorsers lined up to shake his hand. It was the choice preferred by his wife.

So many voices were swirling around him that Alex begged Commissioner Bud Selig to make the decision for him.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” he told Selig.

The debate ended when the WBC agreed to use International Baseball Federation rules, meaning that players played where they had citizenship. Alex was a U.S. resident. “This may sound sentimental, but when I fi rst reported and saw my uniform with ‘Rodriguez 13’ on the back and ‘USA’ on the front, I got chills,” he said upon his arrival to the WBC in March 2006. (His international identity crisis would come up again in December 2008. After a day of playing golf and smoking Cuban cigars at a Dominican resort for a charity event, Alex told local reporters he’d decided to play for the D.R. in the upcoming Classic. “It’s a dream come true,” he said. WBC rules said a player could elect the country of his ances-tors. The New York
Daily News
reported Alex’s allegiance swap with this headline: benedict a-rod.) No one could gray up a black-and- white issue like Alex.

Even though Cynthia believed her husband was vanquishing his personal demons through therapy, there was a self-saboteur lurking within Alex. He had pushed the envelope on steroid use— and now his old friends from Texas were getting caught. His former Rangers teammate and onetime mentor from Miami, Rafael Palmeiro, was being crushed for his hypocrisy and lies. In March, at the congressional hearings, Palmeiro, now playing for the Orioles, had wagged a fi nger at Congress and sworn he’d never cheated. “I never used steroids. Period,” he’d said. In early August, Palmeiro’s name was in headlines reporting that he’d tested positive for a powerful steroid, stanozolol, known by the brand name Winstrol.

This made Alex nervous. If Raffy were asked questions, would
he give up Alex? Palmeiro had always said that Alex was clean, but friends say he knew that wasn’t true. There were plenty of people in Miami who knew Alex was into steroids.

Alex ignored the drama the best he could. And his best was spectacular. In May, he hit .349 with 8 homers and 22 RBIs, despite 22 walks.

He was especially loquacious when he was rolling. The more he talked, though, the more his logic frayed. At one point in 2005— when he was 30 years old and knew he was under contract to play for the Yankees for fi ve more seasons—he told
USA Today
, “I’d be lying if I said I’d play at 40. I’d be lying if I said I’d play at 35.”

Was he lying? Or was this more misdirection? Or, as one teammate puts it, “Was he just talking out of his ass?”

It’s very likely he had hinted at an early departure because he longed to hear the New York fans plead, “Please don’t leave us!” In 2005 he was fi nally feeling the love. He was Ruthian in August, hitting .324 with 12 home runs. He was even lauded for his fl awless return to shortstop for three games when Derek Jeter was injured.

He was now
the
superstar in New York, leading the league for the fourth time in fi ve years with 48 home runs. He pushed the team into the playoffs by hitting .321, with 130 RBIs and 21 stolen bases. He passed DiMaggio’s 68-year- old team record for most homers in a season by a right-hander. He won his second MVP

award.

Once again— as in 2003— he was hailed as the best player in baseball. And once again, he had reached that pinnacle under suspicion. The muscle gains, the “bitch tits” were warning signs to his teammates, but Alex had produced. No one in the organization wanted to question why.

Unfortunately for Alex, there was no miracle in a syringe that could make him produce in the playoffs. Again, he was dreadful in October. As one baseball source quips, “He was on all this shit, right? And yet it expired at the playoffs.” Against the Angels, in an
unthinkable fi rst-round playoff exit for the Yankees, Alex went 2

for 15 with no RBI and had a canine-insulting review of his performance: “I played like a dog.”

A month later, Alex’s mother, Lourdes Navarro, told a Dominican news outlet that her son had fl oundered against the Angels because he had been grieving for his uncle Augusto Navarro, who had died on September 30.

This depiction of a mourning Alex didn’t square with his actions, though. In late September and early October 2005, he was seen frequenting poker parlors into the early hours of the morning.

He had become friends with Phil Hellmuth, a poker player of celebrity proportions. He was Alex’s card guru.

