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

it.”
    Alex next visualized himself being selected to the All-Star team three months away. “What do you see?” Fannin asked him.
    “I see Cal Ripken, Jr., walking across the diamond, sticking his hand out and telling me, ‘I couldn’t wait to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.’ ” This was an odd bit of crystal ball reading by Alex, because as a high school player, he had in fact shaken the hand of Cal Ripken, Jr. He just never believed Cal would remember that moment. Alex was just another upstart. He wanted to be famous enough for Cal to approach him. Not the other way around.
    Finally, as Fannin listened further, Alex imagined himself becoming a household name. He conjured a moment in which a voice on a soundstage of a late-night talk show introduced him: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Rodriguez, the major league’s newest superstar.” Alex laughed at the vision but could hear the applause.
    Fannin told him if he could hear it in his mind, he could make it real.
    Jim Fannin believed in the power of visualization in part because of what it had done for him. He was making a very comfortable living as a mental coach for some of the biggest sports stars in the country. Contrast that to his childhood: he’d been reared among the working poor in Appalachia, where his home had ply-wood sheets covering the fl oors because termites had attacked the fl oorboards.
    “At age twelve, I met this awesome guy who was a custodian at a YMCA tennis facility outdoors in Kentucky,” Fannin recalls.
    “He was an eighty-three- year-old African-American man, and he
showed me some things about energy that were life-changing. He taught me how to visualize success.”
    Fannin says the development of his mental strength comple-mented his athletic gifts and gave him a way out of eastern Kentucky. In the 1970s, with his tall frame and surprising agility, he earned a tennis scholarship at East Tennessee State University, where he majored in marketing and psychology. After graduating, he began working with tennis players as a life coach— long before that term gained both popularity and scorn— and later developed his S.C.O.R.E. System, a way to achieve success rooted in what can only be described as magical thinking: Just believe.
    In the 1980s, an ophthalmologist for the Chicago White Sox spotted Fannin preaching the gospel of positivity at a workshop and asked him to help the players on his team.
    After that introduction to major leaguers, Fannin quickly became a cult fi gure in baseball, worshiped by some and derided by others. One major-league player sarcastically calls Fannin “Doctor Feel Good for the weak,” but players who relied on him include pitchers Orel Hershiser and Randy Johnson. But no one was as devout a follower as White Sox second baseman Joey Cora, who was traded to the Mariners in 1995. His new double-play partner the next season? Alex Rodriguez.
    “Alex marveled at Joey’s discipline,” Fannin recalls. “And he should have. Of all the athletes I’ve coached, and I’ve coached some of the best, probably no one was more disciplined than Joey Cora.
    To the point of being anal, to the point of being obsessed. He really got the most out of his talent.”
    Cora had bought into Fannin’s strategy of fi nding the perfect state of mind for performance, what he calls “the zone.” “The zone needs stress,” Fannin says. “You can’t get into it without stress.”
    To get into Fannin’s zone an athlete applies his acronym for success: Self-Discipline, Concentration, Optimism, Relaxation and Enjoyment. S.C.O.R.E.
“As important, if not more important, than anything else, is optimism, which includes trust and confi dence and belief,” Fannin says. “But you also need relaxation.”
    In his fi rst full season in the majors, Alex wasn’t loose at all.
    He was tight, his mind was spinning. He couldn’t S.C.O.R.E. if he couldn’t breathe.
    At the start of spring training, Alex had been