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The Many Lives Of Alex Rodriguez
Harper
May 2009
On Sale: May 4, 2009
272 pages ISBN: 0061791644 EAN: 9780061791642 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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