by Tim Elfrink
Immediately following the Sports Illustrated exposé and before this press conference, Rodriguez had admitted in a televised interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs from 2001 to 2003. If he had confessed to that span of years, instead of just the season in which he was caught, in an attempt to appear more forthcoming, it was certainly a half measure. Rodriguez, after all, did not tell Gammons—or anybody—that he had requested permission to use testosterone and other banned substances in the two years prior to that interview, 2007 and 2008.
He blamed “tremendous pressure” from the record-breaking contract, his own youthful naïveté, and the permissive culture of the pre-Mitchell MLB. Or, as the baby-talking-under-pressure Rodriguez said, “it was such a loosey-goosey era.”
Rodriguez had then claimed to be uncertain as to what he had taken that caused him to fail the urine test. “There’s many things that you can take that are banned substances,” he told Gammons. “I mean, there’s things that have been removed from GNC today that would trigger a positive test. I’m not sure exactly what substance I used. But whatever it is, I feel terribly about it.”
Following the half confession, Rangers owner Tom Hicks said he felt “personally betrayed.” (Considering the number of implicated, admitted, or proven steroid users on that particular Texas team, the billionaire must feel perpetually abused.) Even Barack Obama weighed in, saying in his first presidential press conference that the Rodriguez news was “depressing” and adding, “it’s unfortunate, because I think there are a lot of ballplayers who played it straight.”
But Don Hooton saw an opportunity. He watched on television as Rodriguez said to Gammons that he had “the rest of my career to devote myself to children.”
Hooton dug up a business card he had for Yankees president Randy Levine, whom he had met in his dealings with MLB. “If he’s interested in working with kids,” Hooton told Levine, “we’ve got a way to reach kids.”
The Yankees and A-Rod’s burgeoning squad of hired damage-control specialists jumped at the offer. Hooton was a VIP invitee at the spring training press conference. He didn’t much care about Rodriguez’s intentions as long as the superstar spoke to kids about the dangers of steroids. “There were a lot of people who told us, ‘Alex and the team is just using you,’” says Hooton. “My response was, ‘You’re absolutely right, but we’re using him, too.’”
Four years later, Rodriguez walked this same plank, but with little to no fellowship from fellow Yankees and team officials. And certainly not from Hooton. But this time around, the Yankees stood by their third baseman, who had hit eighty-nine home runs in the past two seasons. “We support Alex, and we will do everything we can to help him deal with this challenge and prepare for the upcoming season,” the team declared in a statement.
Because after the first Steroid Era came the Apology Era. Only a year earlier, Yanks ace Pettitte, after being named in the Mitchell Report, had held a press conference in this same spring training facility to ask God, in an aw-shucks Texan drawl, for forgiveness for using growth hormone. When he pitched his last game several years later, the New York Times paid homage to his career with a lengthy tribute that made no mention of performance enhancers.
In the post-Mitchell hangover, baseball was handing out free passes. This was A-Rod’s.
But Rodriguez—who only a year earlier had emphatically told Katie Couric on 60 Minutes that he had never used performance-enhancing drugs—had a hard time getting his new story straight at the February 2009 press conference.
While in the Gammons interview only a week earlier he claimed he hadn’t known he had failed a test, this time he acknowledged that in 2004 he had been informed of the possibility by MLBPA chief Gene Orza. He had told Gammons that Selena Roberts was a “stalker” who had broken into his Miami Beach house, but now he said that was a “misunderstanding of facts” and that he had apologized to her on the phone. And, most notably, Rodriguez no longer claimed that the mystery substance came from GNC.
The injectable drug was called “boli,” he said. “Going back to 2001, my cousin started telling me about a substance that you could purchase over-the-counter in DR,” Rodriguez said, reading from sheets of paper. “It was his understanding that it would give me a dramatic energy boost and [was] otherwise harmless. My cousin and I, one more ignorant than the other, decided it was a good idea to start taking it. My cousin would administer it to me, but neither of us knew how to use it properly, [proving] just how ignorant we both were.”
Asked who transported the “boli” from the Dominican, Rodriguez replied: “Same person.” He then refused to name his cousin. “I am here to stand front and center and take the blame because I am responsible for this.”
But he had given the American sportswriting corps new prey to chase. And for them, figuring out to whom Rodriguez was referring was really just a matter of recollecting past assignments. When a features writer had Rodriguez as a subject, the cousin was the chubby, mustachioed chauffeur who drove the superstar to the interview. When a photographer shot Rodriguez for a magazine spread, he was the unobtrusive fellow in a tracksuit, hands patiently clasped as his cousin preened for the camera.
Within twenty-four hours of the Tampa press conference, ESPN had identified the cousin: Yuri Sucart. The name trended on Google. Bloggers posted aerial views of his family’s Kendall home. An ESPN.com scribe got to work on a three-thousand-word chronicle of the life and times of Yuri Sucart, divulging everything from his favorite cigar store to his love of rice and beans with burnt bacon. He became daily fodder for the New York Daily News and the New York Post, tabloids in which he was referred to as A-Rod’s “steroid mule.”
