Juiced (11 page)

But they'd always be bringing it up and giving me shit.

"Jose, Melissa is on the phone," they'd say all the time, whether she was really calling or not.

For a while, Madonna and I would talk just about every day, although I have to say it was always kind of strange. I wouldn't say we ever really got to know each other. Usually she just called to ask about my schedule, and when we could see each other.

She never asked about baseball or anything related to that. She never talked about her own work or career. She would just ask me questions about my marriage to Esther and the details of our separation, and would try to figure out a time when we would be in the same city so we could meet again.

Madonna doesn't fool around. She's a woman who knows what she wants, and goes after what she wants, and for a few weeks that year she had decided I was what she wanted: I was Cuban, I was a superstar baseball player, and she liked the way I looked. She never really got a good look at my body when I visited her house in California, and on the phone she kept asking me a lot of questions about how different parts of my body looked. So I had the A's team photographer take a shot of me wearing nothing but some tight riding shorts, and sent that to her.

"It looks nice," she said. I didn't ask what she meant by "it."

The rumors got heavier and heavier. For some reason, there was an awful lot of curiosity about what happened between Madonna and me. I guess it's no surprise: I was the bad boy of baseball at that time and she was the bad girl of music, so we made kind of an interesting combination. There was all this talk about how she was in love with me, and how she wanted to be with me. I tried to tune it all out, but at the same time, it was a big compliment.

That May, the A's went on the road for a series against the New York Yankees, and when I arrived at our hotel in Manhattan I gave Madonna a call over at her penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park.

"Why don't you come up to my apartment?" she asked me.

"I've got to see you."

I took a taxi over to her apartment on the West Side, and as soon as I got out of the cab, I realized there were paparazzi out in front of her apartment building. She also had her own personal security guard down at the front gate. He was huge, almost seven feet tall and easily 350 pounds.

"Hi, I'm Jose," I told him.

"Yeah, I know who you are."

So as I'm walking past him toward the elevator, I can hear people talking in the background.

"Who was that?" one voice asked.

"Wasn't that Canseco?" someone else said.

I forgot all about the photographers and went up to see Madonna in her penthouse apartment. In some ways seeing her this time was a lot like the first time I'd met her, back in California. She showed me around her place, the way she had in the Hollywood Hills. But this time she didn't play any videos.

Mostly, we talked. She's a very smart woman, and when she talks, you want to listen closely. I felt like I could learn from her. We talked for more than an hour and a half, and then she came over and sat on my lap. Like I said, she was a woman who knew what she wanted and went after it.

"You want to kiss me, don't you?" she asked.

"No," I told her.

Yeah, that's what I told her. Sure, I wanted to kiss her. But I was trying to play it cool, since she'd caught me off-guard. Madonna's a very intelligent woman, someone who knows a lot about business. She's also very intuitive and very knowledgeable about life. I was impressed by the business side of her personality, but on that trip I also got to know another side of her, the little-girl side. She was very relaxed that night, and showed more of a sense of humor. Everything changed, even the tone of her voice; she wasn't Madonna-the-businesswoman or Madonna-the-pop-culture-icon. When Madonna lowers the wall around her, she's a very nice lady. So after a while, I kissed her, and we made out for a while. As curious as I was, though, I just wasn't that into her. She was pretty, but not really my type; to be honest, I didn't find her attractive enough. I was a big fan of hers, but as I sat there with her, I realized I was infatuated with the idea of it more than anything. There was no real chemistry there.

As I left her apartment that night and went downstairs, it was late, maybe two in the morning, but the paparazzi were everywhere out in front of the apartment building. None of them got past the huge security guard, but there were more than a hundred of them standing there behind him. And as I walked out, all their cameras were flashing. It was insane-like a light show at a dance club.

I woke up the next day, and there it was, the headline on the back cover of the New York Post: MADONNA'S BAT BOY. They had a picture of me walking out of her apartment building-and before I knew it everyone was talking about it. Up at Yankee Stadium, I was playing the outfield and the fans were just going nuts. They were throwing coins and batteries at me; someone even threw a bullet. You have to watch out when stuff like that comes flying out of the upper deck. At various times that season, they also threw an inflatable doll, a transistor radio, and a head of cabbage. And they spent most of the game chanting at me: "Esther and Madonna and Jose, do-dah, dodah!" (The papers had been quick to note that Esther and I were still officially married at that time.)

The next day Madonna and I talked again, and this time she got down to business: Basically, she was tired of waiting for me. "I want you to leave your wife," she told me. "I want you to be with me. We can get married."

To be honest, I didn't know what to think. She heard me hesitate, and couldn't believe it.

"What's the problem?" she asked. "Why don't you leave your wife? Are you worried about the money you're going to have to give her if you get divorced? Don't worry about that: I've got money enough for both of us."

I'll never forget that. I was thinking to myself: Damn, that's pretty impressive.

But the news of my visit with Madonna in New York was causing me all kinds of trouble. When Esther heard about it, she went berserk on me. Even if you're separated, no girl wants you to be dating someone else-or at least they don't want their faces rubbed in it on the covers of newspapers around the country.

"I can't believe what you did!" Esther screamed at me over the telephone. I wished I could make her believe the truth: The whole thing with Madonna was just a friendly deal. I never had sex with her. Never. I was quiet and shy at that time in my life; I didn't really know how to handle her. Maybe if we'd spent more time together, I might have had sex with her-eventually. But it just didn't happen.

Ultimately, I just kind of left the whole Madonna thing alone, because I was still in love with Esther. Sure, I'd been curious about meeting Madonna, but it never really developed into anything. Every time she pushed to have me come see her, I kept pushing it back; it was like I was playing hard to g e t . . . except that I really didn't want to be gotten.

