A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (7 page)

Hofman would drift by the school’s weight room and hear the barbells ringing like wind chimes. One single student was in there huffi ng and blowing out through lifts. It was Alex. “He had grown so much, the scouts didn’t recognize him,” Hofman says. “They were stunned.”

The spindly Alex had morphed into a diamond-cut man-child.

He had put on 25 pounds of muscle between his sophomore and junior year. He wasn’t massive, but he was lean and strong. His shoulders were broad, his legs were thick and his biceps looked de-fi ned even when he wasn’t fl exing. His strength went off the charts.

He benched 310 pounds and could hit a ball 400 feet. “Today, I probably bench-press 240 or 250,” says Alex now. “I did it because I played football, quarterback, and the big challenge was that if you could [bench press 300 pounds], you would get a letter jacket with white sleeves. I was poor. I thought, ‘What a great way to get a free jacket.’ ”

Alex didn’t explain
how
he had managed to gain entrée into the hulking “white-sleeves” crew. He didn’t have a personal trainer.

He didn’t have a high-performance program to follow. How did he get so big and strong so fast over three to four months? In February 2009, he would call any allegations about his steroid use at Westminster “baloney.”

“That’s an automatic red fl ag,” says Fernando Montes, a longtime strength and condition trainer on the college and major-league level who worked with Alex in the pros. “It’s so out of the ordinary.

It’s not physically possible without some type of steroid enhance-ment.”

Vitamin shops in the malls were stocked with steroid-tainted substances that would later be banned by MLB. Steroids were not the raging symbol of cheating in the early 1990s that they are today, but even in 1992 they were illegal. Drugs such as Dianabol and Winstrol were added to the list of controlled substances in 1990 with the Anabolic Steroid Control Act. They still remained easier to purchase than pot.

In the Miami area during the 1980s and ’90s, there was a steroids source known by some in the baseball community: dog-kennel owner Steve Caruso. He raced greyhounds, coached baseball and was “kind of just always around,” says Mike Lopez, a former youth player who knew Caruso in the 1990s. “I remember him being real competitive.”

A former business associate, Steve Ludt, says Caruso used to buy steroids for his kennel operation through local animal hospitals. “He could buy it cheap,” says Ludt, who worked with Caruso in the kennel business. “He could get a 1,000-count of testosterone tablets for around $70.”
Caruso didn’t always use his steroid supply for medical purposes with his dogs. He was known to juice his greyhounds at the racetrack, Ludt says, and was admonished for it by racing offi cials.

Caruso’s access to steroids made him popular with friends. He apparently didn’t sell steroids, but he did allow his men’s league soft-ball teammates to dip into his stash.

Some players popped testosterone and Winstrol tablets, says a former teammate of Caruso’s. “Everyone was using it back then,”

says the source. “I was.”

Baseball sources in Miami believe Caruso also gave steroids to up-and-coming ballplayers—including Alex Rodriguez. “They knew each other, for sure,” says Ludt. “I was at Caruso’s house one night when Alex called. He offered to fl y Caruso up to Seattle for his fi rst pro game. Alex was going to pay for the plane ticket and everything.”

(Caruso has since left the dog-kennel business but still lives in Florida. He remains silent about his ties to Alex. Caruso did not respond to repeated messages left for him at his home and through his lawyer.)

A former Westminster player says Alex used steroids in high school and that Coach Hofman knew about it. Another Westminster graduate says Hofman’s son, David, who played on the football team with Alex, told him that he witnessed Alex’s use of steroids.

Rich Hofman says he is surprised by these accounts and denies any knowledge of Alex’s steroid use in high school. “Whatever he was doing, he was doing it somewhere else,” he says. His son, David Hofman, did not respond to messages asking for his recollections.

“I know Rich real well,” says Joe Arriola, a former public servant in Miami who coached youth baseball and advised Alex’s family. “Rich was a good guy. He really cared about the kids. Did he go by the book? Probably not. He probably recruited or had people recruit, but that’s a long way from [allowing] Alex drugs.”

Alex wasn’t the only teen ballplayer in South Miami said to be on performance enhancers. Dozens more just like him were becoming the fi rst generation of ballplayers to begin their careers during baseball’s steroid era. He was one of the fi rstborn of the Canseco program.