Rodriguez didn’t only sell out Sucart to the press. Rob Manfred, then MLB’s executive vice president of labor relations, traveled to the spring training site to interview Rodriguez about the steroids revelation. It was the first instance in four consecutive years in which league officials traveled to Florida to discuss various PED controversies with Rodriguez. The embattled superstar sat with the executive, another MLB attorney, and a league investigator and revealed Sucart’s role in traveling to the Dominican Republic for the “boli,” which he gave to Rodriguez, according to Manfred’s confidential arbitration testimony obtained by these authors. “I believe in the interview he also indicated that he helped in the administration of those drugs,” Manfred added.
The league officials attempted to interview Sucart as well, but he refused to participate. The mysterious cousin also never issued as much as a prepared statement to the sportswriters hounding him. “As a result of the information Mr. Rodriguez had provided and based on his refusal to participate in an interview,” as Manfred later testified, the league banned him from all MLB facilities. This was not a positive career development for a major league right-hand man.
Records reveal that for Sucart, the timing was particularly bad. His plan of buying a few properties around Miami and renting to tenants—a piddling version of his little cousin’s Newport Property Ventures—had imploded with the real estate crash.
By the end of 2008, three of the Sucarts’ properties, with mortgages of more than $1 million, were all in foreclosure. Yuri Sucart’s real estate speculation caused him to lose his family’s home and all properties but one shabby complex.
Sucart’s friends blamed Rodriguez for using his cousin as a human shield, forever linking the previously anonymous Miamian to drugs in the process. “Yuri is a very honest guy, sincere and trustworthy,” says friend Roger Ball. “He practically raised Alex at times. And he got ‘F’-ed.”
Immediately after finishing the press conference, Rodriguez made a beeline for Don Hooton and shook his hand as cameras clicked. In the weeks to come, the Taylor Hooton Foundation set up speaking engagements for Rodriguez.
Don Hooton and his remorseful superstar developed a regular routine at high schools, universities, and Boys & Girls Clubs in the Bronx, Tampa, Miami, and other cities up and down the East
Coast. Hooton would speak for about forty-five minutes on the dangers of steroid use, and then Rodriguez would surprise the students by popping in and giving his own speech. “It was kind of like introducing Santa Claus,” Hooton says of the students’ typical reaction.
“God has given you all that you need,” Hooton says Rodriguez told the kids. “You may not have enough to be a successful third baseman for the Yankees, but you have enough to be a doctor or a lawyer or a plumber. You have enough to succeed.”
Then Rodriguez remarked that he wished the Taylor Hooton Foundation had been around when he was young, to steer him away from steroids.
Even in the first few weeks of that relationship with Hooton, as Rodriguez fought to regain his reputation as a clean player, he was already making the next connection that again publicly tied him to illicit substances.
In 2009, Rodriguez grappled with a hip injury but completed one of the most rewarding seasons of his career. He was finally able to silence the criticism that he choked under playoff pressure. And that quick recovery was thanks in part to undisclosed treatments from a Canadian physician he liked to call “Dr. G.”
• • •
Dr. Anthony Galea’s trouble with the law began, he says, with a phone call from the agent of a felonious football player in 2006. The call led Galea to a new career illicitly treating American pro athletes with cutting-edge—and in at least one case, banned—procedures, the elusive details of which became the target of an obsessive quest by MLB officials.
Running back Jamal Lewis had been one of the best players in University of Tennessee history. He was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens in the first round of the 2000 draft. He had run for 103 yards, including a touchdown, in the Ravens’ Super Bowl victory over the New York Giants in his rookie season. In 2003, he was named that season’s MVP of the National Football League.
But after being caught by tape-recorded conversations with an FBI informant, Lewis pleaded guilty to arranging for an associate to buy cocaine at a wholesale price. In 2005, he spent four months at a federal prison camp in Pensacola, Florida.
Lewis was back with the Ravens the next year, and his agent called Galea, who was well-known in Canada as a sports specialist and team doctor for the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts. The agent told Galea of a “knee injury no one could fix” that had plagued Lewis since his college days, the doctor’s attorneys later recounted in a court document—“a severe case of patella tendinitis.”
Galea later professed that he “felt powerless” to turn down athletes like Lewis who were “begging him to see them in the US where they were unable to come to Toronto,” even though he knew he was breaking the law.
That first trip was by the book, Galea maintains: He alerted border inspectors to his purpose, and his consultation with Lewis was supervised by a Ravens team doctor.
Formerly hobbled and freshly jail-sprung, Lewis responded as if touched by a “healer,” which is often the word Galea’s athletic patients use to describe him. He played all sixteen of his team’s games and had more rushing attempts than any season in his career.
When NFL colleagues asked Lewis about his amazing recovery, he told them about the doctor north of the border. Galea’s reputation spread through the league and into other American sports, until finally word of the Canadian miracle man reached two of the biggest names in sports: Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods.
• • •
In what could be considered a dry run for later, bigger trouble, customs officers stopped a man toting a medicine bag as he attempted to enter Australia for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Anthony Galea, who has arching, catlike facial features and wears his black hair spiky, explained that he was a member of Canada’s medical team, according to a later account by the Globe and Mail.