There was one last time when Madonna and I did try to see each other. After the end of that season, I was back in Miami at my home on Cocoa Plum Beach. I had two boats on my dock, one a speedboat that could do about 115 miles per hour.

Madonna and I were talking on the phone, and she said I should come get her; at the time, she was living nearby at Star Island, maybe fifteen minutes away on the water.

So I got in my boat to go pick her up at her dock and headed off toward Star Island, until saw a helicopter above me. It started following me, and I could see a camera pointed down at me. I had this boat going 100 miles an hour, easy-probably 110-and I just couldn't shake this helicopter. So I had to call Madonna up and tell her what was happening.

"Listen, they're following me with this helicopter," I said. "I don't think I'm going to be able to pick you up. If I did, it would be all over the news."

I was more worried about Madonna's privacy than about my own. After that day, she and I completely shut down communication. We talked briefly when she was shooting A League of Their Own, and she wanted me to fly in and give them some instructions on how to make a baseball movie. I would have, if my schedule was clear, but I couldn't make it at that time, and that was the last time I spoke to Madonna.

It's amazing, though. Ever since then, my whole life, people I meet are always asking me about Madonna. "Jose, how was she?" they'll ask me. Or they ask me about all the crazy rumors they've heard-like the idea that she used to have a trapeze in the bedroom of her Manhattan penthouse apartment. They always ask about having sex with her. And all I can tell them is: I don't know. Ask someone who has.

I had a lot of respect for Madonna, and I didn't want to mess it up at the time by trying to have sex with her, like any ordinary guy would do. I didn't want to do anything stupid. As I got to know her, I really became more interested in her for the person she was and the things that she had accomplished.Even now, I think about her sometimes. I guess that's only natural. Eventually, she married another Cuban, Carlos Leon, and had a baby with him, but that didn't last. I've heard she goes through phases that way, and I guess that's what her infatuation with me was. But still, when Madonna had her first baby, Lourdes Maria, it did cross my mind to wonder what it would have been like. I thought to myself, Can you imagine being married to Madonna right now? Or having kids with her? What would your life really be like? Obviously, I'll never know. 

10. Thank You, Tom Boswell

When Canseco wore the uniform of the A's
or the Rangers, he was just the
colourful
black-hat wrestling villain, the way Charles
Barkley has always been a black-hat villain
at Madison Square Garden.
–
MIKE LUPICA

If I had five minutes to talk to a twenty-year-old version of myself, I wouldn't warn him off taking steroids or dating pop stars. The one piece of advice I would give him is that as much as players like to laugh at sportswriters-accusing them of being jock-sniffers or wannabes, for wearing ridiculous clothes, for not taking care of their bodies at all-the simple fact is that the media can make or break you. And let me tell you, there are some guys out there who really know how to work the angles. I can just throw up watching the total phonies go to work, guys like Cal Ripken or Alex Rodriguez; everything out of their mouths sounds like it was tested by some kind of focus group beforehand.

Alex, in particular, leaves most corporate spokesmen looking unpolished and overly sincere. He's better at politics than any politician I've ever seen. After all, he's been groomed that way.

He's been taught just to make money, money, money. As a player, he has no entertainment value; he fades into the background, and he bats second in the lineup. But he has mathematical value, and for that they pay him ridiculous money. And when it comes to dealing with the press, Alex and the other politicians in baseball just know how to say the correct thing, right on cue. They have the media eating out of their hands. So what if it's all totally false? Who cares about that? The point is, he'll always give you a sentence or two to put on TV or in your newspaper. Sure, it'll be pure drivel. There won't be a spontaneous word there. But it sounds like ballplayer talk, and that's what matters.

The media reward players who talk a lot of B.S. It used to be Cal Ripken Jr. who was most obvious about play acting for the media and projecting a bogus image; today, it's Alex who's playing that role. That's not surprising, I guess, since Alex has said that he's looked up to Cal from boyhood as some kind of hero.

The perception of Alex is that he's the clean boy-that he doesn't do anything wrong. He's always careful and does everything right. I know some reporters don't like him because he's such a boring interview, the one guy who always gives a politically correct answer. So why do they keep coming back? Because they're waiting for him to make a mistake and slip up. And someday he could: He's not the saint he's perceived to be. Eventually the media will find something nasty to write about Alex Rodriguez, because trust me, they're looking for it.

Throughout his career, Cal Ripken Jr. was completely protected by the media. With his family history in baseball, he was one of those untouchable players, the guy who could do no wrong. He even got a pass on the way he dealt with the other players. He used to stay at a separate hotel from the rest of the team, and take a separate car from the team bus. The official explanation was that it was for security reasons, but we minority players couldn't help feeling otherwise. Now, if some minority player ever tried taking a separate car, you know what the media would say: "They're not team players. They don't care about the team." But a guy like Ripken can do whatever he wants, no questions asked. The double standard strikes again.

As a player, it's hard not to get frustrated with reporters who aren't smart enough to trust their own eyes. I don't know how many times I watched a pitcher who was just firing on all his cylinders-his fastball crisp, his slider nasty, everything right over the plate-only to watch a reporter come in after he shuts out the other team and ask what he had going for him that night. Well, EVERYTHING! Sure, it may be a little easier for those of us inside the game to know what's going on. Still, you'd think that after so many years on the job these guys would pick up on what it takes.

What really gives me a laugh, though, are the numbers geeks. There are a lot of guys who have never played the game-never even been around the game-and still try to use mathematics to figure it out. That's a joke. It's impossible. Mathematical equations can't tell you if a player has an injury-not to mention if he's having troubles at home. Stats can't account for the human factor. And yet these guys all act like they're the smartest guys around; some of them act so superior it's almost embarrassing. (We'd have some fun with them if they ever showed up in a clubhouse, but usually they're too scared to talk to a player face to face.)