Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball'sSteroid Era

by Tim Elfrink

  That’s how Ana Lopez remembers her younger cousin every time she visited in the first four years of Alex’s life. Alex would be running from his officious older half sister, screaming and laughing down that hallway, as he tried to avoid taking a shower. Or he’d be playing hallway baseball, using any ball he could get his hands on and a stick, running back and forth, always yelling. And always buck naked.

  To Lopez, who lived in the Dominican Republic but visited every summer on her way to American camp, the Rodriguezes were like the Washington Heights Brady Bunch. Both Victor and Lourdes had children from previous marriages. Lourdes’s son Joe shared a bedroom with Alex, and her daughter, Susy, had her own princess-themed boudoir. (Victor’s son from his previous marriage, Victor Jr., was largely estranged from his father. He went on to be a high-ranking US Army official who barely knew Alex Rodriguez.) And Lopez remembers another constant presence in the crowded apartment, a chubby teenager who was inseparable from Alex.

  Yuri Sucart—with the first name pronounced by Spanish-speaking tongues as “Judy”—was the son of one of Lourdes’s brothers, Lopez says. A deadly car accident in the Dominican Republic had left Yuri orphaned as a baby. So extended family on both the island and in the United States took him in. Victor and Lourdes became Yuri’s guardians for at least part of his childhood.

  Thirteen years older than Alex Rodriguez, he was a big brother to the baby boy. “He’s been with me since I was born,” Rodriguez said much later, when his relationship with Sucart had turned notorious but he still kept him around—to a point.

  Victor Rodriguez, Alex’s father, made a living driving to outlet malls in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, filling his vehicle with Nine West and Anne Klein heels, and selling them out of his apartment to fellow Dominicans. Lourdes worked long hours on an assembly line at a Ford automotive plant in Mahwah, New Jersey. When that closed, Lourdes bounced to another Jersey town, getting work at the Ford plant in Edison.

  Lourdes’s brother, Augusto Bolivar Navarro, lived with his own family in Washington Heights. “Tio Bolivar,” as family called him, was a Yankees fanatic. A gregarious, corpulent man, he spent his workdays in Manhattan’s diamond district, prepping precious stones for display. At home, he angled his armchair in a corner of the living room and held court there so steadfastly that it was forever indented with a mold of Tio Bolivar’s ass.

  He hung a big photo of Alex as a kid in a baseball uniform on the wall. Visiting relatives teased him that the place looked like a memorabilia store.

  When Tio Bolivar and Yuri crowded into the kitchen, those same relatives had another bit. “Get them out of the kitchen!” Lopez says family members yelled of the uncle and nephew. “They’re going to eat everything!”

  Bolivar was almost like a father to Alex and Yuri. When Victor ultimately left the family, Alex’s uncle tried his best to fill that void. “It was a very close-knit family at that time,” says Lopez.

  It wasn’t an easy life in Washington Heights. But there’s a truth Alex Rodriguez’s parents experienced, one known by many in Miami with Third World roots: Once you escape the grips of a despot, lesser struggles become almost sweet in comparison. And like Anthony Bosch, Rodriguez had the genes of a political agitator.

  The general who had taken control of the Dominican Republic when Victor was an infant, Rafael Trujillo, was an effete, round-faced man whose head was crowned with a severe sheen of white hair. He was a plotter. He encouraged baseball in his country in order to keep the lower classes distracted, and the Dominican Republic would one day become the spigot that would flood the major leagues. He offered safe haven and a livelihood to Jews fleeing Europe during World War II, not for humanitarian reasons (he had just earlier ordered the massacre of more than twenty thousand Haitians) but because it was an opportunity to “whiten” his island.

  But mostly, he slaughtered, imprisoned, and stole. In her unauthorized biography, A-Rod, Selena Roberts recounted the rebel leader mythology of Victor Rodriguez, an amateur baseball player. There were murky tales of Rodriguez’s insurgency leading him to be dragged from a bar by Military Intelligence Service goons and beaten with brass knuckles.

  It is clear that Rodriguez was outspoken after the coup that ended Trujillo’s reign, a torrent of bullets killing the general in his blue Chevy Bel Air outside of Santo Domingo in 1961. Along with doctors, professors, and other Dominican activists, Rodriguez co-edited an anti-Trujillo newspaper called the Tribuna Libre. The newspaper called for the release of political prisoners and the erection of a monument to a countryman killed by Trujillo’s regime, and it waxed passionate about the “patriotic frenzy that one day will inspire a cry welling hopelessly from our breast: LIBERTY!”

