A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (5 page)

was on that team. They lived two blocks from Alex. The two boys became close friends and played in every youth league Mr. Arteaga could fi nd for them.

A year went by. Alex was still skinny but now tall with angular facial features, his xylophone ribs showing through his skin and his elbows as sharp as arrowheads. He idolized Baltimore Orioles All-Star Cal Ripken, Jr., and wanted to be a shortstop, just like Cal. If one of his idols swung a black bat, Alex would use shoe polish and a felt-tip pen to blacken his own bat. In one boyhood photo, Alex is wearing red shorts and a dark cap, smiling at the camera but batting left-handed. His favorite player that week must have been a lefty. Alex liked imitating his idols.

His father felt joy at his son’s passion for the game. “He knew more than I did,” Victor says. “It made me feel good that he had something that always made him smile.”

Victor himself was struggling with just what would make him happy. He was a searcher in need of something new, different and exciting. He was antsy again. He was having trouble fi nding a business venture that suited his ambitions. He was 59 now but not ready for the sedentary life of bingo parlors amid the swaying palms. He had business ties to a pharmacy, but he wanted something bigger,
one more hit of adrenaline. He decided that New York City was the best place for him. Victor says Lourdes had no desire to return: “I told her, ‘Let’s move back to New York. I have my credit in New York. We know how to do business in New York.’ And she said, ‘I don’t go back to New York. If you want, you can go.’ I said to her, ‘You want to go or you want to stay?’ She said, ‘I want to stay.’ I said, ‘Okay, bye-bye.’ I went by myself to New York.”

Victor took one suitcase when he left in 1985, when Alex was 10. Day after day, Alex waited for him to return. He would stop bouncing his ball on the pavement to look down the street whenever he heard a car.
How long can a man live out of one suitcase?

“He’d always say, ‘Daddy’s coming, Daddy’s coming,’ ” Susy says.

It was a natural response of a boy who couldn’t imagine any fi rst in his life— fi rst date, fi rst driver’s license, fi rst stolen base— unfolding without his daddy.

“What did I know back then?” Alex once said. “I thought he was coming back. I thought he had gone to the store or something.

But he never came back. He had been so good to me, actually spoiled me because I was the baby of the family. I couldn’t understand what he had done. I still don’t know how a man could do that to his family: turn his back.”

At night, for a couple of years after Victor left, Alex would wait for his mother to drift off and then crawl into bed next to her, sleeping where his father had slept.

He was suddenly a kid of divorced parents. He wasn’t the only one in the world. But to Alex, it certainly felt like it. Wasn’t he worthy of a father? Wasn’t he smart enough and talented enough to deserve a dad? Alex would go through his life always trying to overachieve and please to be forever good enough. Even great.

What Alex couldn’t have known was that the grieving went both ways.

Victor was liberated but devastated by his distance from Alex.

“You cannot imagine how much I suffered when I separated from him,” Victor says. “I cannot describe it. Sometimes, when I woke up, my face was covered with tears. I was crying. I gave so much love to that small child.”

Victor still left, though. He didn’t turn back. There would be no father to shield a boy from the minefi eld of opportunists ahead, all of whom believed one thing: that Alex could be the best ballplayer of all time.

Chapter Two

THE PHENOM

To watch Alex Rodriguez swing a bat in Yankee pinstripes is to witness a split-second gala of force and grace and confi dence.

The clumsiness comes after the game, when questions sometimes result in awkward answers and contradictions. “I don’t think Alex is very good at communicating,” says Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman. “This isn’t something he does well.”

He doesn’t talk as refl exively as he hits. It’s as if he’s pulling the cord on a See ’n Say in search of the right phrase. Where does the arrow point? This scripted Alex reveals the frailty beneath the brawn, a layer not at all surprising considering the roots of his vulnerability.

In the spring of 1993, Alex was a teen pinup in the offi ce of every major-league GM. The scouts practically had personalized
parking spaces in Miami’s Westminster Chris tian School lot as they tracked Alex’s every throw, swing and slide during his senior year. They raved about his fi ve tools— hitting for average, hitting for power, running speed, arm strength, and fi elding ability— often crowding around, hoping for a little face time with the hottest prospect since Ken Griffey, Jr., had come out of high school in 1987. They held their clipboards close to their chests as they scrib-bled love notes about Alex’s talent. They were almost unanimous in their belief that he would be the fi rst or second player chosen in the upcoming amateur draft. The Seattle Mariners had the top pick, and they, too, were swooning.

