A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez
by Selena Roberts
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Book Summary Information
Author: Selena RobertsEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-05-04
ISBN: 0061791644
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Harper
Book Reviews of A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez
Book Review: I actually read the book...
Summary: 5 Stars
I heard Selena Roberts discussing this book on "Today" and talk radio several times last week (she was hard to miss), and she presented her case more persuasively than the negative reviews here suggest. So I bought the book, read it, and quickly came to the conclusion that the nasty reviews here were written by people who either have not read the book or have a misguided antipathy to Ms. Roberts for writing about the Duke lacrosse team scandal. It might be a flawed book, but it's not the clip and paste grab bag of gossip that critics suggest. It's an admirable example of dogged, even courageous professionalism -often missing from sports journalism.
In the Prologue, writing in the first person, Roberts describes how she confronted Alex Rodriguez with the charge that he tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. This is the scoop heard round the world when it was published in Sports Illustrated in February 2009. But what's interesting here is the confrontation itself. Roberts didn't call Alex for a response, or email him. She didn't publish it without giving him a chance to respond. She didn't hide behind the protective screen of a blog or talk radio. She walked uninvited into the University of Miami gym, found Alex lifting in the weight room, surrounded by his heavily muscled cronies, and posed the question straight to his face. Gutsy journalism, not gossip-mongering. How many other reporters or TV talking heads would have the stones to walk into that gym alone? Answer: none.
In the next chapter, titled "The Good Son," Roberts tracks down Alex's father at a nursing home, interviews him extensively, to create a complicated but totally sympathetic portrait of the Rodriguez family and Alex's childhood in the Dominican Republic and Miami. No smears here, just honest and thorough reporting.
Next, in "The Phenom of Westminster," Roberts interviews Alex's sister Suzy, his teammates, and his high school coach to continue a sympathetic portrait of his home life and introduce a troubling picture of an elite high-school athletic program where performance enhancing drugs were used. She names the likely supplier of these drugs, who has not denied the charge. To Roberts credit, she includes the high school coach's denials that he never saw anything. None of this information has been reported anywhere else. It's a result of Roberts' follow-the-story diligence. Readers can decide who's telling the truth.
So it goes, from chapter to chapter, where Roberts lays out her case that A-Rod is a preening adulation junkie who has enhanced his statistics with steroids and HGH (needlessly, she thinks, because of his prodigious talent). It's not a sympathetic portrait, but it's not the complete teardown I expected. The book's biggest threat is to Rodriguez's legacy as a great ballplayer. The numbers say he is. The evidence suggests that his stats are tainted. And as to the most damning charge in the book - his steroid use at Texas from 2001 to 2003 - Rodriguez admitted that it was true. Hard to argue with that admission. Advantage Roberts. Huge advantage.
I wish there were less reliance on anonymous sources, but given the depth of reporting in the early chapters, when Roberts is not exposing seamier episodes in A-Rod's career, a fair reading would give the author the benefit of the doubt rather than the athlete for whom lying and denial and attack-the-messenger are the default response (until, of course, the athlete is cornered with the smoking-gun truth). The irony is that anonymous sources are just as likely to be in the best position to know the truth as they are to promote an agenda. They are the lifeblood of journalism. In this book, the anonymous sourcing - for example, in the pitch-tipping charges when A-Rod was with the Rangers - answers more questions than it raises. And it never lacks credibility. Who would make up a pitch-tipping charge out of the blue?
Three years ago, "Game of Shadows" charged that Barry Bonds used steroids. There was no overwhelming conclusive evidence in that book, which has allowed Bonds to consistently deny the charge - and he has yet to be prosecuted for it. In the past two months, two books have come out on Roger Clemens' fall from grace for using steroids. Clemens vehemently denies the charges, and again there is no evidence in either book that overwhelms the denial. Unlike these books, "A-Rod" exposes Alex Rodriguez' use of steroids during his years with the Texas Rangers, when he became baseball's highest paid player - and unlike Bonds and Clemens, he has not, he cannot, deny it. Ordinarily I'd give this book four stars, but for pulling out that admission from the game's biggest name, Roberts earns five stars.
Summary of A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez
Alex Rodriguez is the highest-paid player in the history of baseball, a once-in-a-generation talent poised to break many of the sport's most hallowed records. In 2007 he became the youngest player, at 32, ever to hit 500 home runs, solidifying his status as the greatest player in the modern game, and months later he signed a contract that would keep him with the Yankees through the end of his career. His reputation changed drastically in February 2009 when Selena Roberts broke the news in Sports Illustrated that A-Rod had used performance-enhancing drugs during his 2003 MVP season with the Texas Rangers. Her report prompted a contrite Rodriguez to admit illegal drug use during his 2001?2003 seasons with the Rangers, who had signed him to the most expensive contract in Major League Baseball history. Although he admitted to three seasons of steroid use, the man teammates call "A-Fraud" was still hiding the truth. In the first definitive biography of Alex Rodriguez, Roberts assembles the strands of a bizarre and extraordinary life: from his boyhood in New York and the Dominican Republic through his near-mythic high school career and fast track to the big leagues, the whole of A-Rod's career mirrors the rise and fall of the steroid generation. Roberts goes beyond the sensational headlines, probing A-Rod's childhood to reveal a man torn by obligation to his family and the pull of his insatiable hedonism, a conflict--epitomized by his relationship with Madonna and devotion to Kabbalah--that led to the end of his six-year marriage. Roberts sheds new light on A-Rod's abuse of performance-enhancing drugs, a practice he appears to have begun as early as high school and that extended into his Yankee years. She chronicles his secretive real estate deals, gets inside the negotiations for his latest record-breaking contract with the Yankees, and examines the insecurities that compel him to seek support from a motivational guru before every game. In A-Rod, Roberts captures baseball's greatest player as a tragic figure in pinstripes: the man once considered the clean exception of the steroid generation revealed as an unmistakable product of its greed and dissolution.Biographies Books
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