Alex loved the action. The exotic dancers who worked at Scores men’s club in 2005 and 2006— with its Ben Hur decor— say Alex was a VIP guest. In the casinos, workers recall him smoking $800

cigars at the tables, where he sat armed with an aggressive streak and a poker face honed through his years of conning the media.

When a Vegas getaway wasn’t do-able, Alex, with Hellmuth and some Miami pals on his hip, would pull up to an offi ce building in Manhattan’s Flatiron District and spend the night in The Broadway Club, an illegal poker parlor. “I was just trying to be a human being and have a little fun,” he’d later explain.

Alex was in a good mood as he walked into The Broadway Club on September 21. The Yankees had just moved into fi rst place in the AL East that night by beating Baltimore 2–1 at the Stadium.

He signed autographs and bought more than $5,000 in chips from a cashier. He strolled through a large room that had six tables and several plasma TVs, where card junkies, from cab drivers to Wall Street wonders, were trying to read one another’s minds in a game of Texas Hold ’Em.

Alcohol was prohibited at the club. Members were allowed to order food, and, on a lucky night, a handful of cookies was provided by management. Alex drew only a few glances, and took a
seat in a glassed-in private room for those with the nerve and the means to compete in high-stakes games.

“It wasn’t seedy, like in the movies,” says Steven McLoughlin, a poker expert who knows the New York poker world well. “It’s not illegal to play in [such a club], but it is illegal to operate one. Alex didn’t do anything illegal, but from a PR standpoint . . . no, he shouldn’t have been there.”

Nothing made Major League Baseball more squeamish than players associating with gamblers, and there is a long, sordid history there that stretches from the Black Sox to Pete Rose. “It was a stunning lack of judgment,” one baseball executive says of Alex’s taste in off-hours pursuits.

On October 15, four days after Alex had been seen in the Broadway Club, NYPD offi cers fl ooded in. Police knew a patron had recently brandished a fi rearm there. Players were questioned and then released; 13 employees were arrested, and more than $55,000 was seized.

Just a couple of months earlier, cops had raided another A-Rod poker haunt, the PlayStation in Union Square— an austere parlor with a decor reminiscent of a bus station.

Commissioner Bud Selig was furious about the message Alex was sending with his underground gambling. In November, the Yankees warned Alex: Stay out of illegal poker parlors. At fi rst Alex ignored the scolding. “What the hell do I care?” he told a reporter as he walked toward his recently purchased Trump Park Avenue apartment. “All I have to do is hit a baseball. It’s not illegal for me to go there. It’s illegal for them to operate it.”

Alex thought poker was cool. Instead of folding his cards, he doubled down by hosting a charity event: the Dewar’s 12 Texas Hold ’Em Charity Poker Tournament in Miami.

On a late January 2006 evening, he lured celebrities to play cards beneath a white tent on the grounds of a waterside estate on the island of Indian Creek Village near Miami Beach. In walked
New England quarterback Tom Brady, a personal favorite of Alex’s.

(He is so infatuated with Brady that buddies joke about their “bro-mance.”) Also in attendance were Evander Holyfi eld, Sammy Sosa, Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey, the rapper Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

The entertainment was nonstop— a fashion show, Vegas—

style

showgirls and sexy dancers, which seemed like an odd choice for an event benefi ting the Boys & Girls Clubs of Miami.

The evening’s main attraction was a Texas Hold ’Em tournament for a 120-player fi eld, with Hellmuth serving as the master of ceremonies. The winner received a 12-month lease on a $50,000

Mercedes C230WZ, courtesy of Alex Rodriguez Mercedes-Benz.

More than $385,000 was reported as income to the AROD

Family Foundation from the event, although it was unclear where or even when those funds were distributed. According to tax records, the money was not disbursed. This wasn’t an indication of anything unseemly— nobody thinks the foundation misappropri-ated the funds— but it was yet another example of the mismanage-ment and misjudgments typical of Alex’s life off the fi eld.