Alex seemed to feed off the scrutiny; he hit an unworldly .606

through the fi rst month of his senior season. He clearly liked the attention.

Throughout Westminster’s 1993 season, a Mariners scout poked the lens of his video camera through the chain-link backstop to capture Alex’s every twitch at the plate on fi lm. “We wanted to make sure if he got injured, we’d know it,” says Roger Jongewaard, the head of the Mariners scouting and development that year. “We had lots of video on him.”

One spring afternoon, Alex ripped through his BP pitches in the Westminster cage, then leaned in close to the camera being held by a Mariners scout and said, “Hey, Chuck, this is Alex. And I can’t wait to get to Seattle.” (Chuck Armstrong was then and still is the president of the Mariners.) “He was the most confi dent high school kid I’ve ever seen,” says Jongewaard. “How many kids would have the nerve to say that to the president of a major-league team?

Chuck was impressed.”

Alex, like any star, needed the camera, but in a way that went deeper than vanity. If people were looking, they cared— and Alex felt validated.

The attention tempered the insecurity that played tricks with his mind and even his sense of who he was. He would constantly ask friends if he was considered popular. On bus rides after away games, far from the scouts and media, he would ask teammates, even after going four for four, “How did I play today?” He needed to be told that he was good, that he was special. That he was loved.

When Victor Rodriguez left his family to return to New York City in 1985, Alex was devastated. Why had his father left? What had he done?

Everyone around Alex poured love into the space vacated by his father. “He was doted on,” Susy says. That’s what families do.

They rally, even if they overcompensate. The family encircled the 10-year- old Alex as if he were the subject of a seance, as if it were their common mission to lift his spirits.

But still he cried, longing for his father and not understanding why he wasn’t coming home. Until the last day Victor was in the house in Miami, he had hugged and held and kissed Alex, made him feel nurtured. Victor was very good at doing that for people— customers and sons alike. He would make them feel beautiful and wonderful and irreplaceable. And then he would leave.

It jarred Alex. At such a young age, his emotions ranged from guilt to anger and, ultimately, resentment. “I lied to myself,” Alex explained in 1998. “I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter. But when I was alone, I often cried. Where was my father? Finally, my hope dried up. Dad never came back. I have to let go of that anger to move forward. The problem is, I can’t forget what he did.”

For months, Alex would lean on the frame of his front door, watching the street. Neighbors could see the little boy craning his neck to scrutinize every man walking toward him.
Is that Daddy?

Alex would come home from school and sometimes check his parents’ bedroom, hoping that his father would be there, napping.

His pain often distorted reality. Later in his life, Alex would speak of years going by without hearing from his father, even
though Victor called and sent him gifts. “I tried all the time to talk to him,” Victor insists. “I loved him. He was always with me, I thought. I sent as much home as I could.”

Over the holidays, in the winter of 1985, a TV materialized in a bedroom Alex shared with his Cal Ripken, Jr., poster. The gift from Victor meant that Susy could watch
Charlie’s Angels
reruns in the living room while her brothers Joe and Alex watched sports. “I loved that boy,” Victor says. “I always made sure he was taken care of.” But Alex craved more than presents. “I thirsted for Dad for so long,” he once said.

Being an “abandoned” child gave Alex an identity. It enveloped him, and that gave him a small measure of comfort. At least he knew he was the kid without a dad, a fact that often elicited sympathy from adults. He had always been a sensitive boy; Victor’s departure made him even more fragile emotionally. Neighbors recall seeing Alex’s eyes brim with tears at the slightest criticism.

“I remember telling him not to play near my fl owerpots,” a former neighbor, Sandra Gonzalez, says. “He must have said, ‘Sorry,’ a hundred times, until he was almost crying.”

Alex cried when his team lost, when movies ended with sad-ness or with joy, when he sensed that his mother was worrying about something.
Was she lonely, too?