  But for all his boldness, Victor was flighty. He sifted through business enterprises and cities like a blackjack player trying his luck at different tables. Ultimately, he decided that financial stability was worth breaking his son’s heart.

  When Alex was four, Victor decided that they would be better off in the Dominican Republic. The family moved back to Santo Domingo, living in Victor’s sister’s home, and began to struggle financially. Two years later, they bounced to Miami. Victor tried to convince Lourdes to move the family back to New York. He wanted the “fast-paced” life in the city, Alex later said, and Lourdes wanted to stay put.

  So in 1985, when Alex was six, Victor packed a bag and left. “I thought he was coming back. I thought he had gone to the store or something,” Alex Rodriguez told the Seattle Times thirteen years later, in a rare introspective interview. “I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care. But times I was alone, I often cried. Where was my father? To this day, I still can’t get close to people.”

  “He went back to New York to find a way to make a living,” says Alex’s cousin Ana Lopez. “But Tia Lourdes thought they had a future in Florida. I don’t think he intended to be separated from them, because he adored those kids.”

  Alex Rodriguez didn’t hear from Victor until the day he was picked first overall in the Major League Baseball draft, and his father called to congratulate him. Lourdes was pissed, Rodriguez later said: “My special day, Mom thought, and my father had no right to be a part of it.”

  • • •

  After his baseball dreams died in high school, Tony Bosch always figured he’d find his destiny in medical school. Practicing medicine ran in the blood. Both his parents, as well as several cousins including Orlando, had donned a doctor’s white coat. In 1977, his dad, Pedro, had opened his own general practice, the Coral Way Medical Center.

  The center was a true family business. Tony’s mom, Stella, was the financial director. Tony and his younger brother, Ashley, spent hours every week at the clinic.

  “Tony always had a love for medicine,” says Hernan Dominguez, a childhood friend and later a business partner, whose father was also a doctor.

  Unfortunately, Tony Bosch was no more dedicated to his grades than he was to improving his baseball game. When he graduated in 1982, there was no hope of a premed program taking him in. He bounced in and out of undergrad programs at two private schools in North Carolina before coming back home to start a two-year respiratory medicine degree at Miami Dade College, a community school in downtown Miami.

  While studying, he met Tiki Rodriguez, an easygoing Miami native who was charmed by Tony. They dated for a few years, and in August 1984, they married. De Armas walked as one of Bosch’s best men. The next day, Bosch returned the favor by walking in De Armas’s wedding. The two newly married couples joined each other for a honeymoon in Acapulco.

  Tony Bosch was radiant, and not just because he was a newlywed. He was about to take the next step toward joining the family trade.

  Working as a low-paid respiratory therapist didn’t fit that bill. Bosch had enrolled at the Universidad Central Del Este in the Dominican Republic, one of the Caribbean’s biggest medical schools. It wasn’t recognized in the United States, but the degree would open doors toward getting into an Ameri
can program, something Tony could never have earned with his middling grades. So after returning from their Mexican honeymoon, Bosch and Tiki packed up and moved to San Pedro de Macorís, the university town on the south coast of the Dominican Republic.

  Once again, Tony couldn’t cut it. To him, home was a handsome, two-story house on a tree-shaded lane in a wealthy Miami enclave. Now twenty-three years old, he suddenly found himself living in a poverty-stricken city in the heart of the Third World, where electricity and water were spotty, with a new wife to support and Spanish-language medical classes all day.

  Bosch tried for about two years but eventually bailed out and moved back to Miami. “He moved down there with his wife and it was just too much responsibility,” Dominguez says. “He had to drop out.”

  So he devised an easier way to break into medical business: salesmanship. Bosch reconnected with De Armas, who’d recently moved back to Miami. The two old friends set up a business reselling medical supplies.

  It wasn’t a glamorous gig, but, to De Armas’s surprise, the friends were good at it. Pedro’s connections in the medical world and among Little Havana’s tightly knit Cuban community gave them a natural in, and for the first time, Roger saw his childhood friend’s true gift.

