Liz and Dave, I’ve read through the prologue and first three chapters of “A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez,” and so far my initial response is the most important: I’m done reading prologues. I always find them frustrating. In this one, I feel as though Selena Roberts is trying too hard to place herself in the story for no good reason — she talks about walking up to A-Rod in a gym where he wasn’t expecting to find such a dogged reporter — and to psychoanalyze A-Rod. Also, she poses a question at the end, a point-blank, “I think you used steroids,” question, but she doesn’t let him answer. She’s trying to build tension, but it’s just frustrating.
The first chapters are full of Stuart Smalley-esque aphorisms, in which she places blame for A-Rod’s perceived desire to be loved at the feet of his father, who left the family when A-Rod was 10. It’s all about A-Rod wanting to be good enough to please others, and you can imagine A-Rod staring at himself in the mirror, “And doggone it, people like me!” I have to admit, I nearly chuckled out loud when I read one paragraph:
All Alex had ever wanted was to stand out. Baseball made him special. He loved the game, and it loved him right back. Baseball gave and gave to Alex. It supplied the attention he craved. It soothed the insecurities he battled. It filled holes opened by childhood abandonment. Baseball wasn’t like his father. Baseball never left him.
The rest of the first three chapters jumped around in time and space too much. We go quickly from the nice retirement home A-Rod put his father up in after their reconciliation, to A-Rod’s secluded home outside Miami, to the Dominican Republic, Washington Heights, and back to the Dominican Republic. We jump from a cocky high school senior A-Rod, ready to be the number one draft pick, to A-Rod playing basketball and bored with baseball in his first years in high school, back to the night he was the number one draft pick. Did you guys feel disoriented, too?
It was a bit padded as well. Liz, we’ve wondered before whether the book as a little rushed to capitalize on the A-Rod steroid scandal. I mean, on top of the book cover is the blurb, “By the Sports Illustrated writer who broke the A-Rod steroids story.” Maybe stretching it into a book is why there are little asides that don’t further the story, like A-Rod jumping into his parents bed as a kid in chapter 1, called “The Good Son.” I mean, doesn’t every kid do that? Does that really tell us much about A-Rod? She’s trying to establish how much he loved his dad, I think, but I’m not sure that does it. It’s like a movie of a little boy who misses his dad, not like real life.
And about the accusations, there are a few peppered around that are really vague and frankly, seem unfair. In chapter 2, “The Phenom of Westminster,” she tells us, about his tuition to Westminster Christian School, a private school in Miami.
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 financial aid, but school board administrators were never clear about who was paying the rest. No improprieties were ever proved. . . .
I’m always suspicious when writers use the passive voice. And also, this:
The pressure of expectations my have tended to make Alex cut corners when no shortcuts were necessary. Former classmates say he asked them how to cheat on tests.
She’s clearly trying to set up A-Rod as the kind of person who would cut corners to reach perfection but, again, it’s too boilerplate. At this far remove from High School, I can safely say that nearly everyone cheats or is the person other kids cheated from, at least once. She also makes an allegation that someone said A-Rod offered to pay him to take the SAT, but it’s not clear how true that is, or whether he ever did it. If he had, it would have made a good point. But since it’s a brief paragraph without much evidence to support it, it’s as thin as celluloid.
Then come allegations that maybe he used steroids in high school, because he bulked up in the summer between his sophomore and junior years and because “baseball sources” say he knew a dog-kennel owner who used them with greyhounds he raced. Perhaps because I’m not a big sports fan, I assume everyone at that level uses some kind of performance enhancement. Maybe it’s illegal drugs, maybe it’s blood doping, maybe it’s sleeping in an altitude chamber tent, but the effect is the same, right?
Mostly, I felt sorry for the mini-Alex Rodriguez. In 1993, during his senior year of high school, the Seattle Mariners had the number one pick and were heavily scouting Rodriguez. A Mariners scout took pictures of Rodriguez through the chain-link fence photographing every move, to make sure he wasn’t injured, according to Roberts. One wrong twitch, and no A-Rod. If it’s not crazy to do that to an 17-year-old, I’m not sure what is.
I had to have knowledgeable friends feel me in on why A-Rod is so important. He’s uniquely talented and uniquely unlikeable, and that could make for a fascinating biography. I can only hope we see some of that in further chapters.