There was a sweetness to Alex that must have made it easy to baby him. In old family photos, his striking eyes, a pearlescent green, are almost always wide and bright as he makes himself a willing subject for every picture. He wants to please. He never looks distant or disaffected like the grunge and Goth children of the 1980s and ’90s.

“We were very protective of him,” Susy recalls. “He was an only child, in a sense, because I was seventeen at the time and Joe was nineteen.” The family revolved around his needs: Where would he go to school? How would Alex get to practice?

Victor sent the occasional check, but most of the burden of raising Alex was on Lourdes. “Her perseverance and inner strength kept us together,” Alex once recalled in a television interview. “She was willing to do whatever it took to make our lives better.”

Each weekday morning, Lourdes would go to work as a secre-tary at an immigration offi ce in Miami. At night, she slipped into her waitress uniform and then traveled 20 minutes away to a Latin restaurant where the regulars tipped in singles and quarters for meals that didn’t cost much more than $5 a plate. “I would always count her tip money,” Alex has said. “I always remember Monday through Wednesday it was a little dry, a little short. And it would probably be $18 to $24. But then Thursday, Friday and Saturday, I can remember counting that money and it would be $38, $39 or $42. If we ever got to $45, I knew it was one heck of a day.”

Alex became the family’s wishing well— Susy and Joe tossed him whatever spare change they had, hoping it would make him happy. “Every time I got paid, I would buy him a little something,”

Susy says.

Despite all the love, attention and generosity, Alex would later describe his childhood as a struggle against poverty and loneli-ness. He would talk wistfully of the many baseball games at which the other children had parents in attendance. He understood, of course, why his mother couldn’t be there— she was working— but he longed to have someone clap for him when he got a hit. “I felt like an underdog,” Alex once said of his childhood, “but I never let my situation keep me down.”

Juan Diego Arteaga, his fi rst youth baseball coach, became a sturdy standin for a father. Alex leaned on Arteaga, became best friends with his son J.D. and spent countless hours with both of them. The Arteaga house was his second home.

Arteaga saw instantly that Alex was blessed with abundant baseball talent. At age 10, he was fl at-out gangly, with lug nuts for kneecaps and the oversized feet of a puppy, but he could move— he had great range and gobbled up grounders. As soon as his arm
strength improved, he was moved from second base to shortstop.

He had speed enough to beat out dribblers to the mound. He had an accurate arm, instinctually scooping and throwing.

Another quality set him apart: his baseball maturity. Alex played with kids who were two— and sometimes four—

years

older, yet he was often the most composed player on the fi eld. In one team photo, the 12-year- old Alex kneels on the grass of a baseball fi eld in the front row. There are two teenage boys with thick necks, who fi ll out their light blue uniforms with broad shoulders.

The team’s name— Corsairs— is stretched in an arc across another player’s broad chest. Two other players have heavy eyebrows and full mustaches. Then there is Alex, a wisp who appears to be swal-lowed up by his uniform. He looks like a boy playing dress-up in his father’s clothes. He is by far the smallest boy on the team.

He wasn’t lost among the big boys on the fi eld, though. “Never intimidated me,” Alex once said about playing against older boys.

His refl exes and focus were superior to theirs, but it was his baseball intellect that astounded his coaches. Alex didn’t realize it, but his father was with him as an echo: “Play the ball, don’t let the ball play you.”

Victor’s voice was in Alex’s subconscious, but it was Arteaga who honed his talent. He watched over him and supplied him with essentials as any father would: a new glove, an entry fee for a league, a bag of popcorn after a game. He never dropped off Alex at an empty house.

Lourdes was grateful. Her son was growing up grounded and thoughtful, and she must have noticed that there was still some Victor in him. Alex was a sweet talker and meticulous about his appearance. “When you look like a slob, generally, you get treated like a slob,” Alex wrote in a 1998 children’s book. “As you get older, you’ll fi nd people will respect you more if you’re well dressed. It can open all kinds of doors for you.”

There is a picture of Alex with his mom as they stand in the living room the night of his junior high prom. Alex is dressed in black pants and a white linen jacket with the kind of skinny red tie Rick Springfi eld and Michael Jackson were wearing in videos on a cable network called MTV.