  Tony Bosch couldn’t hit or field and was nobody’s idea of an athlete. He was smart, but not nearly driven enough to cut it in medical school. He didn’t have his uncle Orlando’s fiery passion or his dad’s steely self-determination.

  But damned if Tony couldn’t sell anything.

  “Great marketers are basically great at bullshit, and no one was better at bullshitting than Tony,” De Armas says. “Tony could sell you a waterfront condo in the Everglades and you’d thank him on the way out.”

  While De Armas held down the office and organized orders, Tony visited doctors’ offices around Dade County, selling them on new equipment, basic supplies, or anything else he could convince them to pay him for. With his coy smile and dark mess of hair, Tony was even more popular with the young women who worked at the front desks.

  Miami Med Management Consultants made respectable profits. Bosch and his wife bought a small house in the Gables, and in 1987, they had a daughter.

  Tony also found his way back out onto the diamond. He’d played recreational softball ever since graduating from high school. Now that he had a profitable company, which he shared with the equally baseball-loving De Armas, Bosch arrived at the idea of sponsoring a team.

  Though the regional fad has been largely forgotten, in the late 1980s, softball in Miami was hitting a peak moment in the zeitgeist. Every weekend, on floodlit fields in Tropical Park or on baseball diamonds across Hialeah, thousands gathered to wallop slow-pitched balls and to swig beers after games. There’s no doubt that the heart of the softball scene was recreational and booze-soaked, but there was also a hard-edged competitive spirit growing.

  In part, it was fed by the same incredibly deep talent pool that had made high school ball such a challenge for kids like Tony Bosch. The gifted players who had made those teams, and even the guys who went on to star in college or play in the minors, all flooded softball leagues to recapture their glory days.

  Miami’s booming underworld of drug lords also saw an investment opportunity in the amateur teams. The city’s immigrant influx had changed it in more ways than just its baseball pedigree. In 1980, Fidel Castro had hoodwinked President Jimmy Carter into allowing more than 125,000 Cubans to immigrate to Miami. What Carter didn’t know was that a large number were violent criminals and mental patients culled from the island’s asylums and prisons. The Mariel Boatlift, as the fiasco became known, remade Miami as thousands of hardened criminals slaughtered one another in South Beach and made Biscayne Bay the heart of America’s cocaine trade.

  Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta—a pair later betrayed by their own meticulous bookkeeping, which revealed the scope of their operation—imported roughly seventy-five tons of cocaine, worth about $1 billion, into Miami before they were caught. And they also built an ass-kicking softball team, called the Seahawks. Falcon and Magluta paid one nineteen-year-old Canadian pitcher $50,000, and gave him a bright red Porsche, to move to Florida to be the team’s ringer.

  “Some of the biggest sponsors back then are in prison now,” says Jesus Morales, a longtime player, organizer, and unofficial historian of Miami’s softball scene. “There were guys who would spend $200,000 or $250,000 sponsoring a softball team.”

  Bosch didn’t have the liquid assets of a cocaine kingpin, but he and De Armas sank a few thousand dollars into uniforms, and the Miami Meds were born. Every year, they added a few more competitive players and stepped up a rung on the competitive ladder. By 1990, the team was so stacked that Bosch and De Armas only penciled themselves into the lineup if there was a blowout.

  The best player on that year’s squad was Paul Biocic, a speedy, powerful hitter who’d played college ball in Chicago before moving to Miami for work. “He truly loved what he was doing with the team,” Biocic recalls of Bosch. “He didn’t play hardly at all, but anything we needed done practice-wise, he was there: throwing batting practice, shagging flies, just helping out.”

  With the stacked roster, the team pulled off a Miracle Mets–esque run through the playoffs, rolling to a state title in Clearwater to earn a bid to Alabama. There, they blasted through a ninety-one-team field to earn a title game tilt with another Miami-area team.

  With Biocic starring, they won and hoisted a national title. It was just softball, but it was a big deal. The victory earned a write-up in the Miami Herald’s sports section, and Tony Bosch exulted in the victory, hosting a drunken celebration at his house when the team returned to town. “He was ecstatic,” De Armas says.