Chapter Three

The early 1990s— Alex Rodriguez’s high school years— were a pop-cultural celebration of the outsized. In 1991, Arnold Schwarzenegger fl exed his way through the box-offi ce hit
Termi-nator 2: Judgment Day
, fries were becoming supersized and SUVs began hogging the highways. One half of the Oakland Athletics’

burly Bash Brothers— the muscular Jose Canseco— would regularly drive to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Miami to say hello from the front seat of his red Jaguar during the off-season.

Alex was immersed in a culture of physical distortion and exaggeration. Though chemistry could enhance Alex, it didn’t create him. His skills and coordination separated him from peers who were taking performance-enhancing substances. Until his junior year in 1992, Alex’s reputation had been that of a slick fi elder with good range, a sure glove and a quick release, fl icking his wrist like a lion tamer.
Now he was an uncommon teen focused on a mission to make himself a great baseball player. By reading workout magazines, he learned to cut out Big Macs and fries and eat healthfully. “We took his coach and him out to eat,” says Roger Jongewaard, the former head of the Mariners scouting department. “He was very careful with his diet. He’d just eat chicken and vegetables.”

All of those muscle powder mixes and supplements— many of which are banned by Major League Baseball now— favored by Alex didn’t create his diligence. It just added to his distance.

“Hit it in the pool!” fans would shout whenever Alex came to the plate during home games. “There was a swimming pool in left fi eld,” Jongewaard recalls. “I said to his coach, ‘I bet he has hit some in the pool,’ and he said, ‘Actually, he’s never hit a ball in the pool; he hits them over the pool.’ ”

Alex was one of the few high school players in the nation who could drive a ball more than 400 feet. The added muscle alone did not account for his newfound power. His pitch selection, which he had worked on with Hofman through the off-season, gave him an edge. “He had only hit [.256] as a sophomore,” recalls Hofman.

“So he worked on his swing. I talked him into not hitting pitcher’s pitches but looking for his pitch to hit. And then it seemed like he hit a home run almost every game that summer.”

Hofman became Alex’s protector, the new male voice in the teen’s head. “I think he confi ded in me a little more [that year],”

Hofman said. He was the one who handled the scouts and media requests that began piling up during Alex’s junior year. “You always hear that something is wrong with a player from scouts,” Hofman recalled, “but never, not once, did I hear a scout say something negative about Alex.”

Suddenly, no one could throw a fastball past him. He was gaining a reputation, hit by hit, as the complete package. He was a national star, often mentioned in major publications. Soon, pitchers were perversely challenging him, craving an Alex Rodriguez
strikeout as a personal trophy. “When pitchers pitched to him, scouts told me that most of them amped it up about four to fi ve miles per hour more than they did for the next batter,” Hofman says. “There was a personal vendetta to get him out. He didn’t have an easy road.”

He more than merited the attention of major-league scouts during his junior year, when he earned All-American honors by batting .477, with 52 runs scored, 42 stolen bases and 6 home runs.

Scouts who were nosing around Westminster would usually fi nd Alex in the weight room— usually alone. They would see him take extra fi elding reps and linger in the batting cage long after everyone else had stopped hitting. “I think his work ethic was something special,” Hofman says.

The scouts swarmed the Westminster team— ranked number one in the country by
USA Today
in 1992, with a national championship banner— with as many as 100 scouts watching its tournament games.

Alex handled the attention, the scrutiny and the adulation well. He acted, spoke and thought like an old soul. He knew what people wanted to hear. “He was almost always like a grown man,”

Hofman says. “He seemed to understand the whole process and his destiny.”

Hofman says he told Alex: You’ll be in the big leagues soon; you’ll be in the Hall of Fame before it’s over.

In late August 1992, regular TV programming was interrupted throughout south Florida by the sight of Doppler radar screens showing an ominous orange mass twice the size of the state churning toward the coastline. Hurricane Andrew, feeding on the warm waters off the talcum-powder beaches of Miami, was heading for landfall. On August 23, a Sunday extra edition in the
Miami Herald
called Andrew the “hurricane of our nightmares.”
The paper warned of 20—

foot waves and winds powerful enough to fl ip buses over. Residents who didn’t heed the bullhorn warnings to evacuate rushed to supermarkets for Spam, tuna and pinto beans— anything that could be served by can opener— and cleaned out ATMs.