The officers took a look in his bag and found ephedrine, an active ingredient in cold medicine, which is banned by the Olympic committee. And then they learned that Galea—who was staying with Canadian runners including top sprinter Donovan Bailey at a “safe house” outside of the Olympic Village—had, in fact, no official role with the national team.
Galea was allowed to enter the country without the banned drugs, and the incident was largely forgotten. But it elucidated the trouble with Galea, a medical maverick whose genius lay in fearless and successful adoption of procedures considered too bizarre or risky by mainstream physicians. Galea regularly shot himself with HGH, provided patients with a controversial calf’s-blood extract that hadn’t been approved in Canada or the United States, and pioneered a space-age blood-spinning procedure that made the World Anti-Doping Agency nervous.
In Dr. Galea’s medicine bag, elite athletics and banned substances made their queasy intersection.
In fawning news articles before a seismic fall from grace and court filings after, Galea described his life in almost prophetic terms. The son of a beautician and a bookkeeper, Galea says he knew by age seventeen that he’d be a sports doctor. He told his neighbor of his plans, and she jokingly promised she’d work for him. “Years later, after completing his medical training [at Canada’s McMaster University] Dr. Galea called her on her promise and she complied,” Galea’s attorneys wrote. “Donna still works as his office manager.”
The director of a clinic called the Institute of Sports Medicine, and the official physician for the country’s tennis and ski teams, Galea oversaw urine tests of Olympic athletes as a doping control officer. He warned of the proliferation of steroids, especially among boys. “We want males to look like Marky Mark, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone,” Galea lamented in 1995. “So teenage boys do everything in their power to look like that.”
Galea fathered a brood of picturesque, private-schooled kids. In 1999, at forty years old, he divorced the mother of his four children and married an eighteen-year-old tennis pro. “His behaviour change[d] dramatically,” his former wife wrote in divorce filings. “He became disinterested in family life.”
He had three more kids with his young new wife. His treatments became more daring, his actions eccentric.
Galea started tossing and turning in bed in his downtown Toronto condo. “Go to Jerusalem,” a Field of Dreams–esque voice told Galea, who had been raised Catholic. He obeyed the voice and experienced a spiritual epiphany in an ancient olive grove. “It felt like someone had put an intravenous in my veins and poured in a combination of fire and love,” Galea told an Israeli journalist, and he volunteered his care for the country’s many wounded soldiers.
His treatments made him both famous and, ultimately, notorious. Galea took a liking to the medical patents of a Miami-area doctor named Allan R. Dunn, whose off-label use of human growth hormone consisted of scraping away scar tissue from inflamed joints and refilling the area with HGH. Dunn says he performs the procedure almost exclusively on elderly patients—the ubiquitous snowbirds of Florida—but he did use it to help former NFL player Abdul-Karim al-Jabbar recover from a career of hard hits.
Galea has frequently cited Dunn in medical lectures and court filings, constant shout-outs that irk the Florida doctor. “I wish he would stop doing that,” says Dunn. “I would like to tell him to get lost. I don’t want any part of him.”
Galea put his own spin on Dunn’s methods, adding a substance called Actovegin to the mix. The calf’s-blood extract, said to quicken tissue recovery periods, has not been banned by the Olympics or major sports leagues, and the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt, has made trips to Germany to be administered the stuff. But its sale and import is not approved in Canada, and its use is illegal in the United States.
Galea found a way around both hurdles, as US authorities later learned.
With HGH and Actovegin, completing Galea’s holy trinity of designer treatment procedures was his use of platelet-rich plasma injections. He gained fame among Canadian athletes for the technique, in which he placed a patient’s own blood into a special spinning centrifuge before injecting it into an injury site, purportedly speeding recovery. The
World Anti-Doping Agency banned the practice from athletes it governs, before legalizing it pending further evidence as to whether it enhances performance.
Galea gained his first significant MLB client in 2004, as revealed by a recent lawsuit. That year, Toronto slugger Carlos Delgado traveled to Galea’s office for treatment, “with the knowledge of the Blue Jays,” the since-retired player disclosed in a memorabilia-related dispute. Delgado doesn’t reveal what the treatment was for, but that season he was inflicted by nagging knee injuries—Galea’s specialty.
Galea’s attorneys maintain that his treatments involve only injury recovery, never performance enhancement. “The use of HGH is involved in less than one percent of Dr. Galea’s patients,” reads one court filing in his defense.
• • •
Tiger Woods and Alex Rodriguez have a lot in common. They’re both Florida-based kings of sport who have amassed incredible fortunes but spend an unenviable amount of time roasting in the media rotisserie.
They’re not best buds by any means, says Woods’s former swing coach, Hank Haney. Woods is closer to Jeter, Rodriguez’s teammate and rival. But sometimes the best golfer and one of the best baseball players of all time get on the phone and discuss their mutual interest: amassing the top physical trainers in the world.
From late 2008 through 2009, when Woods was facing the worst injury of his career and Rodriguez was sidelined with a lingering hip problem, they sometimes talked about the cutting-edge techniques of the two Canadian physicians treating both of them at the same time: Anthony Galea and Mark Lindsay.
