A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (6 page)

Alex’s right hand is stashed in his pants pocket in the style of a child model. His mother is lovely, smiling in a lightly colored silk shirt and matching skirt, with her right arm around Alex’s shoulder. Lourdes’s red-painted nails are a perfect match to her son’s tie.

At age 14, Alex is still slender but not ungainly, even though he is sprouting toward fi ve-foot- ten at a rapid rate, cutting a lean fi gure in his party best.

His casual grin suggested that he was fully aware of his charms and his abilities.

He was already a star. He was able to dunk as a freshman at Christopher Columbus Catholic High School, where he played before transferring to Westminster his sophomore year. “Actually he came to Columbus to play basketball,” says Brother Herb Baker, the Columbus varsity baseball coach. “He was a very good basketball player. He had the quick feet, all right. And when he came over to play baseball he was just a little . . . well, the bats were too heavy for him. He was a good hitter, but everything went to right.

He couldn’t get the bat around.”

Sometimes Alex wondered if basketball would be the better sport for him to pursue. Once, just before his sophomore year, he told his family he hated baseball. He was burned out. He wanted to quit. “I’m tired,” he said as he fi dgeted in a dining table chair, surprising his mother. “It’s no fun anymore.” No one in the family could believe it. “He had a great basketball coach, and all he wanted to do was play basketball,” Susy recalls. “He said his future was in basketball. That was a family crisis for two days.”

Mr. Arteaga knew better than anyone— more than a mother who was working two jobs, more than a sister who was in college
and a brother who had a full-time job already— how critical it was for Alex to keep playing baseball.

Baseball was a proven escape route to a better life in Miami during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Boys & Girls Club in South Miami was famous for the quality of talent in its youth league baseball teams. The Cuban-born Rafael Palmeiro and Jose Canseco, who were already big leaguers, had grown up on its dirt fi elds just a half generation ahead of Alex. Canseco, in particular, elicited rock-star worship from the teens who marveled at his muscle and fame as the Oakland A’s All-Star slugger. They also knew Canseco as the pied piper of a steroid revolution at a time before steroids were a dirty word. “It was a completely different time,” says one former youth ballplayer in Miami. “Everything was so competitive.”

There were recruiting battles among the powerhouse baseball schools that grew ugly at times, with fi nger-pointing between coaches over alleged payments and charges of player stealing.

Arteaga understood the intensity of Miami baseball— and its promise. He believed Alex had baseball stardom in his blood. He was the one who placed Alex on club teams with older players to sharpen his skills. He was the one who had the connections to help Alex prosper.

“Mr. Arteaga knew the movers and shakers of the baseball world; and we were relatively new to Miami,” Susy recalls. “Mr.

Arteaga told us baseball is where Alex’s future is. He saw something in Alex that maybe I didn’t see in my little brother. He begged us not to let Alex have one off season.”

Alex resisted. He dug in, with hoop dreams in his head. The family had a meeting in their apartment. Seated around a table, they kept imploring Alex to take a deep breath, to think his decision through. Lourdes didn’t want to push him, but Arteaga kept saying to her, “Your son is special.” He kept telling Alex, “Baseball is your path.”

“But I’m bored,” Alex said. “I want something different. I love basketball.”

Basketball was the hot sport among teens then. Every weekend, it was Magic vs. Bird on the TV in Alex’s room. That could be him one day, he’d think, defying a defense with the kind of ser-pentine dunks Dr. J was throwing down for the 76ers. NBA players were the new TV stars. It was a fast-paced game on a hardwood stage— no dead time as there was in baseball.

“I think he liked the noise and the atmosphere,” Susy says.

“When you like the attention, well . . . I think he was born that way, and he knows how to handle himself. Then, when you get a taste of it, there are some personalities that handle that so well.

That attention is basically food for your soul or mind.”

Alex Rodriguez was—

and will always be—

an adulation

junkie. “Some people are their own worst enemy when they get better, but not him,” says Susy.

Nothing was decided over the family table that night, and the discussions continued for two more days. Finally, a deal was struck at Mr. Arteaga’s urging: One more season, they told Alex, and if he still felt baseball was boring, he could quit.

