A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (3 page)

one source said. The rumors eventually gained traction in reality after I checked and double-checked the credibility of the sources.

Finally, the information that Alex had used steroids reached the point where it became irrefutable.

All that was left was to confront Alex face-to- face.

The question I posed to Alex in the UM gym was direct and specifi c: “I have information that in 2003 you tested positive for anabolic steroids— Primobolan and testosterone— while you were with the Rangers. Is there an explanation?”

His mouth dropped slightly. His green eyes widened. But this was not the prepared refl ex of surprise he had used so often. This wasn’t feigned. This was different. He stepped back and stared into the distance, processing the question. In his gaze there was confusion.
What do I say? What can I say?

In his fi xed stance there was vulnerability. A steroid revelation would undermine the credibility of Alex’s precious body of work as a Hall of Famer in progress. A steroid revelation would render his
2003 MVP as a performance gained with an asterisk. It would also transform Alex into the one thing most crushing to his core: He would be like everyone else. Not uniquely gifted. Not singularly spectacular. Not one of a kind. Only tainted— like the others.

All Alex had ever wanted was to stand out. Baseball made him special. He loved the game, and it loved him right back. Baseball gave and gave to Alex. It supplied the attention he craved. It soothed the insecurities he battled. It fi lled holes opened by childhood abandonment. Baseball wasn’t like his father. Baseball never left him.

Baseball had created a cocoon for Alex at the start, from a mother and siblings who supported him and the youth coaches who fathered him. But then came the agent who enabled him and the opportunists who preyed on him and the handlers who mis-guided him and the pals who lived off him.

He’d had so many various protectors— pieces of red string throughout his whole life— to stand between him and account-ability. But now it was just Alex in a weight room searching for an answer that hadn’t been scripted.

Could a single question destroy baseball as his one truth if it revealed a lie? Could a query betray the secrets of an entire career shaped into legend by the steroid era? Could he confront this or would his narcissistic resistance allow him to play only the position of victim?

He prayed he’d never have to fi nd out.

Chapter One

The back porch of the Emerald Park Retirement Center opens onto a large green lawn with a stone walkway that loops through the neatly trimmed grass and curls by a half-dozen benches. It’s not an entirely bucolic scene, though. Over a stucco wall, there is a sprawling strip mall where a pub boasts that it opens “daily at 7 a.m.”

Across the road out front there is a trailer park where residents live in single-wides on cinder blocks and aged RVs with broken headlights. A six-lane highway borders the center on the left, which makes this one of the noisier parts of Hollywood, Florida, with sedans, vans and 18-wheelers blasting past the corporate parks and the multiple storefronts for psychics.

Inside Emerald, where Muzak bathes a vast community room of white tile, Victor Rodriguez feels fortunate.
“It’s a nice place,” Victor says. “I’m taken care of.”

He looks sturdier than any of the other residents. Most appear to be at least 10 years older than Victor, who is 79. Behind him, a brittle-looking man in blue shorts, black socks and orthopedic shoes is slumped in a chair asleep, oxygen tubes plugged into his nostrils. A woman with a walker moves slowly across the lobby, asking why the room is so cold— again and again. Victor sits next to the glass elevator, upright in his chair, dressed in a crisp short-sleeved button-down shirt and brown slacks with a sharp crease.

His jaw is still square. He still resembles the ballplayer he once was.

“My son, Alex, he is, let me tell you, a much better player than I was,” Victor says. “He is the best, I think. But I am a father, so . . .”

His son is Alex Rodriguez, the 33-year- old third baseman for the New York Yankees. Alex is the richest player in baseball, set to make nearly $400 million before age 42, as he glides along a seemingly clear path to pass Barry Bonds as the all-time home-run king, the sexiest moniker in baseball.

Alex and his father share the same caramel-colored skin and charming disposition. They both listen thoughtfully, never interrupting. They are both obsessed with neatness and speak with a similar cadence. Victor, like Alex, talks deliberately, with occasional pauses as he searches for the right word. Both men have been through a divorce that involved small children.

