He lives in the curious intersection of superstardom and celebrity, a life played out on the pages of the New York tabloids, the embodiment of the American superstar. From strippers to Madonna, from the public destruction of his marriage to being one of the centerpieces in baseball's steroids mess, he long ago transcended being just a mere baseball player.
You couldn't make it up.
But who is Alex Rodriguez, anyway?
In one sense, it's the nature of celebrity itself.
For what is celebrity if it's not about a public image? That's something that Hollywood discovered a long time ago, and if the public image was very different than the private one, that just went with the territory, right?
So it is with A-Rod.
From his nickname that's become a kind of celebrity shorthand, to his personal life that's the fodder for the gossip rags, who he really is no doubt got lost a long time ago.
Is it any wonder that some of his teammates refer to him as A-Fraud?
Is it any wonder that the more he plays in the media capital of the world, we seem to know less and less about him, as if he more and more became a caricature of himself, like some soap opera figure who bounces from crisis to crisis?
So who is Alex Rodriguez, anyway?
"A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez," the insightful new book by Sports Illustrated's Selena Roberts, attempts to tell us.
Her premise is that from an early age A-Rod had a strong desire to please -- what she calls "the good son." He grew up in Miami. His father left when he was 10; they would essentially be estranged for the next 20 years. To Roberts, it was the central fact of Rodriguez's childhood.
"Wasn't he worthy of a father?" she writes. "Wasn't he smart enough and talented enough to deserve a dad? Alex would go through his life always trying to overachieve and please to be forever good enough."
By the time he entered high school, the word was already out. He went to a private school on the outskirts of the suburbs, a place that had a great baseball tradition and a well-respected coach. One of his teammates was Doug Mientkiewicz, the former who would become Rodriguez's teammate on the Yankees.
"I used to take all his clothes, T-shirts and shorts," A-Rod says in the book. "He was rich and I was poor."
Rodriguez was an excellent high school quarterback, and he loved basketball the most, but it was baseball that was his special gift, complete with youth coaches who honed his skills.
Roberts also throws out the theory that A-Rod's steroid use began then, though Rodriguez has dismissed that. Between his sophomore and junior years he added 25 pounds of muscle, dramatically increasing his strength, and changing his body, all this happening in the Miami area that was rife with a steroid culture and vitamin stores laden with substances that later would be banned from Major League Baseball.
Roberts writes that baseball sources in Miami say that A-Rod used steroids in Miami.
"Alex wasn't the only teen ballplayer in South Miami said to be on performance enhancers," Roberts writes. "Dozens more just like him were becoming the first generation of ballplayers to begin their careers during baseball's steroid era. He was one of the firstborn of the Canseco program."
The Canseco reference is not just a throwaway.
They first had met in Miami, A-Rod the young kid on the rise, Jose Canseco one of the biggest names in the game.
Rodriguez would follow him around.
"He wanted to be me," Canseco says. "He was 17, 18. I took him into my home. He wanted to do everything I did."
Ponder that quote and its ramifications.
A-Rod also was always very image-conscious. As a young player in the big leagues, he became almost obsessed with the media dance, going over his answers as if grading himself.
"The need for adoration fueled Alex's ambitions," writes Roberts.
So maybe it was inevitable that New York would overwhelm him, that he simply wasn't psychologically prepared for having to live his life in the media fishbowl, however much he loved the attention; that his behavior became more reckless, his hedonism more out in the open, all his flaws and imperfections more magnified under the bright lights.
"The city welcomed him," Roberts writes. "The team, though, rejected him. They did not like his haute couture flair, his high-maintenance needs and his manicured quotes for the media. They also knew he was a hypocrite, playing the Boy Scout by day and the Bad Boy at night."
Then came the steroids admission in spring training, one more public hit to the image that has begun to unravel like yesterday's newspaper.
So now, in a certain sense, he's on his own redemption tour as he chases baseball's home run record. Now he tries to reinvent himself again, even as the tabloids now follow him around as if he's the mother lode of material.
Who is Alex Rodriguez, this man who now lives in the intersection of superstardom and celebrity?
Maybe no one knows anymore, not even him.
(Contact Bill Reynolds at breynold@projo.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
columnMust credit The Providence Journal
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