Says Susy, “He never turned back after that.”

Westminster Chris tian School looks more like an insurance offi ce than a school, with its low-slung concrete exterior behind a circular drive and palm trees. It is secluded, on the southern outskirts of suburban Miami.

The ride to school took Alex about 30 minutes. He rode past affl uence, past hedges surrounding sprawling homes with tiled roofs and swimming pools, past the swaying palms lining Coral Reef Drive as it passed Westminster on its way toward the yachts anchored in the marina two miles farther along. It was a world away from Alex’s working-class neighborhood, where homes had
barred windows. Some of his classmates drove BMWs. He drove a battered Mazda. “He had to break into the back window just to get in,” says a former teammate, Steve Butler. Westminster was a diffi cult transition for Alex, who went there to play for coach Rich Hofman, the John Wooden of Florida high school baseball. All he did was win at a small, elite school with only 100 students in its senior class.

Did Alex feel as if he belonged there? He didn’t know, but he desperately wanted to. He liked his surroundings.

Tuition wasn’t cheap. The $5,000 yearly fee was too much for the Rodriguez family. There would be allegations that recruiting rules had been broken when Alex attended Westminster. His family received some fi nancial aid, but school board administrators were never clear about who was paying the rest. No improprieties were ever proved. Alex was on his way, set to play for a national powerhouse in 1991 under Hofman.

“At fi rst blush, Alex didn’t stand out because when he fi rst started with us he was like six foot, 165 pounds,” recalls Hofman.

“He came into a program that was one of the best in the country, so there were other good players around him. He probably wasn’t the best player on our team his sophomore year, but he certainly had all the indications that he was going to be a terrifi c ballplayer.”

Baseball dominated Alex’s life at Westminster. “I’d leave the house at six-thirty a.m. and wouldn’t get home until eight p.m.,” he recalled. He’d leave his house each morning with $20 in his pocket for breakfast, lunch and, sometimes, dinner. “I didn’t realize until later how Mom sacrifi ced her needs to give me that money every day,” Alex said.

Most of his friends at Westminster came from far wealthier families. Doug Mientkiewicz, who would become his teammate with the Yankees 15 years later, was one of them.

The Mientkiewiczs’ home was just a mile from the campus. “It took twenty-two seconds to get from my house to school . . . if you caught the light,” Mientkiewicz says. It wasn’t the biggest house on the block, but it must have seemed like a palace to Alex. The ranch-style house in a peach shade of stucco was perched on a corner lot with a vast lawn, a circular drive, and the must-have for every fi ne Florida home: a sparkling swimming pool. But there was one more amenity that lit up Alex, lit up the whole baseball team for that matter: The Mientkiewicz family had built a batting cage off the back porch. “It was a clubhouse,” Alex has joked. Doug’s mother became very skilled at cooking for many mouths, because half the baseball team often ended up at her dining room table. “We killed everything,” Alex said. “[His parents] probably had to get an extra job to support us.”

Alex was growing into his body, shooting past six feet by age 15. He was sprouting out of his clothes, which made Doug’s closet a good place to look for new ones. “I used take all of his clothes,”

Alex remembered. “[I wore] T-shirts and shorts. . . . He was rich, and I was poor.”

He was growing into the identity of a kid struggling against the odds. It fueled him, and at a school with manicured grounds extending into the woods, where the baseball fi eld was cut out of the groves of scrub oaks and palms, he was confronted with what he didn’t have every day. Behind the left fi eld wall, there was an Olympic-sized pool and two tennis courts— tantalizing targets for home-run hitters. The football fi eld lay just beyond.

With his basketball jones behind him, Alex focused on baseball, earning the starting shortstop position as a sophomore. But he also loved football. He was a quarterback with a limber arm, and football was big in Miami. This is where the Gino Torretta legend was born. Alex, J.D. and Doug often attended University of Miami games to watch Torretta play quarterback, checking out the Hurricanes’ potent offense in an era when the team was a perennial contender for the national championship, and Alex became immersed in Hurricanes lore. Alex was a great passer at Westminster— he set
school records and made the papers as an All-State selection— but his most enduring memory of Westminster football was a tragic one.