Cynthia fi led for divorce in July 2008. When it was fi nalized in September, ending two months of mud slinging, the ironclad prenuptial agreement called for Alex to make generous child-support payments. He moved out of the couple’s dream home, a Mediterranean-style estate on the water in Coral Gables, and put it on the market for $14 million. Cynthia also signed a confi dential-ity agreement; if Alex’s secrets were going to come out, they would not be disclosed by his ex-wife.

By the spring of 2009, the asking price for their estate was reduced to $10 million. Cynthia expected to receive the proceeds from the sale of the home, which the couple had bought for $12

million in 2004 in a transaction that was mostly in cash, according to mortgage records. Meanwhile, Alex was living in a rental mansion on Star Island, where monthly leases were listed at $75,000 per month even in Florida’s horrifi cally depressed real estate market.

This enclave for the superwealthy is an artifi cial landmass shaped like a pill afl oat in Biscayne Bay. It’s open to the public, but a guard at a gate takes the names of all who enter to protect the high-profi le residents from autograph seekers and groupies. About 30 mansions of various pastel colors rise above the 15-foot hedges along the road. From the homes’ deepwater docks, where 40-foot yachts rest, residents can see the cosmopolitan high-rises of Miami to the west and the sun rise over the Art Deco vibe of South Beach to the east.

The glitziest of Miamians live here. Alex liked the idea of being one of them. Over the years, sugar cane magnates, fi nancial barons, and entertainers such as Madonna, Sylvester Stallone, Sha-quille O’Neal and Gloria Estefan have maintained residences on Star Island.

The Emerald Park Retirement Center is about 20 miles— and at least several tax brackets— away. Victor lives in an apartment; they typically rent for about $2,200 a month, but he doesn’t pay a nickel. “Alex is a very good son,” he explains. “Of course, I never ask him for nothing, but he helps me. He doesn’t want me to pay for where I live. But I never ask.” (Victor won’t live here for very long. In early 2009, he moved to another retirement enclave—with luxury upgrades.)

He hasn’t spoken to Alex in several weeks. They were es-tranged for almost 20 years but reconciled in 2003— to a point.

Part of Alex still can’t fully embrace a father who left the family when he was 10. Victor reads about his son in the papers and hears
about him through the entertainment news. “I worry about Alex and Cynthia,” Victor says. “I hear about Madonna. I don’t know. I talk to Cynthia and ask about my grandchildren, but the conversations are short.”

It’s before the holidays. He expects to see Alex but understands if he doesn’t. He doesn’t push Alex for fear of losing him again.

“He’s so busy,” Victor says. “He has so many dealings. He is doing many big things at once.”

Victor was always ambitious, too.

Victor Rodriguez was born in a verdant valley below the Cordil-lera Mountains of the Dominican Republic, in the village of San Juan de la Maguana. Shacks and small houses in hard-candy hues of yellow, pink and blue dotted the valley; most of them had walls made from palm trees and roofs made of dried branches and palm fronds. Victor remembers his town as an agrarian idyll— good land for rice fi elds and, farther into the plains, good grazing land for cattle. Donkeys pulled wagons loaded high with burlap sacks of grain, sugar and coffee beans over dirt roads toward San Juan de la Maguana. Men played dominoes in the park, while children piled up bananas to sell in the market. “No one was rich,” he says.

“We didn’t know what rich was. Everyone was in the same situation.”

Victor was born in 1929, one year before General Rafael Trujillo seized power in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo ruled for the next 31 years, regularly winning 95 percent of the vote through fraud and threats, bribes and violence. “He was all that I knew,”

Victor says. “Let me tell you, he was one terrible dictator. He controlled everything. He abused people. He was cruel in many opin-ions.”

Trujillo was a diabolical despot who promulgated a cult of personality; he erected statues of himself throughout the country and renamed the capital Ciudad Trujillo (night and day, a large electric sign there blazed the words
Dios y Trujillo
— “God and Trujillo”).

Trujillo was also a brazen and brutal racist who tried to purge the African strain of his people; he dreamed of “whitening” his island to make it more European and even used bleach to whiten his own brown skin.

