A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez by Selena Roberts

to go to law school, and he had fl attered her endlessly about her negotiating skills with the promise of a job at his fi rm. “Every time he talked to Susy, it was, ‘Oh Susy, I’m going to do this for you; I’m going to do that for you,’ ” recalls Arriola. “She was important to him then. And he didn’t do anything for her.”
    Alex had made his deal with the Mariners by breaking from Boras, but he kept him as his agent. He was not the nurturing father fi gure Alex craved, but he was calculating and smart, ruthless and fearless. Together they would make many more big deals and generate many more headlines. And controversies.
    Screw Arriola, Boras thought. His impulse for revenge seemed to know no limits. Not long after Alex signed his contract with the Mariners, Boras stepped in to have it voided. Boras fi led a grievance with baseball against Arriola. He convinced Alex that his deal had been wickedly mismanaged by Arriola and his son, Rich, who had just graduated from law school.
    Arriola was mystifi ed. How could Boras fi le a grievance against him? And for what his son had done, which, in fact, was nothing?
    “He said that [Rich] had misrepresented to Alex that he was a lawyer,” Arriola says. “And he didn’t.”
    Boras claimed that the Mariners and Arriola had misled Alex into believing his deal was guaranteed for fi ve years, not three.
    The players’ union was on Boras’s side— specifi cally, his dear friend Gene Orza was on his side. “Sometimes you get the feeling that Boras is more important to the union than the players,” says one major league player familiar with Boras. “It’s that screwed up.”
In a memo to Chuck Armstrong from Roger Jongewaard, dated February 28, 1994, Armstrong said: I have come by some information that has run the gamut before actually falling into my hands. The chain so far runs like this: I was told by a reporter who spoke with Peter Gammons, who talked to Gene Orza who said that we [Orza] will defi nitely not lose the Rodriguez case. He goes on to say that he’s never been so sure of anything in his life.
    How he intends to win the case, nobody knows. I realize this is second hand information but thought you might be interested in hearing it.
    Orza was wrong. Boras couldn’t win. The grievance languished in baseball’s arbitration system but was eventually dropped in 1996
    when Alex signed a contract extension with the Mariners. In hindsight, Arriola had negotiated a good deal for Alex, which got him to the majors and onto his next deal more quickly.
    “You can say whatever you want, but at the end of the day that meant an extra $25 million for Alex, right?” Arriola says. “By the way, I have never even accepted a cup of coffee from either one of them.”
    Alex never apologized to Arriola.
    Chapter Five

THE PERFECTIONIST
    Alex Rodriguez was suffering from a writer’s block of sorts in forming his own baseball identity, wanting badly for his career to be a living folktale but completely frozen on how to start the narrative.
    By the spring of 1996, the now 20-year- old Alex had earned a major-league roster spot in fewer than three years after draft day, but now what? The accelerated promotion of Alex from minor-league outposts such as Appleton, Wisconsin, and Calgary, Al-berta, to a certifi ed Mariner was a bit dizzying, enough to induce errors and whiffs.
    He was foundering. At the outset of his fi rst full season with the Mariners, Alex was hitting a dismal .105. He needed a faith healer for his psyche. Fortunately, he knew who to call.
    In a downtown Milwaukee hotel room, with April nearing its
chilly end, a motivational guru in a sharp, tailored suit asked Alex to close his eyes to envision his future. Visualize three goals, Jim Fannin told Alex in a sedate voice lightly fl avored with a southern drawl.
    Alex responded instantly: “I want a batting title this year.”
    “He took possession of it in his mind,” Fannin recalls. “He saw it. He felt