The team was in the locker room at halftime his sophomore season when a parent fl ung open the door and said, “A man collapsed in the stands.” There was confusion, and then someone said, “It’s Mr. Arteaga.” J.D. ran out the door to fi nd his father, and Alex darted after him. Inside a patch of gathering people, they discovered paramedics standing over Mr. Arteaga, checking his vital signs. He was still breathing, but his chest was rising and falling erratically. He was laboring. His heart was failing. A few minutes later, a helicopter landed on the fi eld and Mr. Arteaga was airlifted to a hospital with everyone else on their way by car to be by his side.

Alex didn’t go. He couldn’t bear to feel the pain, to see Mr.

Arteaga in distress, to see J.D. agonizing over his father.

A day later, Mr. Arteaga died. “I felt someone had torn my heart out and smashed it,” Alex recalled. “At the time, I couldn’t say good-bye. I lost a father for the second time. I know Mr. Arteaga and his family have forgiven me for not showing up at the hospital.

I’m not sure I’ve forgiven myself.”

The Westminster baseball jersey was trimmed in the deep green of infi eld grass. It billowed on Alex’s slender frame during his sophomore season. He had enough arm to start at shortstop but was a self-professed weakling at 15, once admitting that he could “barely bench-press a hundred pounds” in a season he fi nished with a .256

average. Shortly after the last game that season, Hofman challenged Alex to get stronger, to hit the weight room.

“Well, tenth grade you had an okay year,” Hofman told him.

“Next year everyone will get to know you, and in twelfth grade you’ll be the number one pick in the country. Work hard this year.”

The vote of confi dence was exhilarating for Alex . . . and scary as hell. The number one pick in the country?

“He raised the stakes,” Alex said of Hofman. “I felt I couldn’t let him down.”

The pressure of expectations may have tended to make Alex cut corners when no shortcuts were necessary. Former classmates say he asked them how to cheat on tests.

One former teacher of Alex’s at Westminster points out, “He was a fl at character, one-dimensional.” Alex didn’t join social clubs and he wasn’t active in anything but sports. The teacher says it didn’t seem as if Alex had grown up with storytelling in his life to enrich his imagination. In some ways, this explains why Alex would, as an adult, react to situations without understanding the arc of a story, how it has a beginning, middle and an end. He would often fabricate scenes and events without understanding that embellishment had repercussions.

Alex was an honor roll student at Westminster, but his insecurity got the best of him when he thought about the Plan B alternate to the MLB draft: a college scholarship. He didn’t want just a good score on entry exams but a great score to open as many options as possible. A former Westminster student says Alex offered him $50

to take the SAT for him. The student believed he was serious and declined the payout.

Alex was smart enough and talented enough, but he didn’t always trust himself.

To fall short would be to fail. No one clamored for failures. No one lined up to see failures play. And failing to reach number one might mean losing yet another father fi gure in Hofman.

At Westminster, Hofman was successful— with six state titles as proof— but he was also a polarizing fi gure. The faculty enjoyed the higher profi le that baseball success brought the small private school. They were A Little Team That Could with only 300 students in the high school, one highlighted in
USA Today
as state
champions and national champions. But some educators worried about the fi efdom Hofman had created in his 25 years as head coach. One year after a big victory for the team, he was seen in front of the school lowering the American fl ag and the school’s Chris tian fl ag and then raising the team fl ag above all else. This was blasphemy to some faculty, who worked at a school where one slogan read, “Jesus is the reason for the season.”

Westminster was holier than thou to some rivals and the object of envy to others. Opposing schools coveted its facilities, titles and national status. But some coaches wondered if Hofman was assembling his powerhouse in good faith. “He started talking to my players during the game, to bring them over [to Westminster],”

says Brother Herb Baker.

Hofman fi lled his rosters with eye-catching size for a tiny school. His lineups looked more minor league than prep level to opponents. “We used to play them regularly, and his kids were always much bigger than our kids,” Baker says. “And that’s what I didn’t understand.”

In the early 1990s, few teams had the size advantage Westminster boasted. Soon enough, Alex would fi t right in after undergoing a before-and- after-worthy body makeover.