Yet, despite his ironfi sted persona, Trujillo fancied himself a refi ned gentleman with a sophisticated taste for fi ne art and race-horses. He loved equine pursuits, but he was savvy enough to understand how sport could play a role in perpetuating his stran-glehold on his country. Baseball, he knew, would be an excellent distraction from his political manipulations. He encouraged the sport’s popularity. His son ran a team in Santo Domingo.

“Everyone played baseball to escape and dream,” Victor recalls. “We talked about it all the time. We breathed it. In every city, it was the sound of a bat and a ball that thrilled everyone. By the time I was seven, I played every day.”

The children played even when they had no gloves, no bats, no balls. The gloves of poor children were sometimes made from milk cartons or old socks. A broomstick or even a large wooden spoon might be the bat. The balls were sometimes just beans wrapped in tape. “Everyone played without knowing what a glove really felt like,” Victor says. “Your hands hurt, but we were crazy for baseball.

For us, baseball was life. Boys and even the girls played. All the cities, no matter how small, had at least two teams. It was a small island, but it had so much talent.”

The D.R.’s thrumming amateur leagues fi rst caught the eye of American baseball scouts in the 1950s when the amazing Juan Marichal was signed. He was a different kind of pitcher, one never seen before, with a high leg kick that gave him the vertical look of an exclamation mark. He became the nation’s fi rst major-league superstar when he left the island to play for the San Francisco Giants in 1960 at age 23. “He was the beginning for us,” Victor says. “He
was a great, great hero. He brought so much good to the Dominican when he went to the major leagues. It was a proud moment for us.”

Victor was a talented catcher who had a strong arm and a fi ne grasp of the game— calling pitches was his forte— but he never emerged as one of the country’s top stars. “I never played profes-sionally,” he says. “I didn’t play for money.” He played organized ball for 18 years, though, from age 18 to 36, until injuries fi nally forced him to stop.

Victor poured his soul into baseball, but he didn’t neglect his studies or restrict his dreams to sports. He was a well-read young man with a keen interest in current events, and his circle of friends included many polished professionals and businessmen. Politics was a close second to baseball as their favorite topic of discussion.

It is unclear how intensely active Victor was as a revolutionary.

Former teammates of Victor’s remember him as a good catcher and simple man. Others who lived through the Trujillo era believe that Victor was a freedom fi ghter and a member of the underground resistance in the late 1950s. A Spanish-language, online history guide of San Juan de la Maguana also portrays Victor as a rebel leader. Juan Rivas, who grew up in San Juan de la Maguana, says Victor was the editor of an anti-Trujillo newspaper near the end of the dictator’s reign. “Victor was a very smart man,” Rivas says. “He was a brave man.”

On a Dominican history blog, one tale of Victor’s past is told from 1959. He was 30 years old and targeted by Trujillo’s military thugs at a bar. Victor was approached by several men who dragged him from a table and, in front of patrons, began beating him with brass knuckles.

In 1960, Victor, as the story continues, became a galvanizing force in the western part of the D.R. against Trujillo when the entire nation turned on its dictator after he tortured and killed the Mirabal sisters, the heroines of the underground resistance. Turmoil erupted across the country. In 1961, Trujillo was assassinated.

“It was over,” Victor says. “The end, I couldn’t believe, had come.”

But what about his role in the resistance? Was it fact, folklore or something in between? Victor laughs but does not answer. “So long ago,” he says.

Victor married Pouppe Martinez in 1955. She gave birth to their fi rst child, Victor Rodriguez, Jr., in 1960, but a year later, the couple divorced. Victor was getting restless. The country was in transition and there were new opportunities he was itching to explore, but he continued to play baseball a few years more. His son, Victor Jr., never saw him play.

“I didn’t know him that well when I was a young boy,” Victor Jr. says. “I remember him only the few times he came to see me. I always had good memories of him. All the encounters I had with him— up to the time when I actually saw him more often when I was a teenager— were always very positive. He was a tender person.”

Victor was warm and attentive in the moments with his son, but then he was off, gone for stretches at a time. He had a wide-eyed sense of adventure. Victor decided the United States was where he had the best chance of realizing his dreams, so he moved to New York City.

He left behind a nation in turmoil, one that was about to become a very dangerous place to live. The U.S. military unilaterally invaded the D.R. on April 28, 1965, based on the fears of the LBJ