Alex Rodriguez was far removed from this disaster, playing at a world youth baseball championship in Monterrey, Mexico— and playing well; he was the best player on the U.S. team. “He was the star shortstop on a pretty darn good team,” says Fernando Arguelles, a Mariners scout who would soon be the team’s coordina-tor of scouting throughout Latin America. “I think all those kids got drafted, and he was their three-hole hitter and shortstop. And he was playing against some of the better seventeen-year- olds in the world. That’s when I fi rst thought, This kid’s got a chance to be a big-time player. He was hittin’ balls out all over the fi eld. He was putting on a show in batting practice, and we were thinking, This guy could be the next Cal Ripken, Jr. He was a man as a child.”

Alex was playing out of his mind, but he was burdened with worry about the safety of his family. He had no idea where they were when Andrew hit with 145-mph winds. There were 65 deaths as stucco homes were lifted from their foundations and tossed like tumbleweeds. More than 250,000 people in Miami–Dade County were left homeless. There were mad scrambles for food and water as desperate residents fi ltered water in the street through cloth rags.

Alex had no way to reach his mother or Susy. “I frantically called home,” he said. “I couldn’t get through for three agonizing days.” Finally, he made a connection and was told they were okay.

His home had been beaten up by fl ying debris; trees were down and phone lines were lying in the streets of Kendall, but his family had hunkered down and ridden out the storm several miles away from the blast zone.

Westminster’s campus was a devastation scene after Andrew.

Windows were blown out, and there was structural damage to al-most every building and wall. When Alex got back to Miami, he learned that there was $3 million in damage to the school, including $100,000 to the baseball fi eld. That meant his senior season was in jeopardy. Would the school be ready when classes were scheduled to start in just a month? Would they have to cancel the baseball season? Alex knew that a season undercut by an abbrevi-ated baseball schedule could hurt his draft status.

An angel in a hard hat materialized just in time: A local con-tractor donated his ser vices to repair the ball fi eld. Just weeks before the start of the season, a ballpark was unveiled with new dugouts, backstops and bleachers. They would need those bleachers to accommodate all the scouts coming to scrutinize every move Alex made on the baseball diamond.

Years later, Alex would fl uff up his high school legend by telling this tidbit about how meticulously he had prepared for the pros: “I decided to use a wood bat in high school instead of the more powerful aluminum so I’d be ready for pro baseball,” he said.

Yet in game photos from his high school years, he is swinging an aluminum bat. The opening sentence of an article from 1993 in
Sports Illustrated
reads, “As the ball left Alex Rodriguez’s aluminum bat . . .”

He didn’t need the exaggeration. As far as the scouts and baseball writers were concerned, Alex Rodriguez was a demigod at age 17.

Alex knew what was coming as far as attention from the media and the scouts. As his senior year approached, he asked his sister for help. “At the end of his junior year Alex said, ‘Susy, I’m really going to need you next year,’ ” she recalls. “He said ‘It’s going to get really crazy. I need you at most of my games. They’re going to want to talk to me, but I can’t talk to them.’ When he said ‘crazy,’

I thought it would be just a couple of people here or there. I came from a family that just watches baseball.” She could not imagine the frenzy that lay ahead for her family.
Alex, though, was ready for the press. He welcomed their attention, their inspection, and their affection. In fact, he craved it and did his best to please writers from the
Miami Herald
, the
Los
Angeles Times
and even
Sports Illustrated
.

The pamphlets, packets and questionnaires from major-league teams hit coach Rich Hofman’s mailbox almost daily during Alex’s senior year. “At his fi rst home game of the season, there were at least ninety scouts or agents or representatives in the stands,” Susy says. “People had those machines— radar guns— and stopwatches out every time Alex ran. Some were scouts, some were agents. At that time I didn’t know the difference. They were all sitting right behind the fence, and I remember thinking, They’re not letting me see my brother play! Can’t they sit the way the rest of us sit?”