  • • •

  The story of how prepubescent Alex Rodriguez, the boy without a father, ended up playing organized ball is apocryphal, shifting in every newspaper profile, young adult tome, and unauthorized biography in which some version is retold. It’s Major League Baseball’s Malcolm-X-picking-up-the-Koran-in-prison moment. The elements are usually similar: sweltering Miami day. Eight-year-old Alex hanging alone on some monkey bars. A Little League team gathers to practice—or, alternatively, to play a game. They’re one kid short.

  A big, bearded coach lands his eyes on the jungle gym runt. “Hey, kid, do you want to play?”

  The heart of the story is true. The coach was J. D. Arteaga, who is said to have been the first to notice that Alex—playing that day against kids two years older than him—was of a special talent and composure.

  Arteaga’s son, also named JD, became Rodriguez’s best friend. The Arteagas brought him to the Hank Kline Boys & Girls Club and introduced him to Eduardo Marcelino Rodriguez, the trim, intense coach forever prowling the facility. If your elbow sagged while batting, Eddie Rodriguez was the sort who would come running out of the dugout—screaming a blue streak—and slap your arm back to proper stance. Alex craved such tough love.

  Probing for acceptance and guidance from older male mentors was a quest in which Rodriguez partook well into adulthood, with varying degrees of success. Scott Boras, Jose Canseco, and Joe Torre all found themselves taking under their wing this insecure kid named Alex with the net worth of a CEO and the sweet stroke of Joe DiMaggio. “He was constantly looking for people he could trust,” says childhood friend Tom Bernhardt.

  Eddie was one of those first dad stand-ins, as Alex sometimes pulled out a sleeper couch to spend the night at the facility. “His mom worked two jobs,” says Bernhardt of Alex, “so the Boys Club was basically his home.”

  It was also sometimes home for Eddie. Nicknamed “El Gallo” or “Macho Eddie,” he had first been hired by the facility at age sixteen. During a divorce, Eddie Rodriguez, who then made $28,000 a year, also lived on a fold-out couch at the Boys & Girls Club. And in 1993, the Miami Herald reported that he was arrested and suspended for allegedly accepting a $400 bribe to fabricate paperwork getting a traffic offender out of community service at the clu
b. (That record has been expunged and Rodriguez refused to discuss the case with the authors.)

  But as the reigning shah of Miami-area Boys & Girls Clubs, Eddie was the keeper of regional elite youth baseball talent. Danny Tartabull, Rafael Palmeiro, and Jose Canseco, all of whom became baseball superstars, played ball at the local clubs when they were young.

  Eddie Rodriguez, a Cuban-born former minor league ballplayer who wore skintight black shirts and big crucifix necklaces, mentored Alex throughout his childhood and into his professional career—turning against his protégé only when A-Rod was nearly middle-aged and his constant scandals pissed Eddie off for the last time.

  A peculiar baseball-obsessed family sprouted at the Boys & Girls Club. The de facto hitting instructor was a wizened security guard the kids called “The Old Man.” Septugenarian Rene Janero had played ball in Cuba and now lived on the club grounds. He didn’t speak a lick of English, but he was a master of the fluid swing.

  Alex Rodriguez then lived in a Miami suburb called West Kendall with his mom, Susy, Joe, and, at times, Yuri Sucart. Rodriguez, twelve years younger than Anthony Bosch, lived six miles down the traffic-clogged artery of US 1, also known as West Dixie Highway, from Coral Gables, where Bosch grew up.

  That short drive signified a world of change between Bosch’s upbringing and that of Rodriguez. High-end department stores became strip malls. Teenagers drove battered Mitsubishis instead of new BMWs. Red-tiled, white-stucco villas were replaced by the sort of shabby suburban family houses you’ll see anywhere in America, albeit with palm trees in the yard.

  This was the divide Rodriguez struggled to reconcile throughout his teenage years, even into adulthood. At the time, baseball earned him entry to exclusive prep schools. While his classmates’ parents were doctors and attorneys, Lourdes’s two jobs included shifts at a place called El Pollo Supremo.

  He was a latchkey kid from Washington Heights and the Dominican Republic, trying to break into the rarefied environs belonging to the Bosch children of the world. “Alex probably felt inferior,” says Tom Bernhardt, himself the son of a successful insurance agent. “On the outside he was cocky, but on the inside he was scared. He didn’t know who to talk to. He was around all these affluent people. He must have thought, I don’t have the background that all these kids have, so how am I going to make it? And the only answer was sports.”