Long before Alex Rodríguez (New York, 50) began his high-profile four-year relationship with singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, the former baseball player had lived many lives. When the flame of love ignited between them in 2017, and then extinguished – almost suddenly – in April 2021, A-Rod, as he is known professionally, had already arrived in the Olympus of baseball, from which he was expelled when he was the protagonist of one of the biggest scandals in sports memory in the United States. Suspended for doping, that unpleasant episode caused serious damage to his reputation in 2014. Now he has spoken about it in a three-part documentary about his life, Alex vs. A-Rod. “There’s an arrogance that often comes with power, a feeling of not getting caught because you truly believe you’re better than everyone else. There is nothing sillier than this and I learned it the hard way,” he says in it.
Before his relationship with JLo and his face becoming internationally famous for that relationship, Rodríguez was already the father of two girls, the result of his marriage to Cynthia Scurtis (from 2002 to 2008), and had had other famous partners, such as the actresses Kate Hudson (in 2009) and Cameron Diaz, a love story the latter best remembered for a public image from 2011 in which she fed him popcorn, while they both had fun Super Bowl. However, and at least for a certain period, the person that Alex Rodríguez loved most was, probably, Alex Rodríguez.
It was no wonder. This strong, green-eyed New Yorker of Dominican descent has been an unquestionable baseball star for decades. Rodríguez developed his career with the Seattle Mariners, New York Yankees and Texas Rangers and, among other achievements, boasts of being the youngest player to reach 500 home runbreaking a record that dates back to 1939. He ended up loving himself so much that his enormous ego began to attract the attention of the specialized media along with his strong character on the playing field, which also provoked criticism that highlighted his arrogance. As if that wasn’t enough, in 2009 he decided to have his photo taken for the men’s magazine Details while kissing his own reflection, an image parodied, commented on and which is already part of his past as the Narcissus of sport in the early 2000s.
Another of his great loves, besides himself, was his charismatic mother. The same one who, in the absence of a father who was neither there nor expected, supported the family by working as a secretary during the day and as a waitress in a Miami restaurant at night. In June of this year, the former player told Dominican entrepreneur and communicator David Collado how Mrs. Lourdes Rodríguez had proudly negotiated one of the most important contracts of the career of her son, who was then 18 years old: “At midnight on a September day in 1993, my mother sat down with the two presidents of the Seattle Mariners, who offered us a million dollars. She told them: ‘We need a million and a half for my son, be firm with yourselves.’ They called us after two hours, at two in the morning, and offered us 1.35 million. We signed at three.”
Thus the years passed, between victories in the Major League baseball, millionaire sports contracts: he was the highest paid; He signed in 2007 with the Yankees for 275 million dollars in 10 years: a family life and more or less high-profile love stories. And while A-Rod wasn’t the most popular guy in America, the worst was yet to come. This time, not even his mother could help him: In January 2014, just three years after the high-profile cuddle with Diaz, he admitted to doping during his time with the New York Yankees. But this was not the beginning, but rather the end of a dark chapter in which Rodríguez was not exactly exemplary. In the two years preceding his testimony he had presented himself as the victim of a witch hunt. The confession was made to the DEA (the United States Drug Enforcement Agency) in a meeting he attended as part of an investigation against the fake doctor Anthony Bosch, the man who supplied him with the drugs, and his Biogenesis clinic in Miami. Until then, Rodríguez had only admitted using stimulants while playing for the Texas Rangers in 2001.
The Bosch scandal, in which 13 other athletes were implicated, led to A-Rod’s one-season suspension (162 games, reduced from the original 211) for steroid use, the highest imposed in the history of baseball in the United States. When he decided to do it singHe recounted such gruesome things as how the fake doctor gave him testosterone cream, pills and growth hormone injections — for which he paid him $12,000 a month — and that he even had his blood drawn at a Miami Beach nightclub. Specifically, he told DEA agents that from late summer 2010 to October 2012, Bosch drew his blood approximately 10 times in South Florida, Tampa and New York. Ultimately, the fake doctor was sentenced to four years in prison: “I’m ashamed of myself. I’m sorry,” he said of the case involving the Yankees third baseman.
Now Alex Rodríguez tells his story in the HBO documentary Alex vs. A-Rodwhose first episode premiered on November 6 and which he promoted. In his eyes Tonight’s showon October 26, he confessed to Jimmy Fallon: “I made mistakes publicly, I had a long suspension, it cost me the Hall of Fame. I never thought I’d say this, but, looking back, this might be the best thing that happened to me. When I went Hall of Fame-less for my stupidity, I started to be a better father, I felt like a better person, and I went much deeper into therapy, which helped me understand what happened in my childhood and where I am today. I’m excited to talk about it, but that’s what the documentary is about.” In one of the videos announcing it, A-Rod also says, “I think it was hard for people to really understand me and get to know me because the same thing was happening to me, in real time.”
For its directors, Gotham Chopra and Erik LeDrew, the goal of the film was to capture the difference between man and character (hence the title). One of his successes was getting the protagonist to confess why he lied about using substances that led to the end of his career. “I felt pressured to produce and perform at a very high level at all costs,” he confessed. Currently, Rodríguez continues his journey to become “a man with integrity and character and someone you can trust” and shares his life with his daughters and his partner, Canadian bodybuilder Jaclyn Cordeiro. Professionally, he now sees everything from the sidelines as a sports commentator.
