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

anointed the Mariners’ starting shortstop, the presumptive heir to Ken Griffey, Jr.’s, legacy at the plate and a can’t-miss idol on Madison Avenue.
    Alex tried to downplay expectations, even trotted out a bit of toe-scuffi ng humility for the beat writers. “I never want to crowd him,”
    Alex said of Griffey. “I want to be a guy who helps him win. I want to be the guy in the background. Whether fans like me and my personality, that’s up to them.”
    This, of course, was far from the truth. The need for adoration fueled Alex’s ambitions, and he thought he was destined to be baseball’s best player. But he understood that the fans liked humble players, so he became a student of how to play the media. He worked on perfecting his answers, as if each interview were an audition. On occasion, when his answers were ill received or sounded awkward or he appeared to have been rambling he would say, “I didn’t mean it that way. My English isn’t very good.”
    After four years of schooling in the Dominican’s ABC school and the rest of his education in the U.S. system, Alex’s English was just fi ne. But unlike players who shrugged off malapropisms and peppered their speech with profanities, he was self-conscious and overly deliberate when he spoke in public. (Jose Canseco once wrote that Alex spoke as if his answers had to be fi ltered through a “focus group.”)
    The media trainer Andrea Kirby was Alex’s public speaking coach. At his rookie orientation, she began to work with him at the request of a Major League Baseball offi cial. The league recognized that Alex could be a huge draw for them— a handsome, bilingual
prodigy with big-play fl air and studio-quality charisma at a time when fans were sick of surly sluggers like Albert Belle, who spewed out expletives in live interviews and upended clubhouse buffet tables out of anger.
    Alex was angelic by comparison, baseball’s boy-band idol. He was the youthful antidote for a sport still hobbled by the labor strife of 1994, when the entire postseason was canceled. Fans were dis-gusted by greedy players and owners, and attendance plunged.
    The fans who did go to the ballparks often booed the players whose behavior, they felt, had tarnished the sport. Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla habitually preened after hitting home runs, while Darryl Strawberry and Steve Howe were cited for repeated drug offenses.
    Alex could be the savior. He was neither too urban nor too country; he was smooth and stylish, unlike the players who sported gold chains as thick as lassos (“I don’t like to wear gold,” Alex said) or chewed on wads of tobacco that made their cheeks puff out like Dizzy Gillespie’s.
    There was a genuine, lovable core in Alex, the part of him that was acutely sensitive to what others wanted him to be, the part that made him so popular with children. Kids of all ages wrote to Alex, requesting him as their show-and- tell project in school. He was fas-tidious. He was meticulously inoffensive. He had his hair trimmed once a week and brushed his teeth obsessively to polish his smile.
    He claimed to fl oss four times a day. “He knew that people were looking for him to be, well, I want to use a phrase that I’ve never used before: a clean hero,” Kirby recalls. “He knew there was an expectation for him to be one of the good guys, and he wanted to live up to that.” He wanted to be good at being good.
    Alex would watch taped interviews he’d done and scan the morning papers, looking for his name. “He liked to read the papers and all that stuff,” Cora says. “So he knew everyone was talking about him.” He rehearsed out loud answers to easily anticipated
press questions while driving in his black Jeep Cherokee— his only splurge buy from his signing bonus. His salary was $109,000— the league minimum— but it was plenty of money to buy video games and his high-end suits and to pay for all those long-distance phone calls to his family. He had budgeted