Juiced (9 page)

That was the pattern, from that year on. It started circulating a little bit that I might be doing steroids, and more and more reporters were criticizing me for gaining all this weight and stacking up the home runs. McGwire just kept getting bigger and bigger, but he was always protected by the media and by the organization.

And me? I was left out to dry.

7. My First Lamborghini

Dangerous car. What if you're doing a mere 50, do you
have the illusion of being parked and try to step out of
the car?
-
SPORTSWRITER SCOTT OSTLER,

After I was pulled over for doing 125 in my Jaguar and said the car was so smooth, I thought I was only doing 50 mph. As long as I can remember, I've always loved cars-especially fast cars. So many baseball players drive sports utility vehicles now, rather than sports cars, but I don't really understand it. If I had two weaknesses in my life, they would have to be fast cars and women. I never spent that much money on other stuff. Some baseball players were into piling up a lot of diamonds and jewelry and expensive clothing and shot's. Other guys had a passion for houses and wanted to have them all over

the place. But cars and women were really enough for me, When I drove fast, it would be at nighttime on a deserted road. I never put anyone in danger. Nowadays, you see guys driving fast in heavy traffic and swerving in and out. I never toyed with death-not that way.

Most of all, I loved the power and the look of a really fast car, It was such an adrenaline rush, knowing you had six or seven hundred horsepower under your hood, and at any time you wanted, you could just step on it and shoot past any other car on the road. That was a great feeling. I was never into long car trips.

That didn't make much sense with those high-horsepower cars, I don't know how they could take traveling over a hundred miles. I'd mostly just use my sports cars to go back and forth to the ballpark, or out to dinner, or to a club.

Nothing can quite match the first time you buy yourself a brand-new sports car. Esther and I drove down to Santa Cruz, about an hour south of Oakland, to Bruce Canepa Motors. I was really excited driving through the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The car was a custom-built Porsche 911 Turbo Slant Nose, and I'd heard a lot about what a great car it was. We pulled up and I got my first look at the 911, a white-and-black convertible, and it was so beautiful, I just stared at it endlessly. Bruce told us all about the car and how it handled. He used to race cars on the circuit, and he was very knowledgeable about high performance cars.

We got in to take a spin through the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Esther decided she'd stay put rather than squeezing into the small back seat. It was a good thing she did, too. We were driving through hills and mountains and Bruce was taking these turns so fast, the back end would spin out. This man made me shit my pants; I thought I was going to die. But he was in complete control of that machine.

I had to buy it, no two ways about it. It cost me ninety grand, but driving the 911 back home that day was such a great feeling.

I loved that car. It had the perfect engine and the perfect combination of speed and handling, and I liked that it was a convertible so I could just let the wind blow. That was the first sports car I ever owned, and I really should have kept it; today the Porsche 911 Turbo Slant Nose is considered a classic. But later on, I ended up selling that car to Ivan Rodriguez. I wonder if he still has it today.

My second sports car was a Ferrari; then I picked up a Corvette, the car I'd been thinking about for so long, jogging past the dealership on my way to the gym. (Actually, I got two of them.)

A white Lamborghini came soon, and later I bought another. There was also at least one Jaguar in there, metallic red with twelve cylinders, and a BMW.

I think at one point I had twelve cars. Soon after I met Jessica, who became my second wife, she came to see me in Texas, and in the garage I had a '93 Testarossa, a Lamborghini, a white Ferrari, and my 930 Porsche-not to mention the Chevy Suburban parked out on the street. When Jessica needed to drive to Arlington Stadium, my housekeeper, Vera, told her to take her pick.

"Just go in the garage and take one of the cars and meet him at the game," she told Jessica.

So Jessica went out into the garage and just stood there, looking at all these sports cars. Then she turned back to Vera. "I can't drive any of those cars," she said. But Vera insisted, and Jessica ended up driving my Porsche to the ballpark that night. (She did fine.)

At that time, I had built up a pretty nice collection of modified Porsches. I had one of them custom-made with 820 horsepower; that car was probably the fastest street-legal Porsche in the state of Florida, if not the whole United States. I used to race motorcycles on the highway with that thing. I'd be out on I-75, and motorcycles would want to race me. They thought they could beat me easy, but that Porsche could do about 240 miles an hour. I'd be racing those motorcycles going almost 200 miles an hour in third gear, and they'd freak out. They couldn't believe how fast the car was. I took it up to 200 miles an hour one time, just to see what it could do, but never faster than that.

The fastest I've ever gone in a car was 202 miles per hour. That was in my Lamborghini Diablo, which cost me about $225,000 and had license plates saying "40-40." Once, when I first moved to Weston, Jessica and I took the car down I-75 in Florida-which was a new road back then. There were no cars out there at all, and we were all alone with all that newly paved highway.

"Wow, how fast is a Diablo?" I started thinking. "I wonder if it can really do 205 the way they said it can."

So I decided to find out. I took that Lamborghini up to 202 miles an hour-I remember watching the needle creep just past 200. The Diablo is wide and low, fiat to the ground; the faster you go, the more you hug the road. It's basically a detailed race car and handles the speed like a dream.

Once I hit 202, we passed a cop, and he flashed his lights at me. I didn't want to take any chances and was going to slow down. "Listen, the exit is only about three or four miles up," Jessica said. "Why don't you just keep going?"

Like an idiot, I listened to her. We kept going, blowing right out of the cop's reach, but then only a mile farther down the road, there was a bunch of cops waiting for me. I had slowed down, but I was still going about 120 when I reached them.

They pulled me over, and I sat there waiting for these cops to walk up to the car. I was so worried, I started sweating and shaking. "My God, these guys are going to put me in jail," I told Jessica. "My career is over. I'm going to be arrested. I'm done, completely done."

These two young officers walked to the side of the car. I reached over to roll down the window to talk to them; I was so jumpy, my hand was shaking. They saw that, and they knew I was nervous.

"Don't worry, Mr. Canseco, we're not going to arrest you,"

they told me. "We just wanted to see the inside of your car." The Lamborghini Diablo had just come out then, and these young cops had never seen one before.

I sat there staring at them for a minute. "Here, take my car," I said after a minute. "You can have it."

Then I started joking with them.

"Go ahead, take it for a ride," I told them. "You can do whatever you want." Apparently, I could, too; those cops let me off the hook.

Another time, I had that Diablo with me at spring training in Arizona. I parked it at the team hotel and was off with the team when someone staying at the hotel backed his Ford Escort into the Lamborghini, causing twenty thousand dollars in damages. But what can you do? I came back later and talked to the driver of the car and even autographed a baseball for his son. As I've said, despite my reputation, I'm basically a calm person.

I think with age certain things change in your life. I'm forty years old now, and my main priority is my daughter, so I don't need fast cars. I still have my Bentley and my Escalade, my Mercedes, and so forth, but I really don't need ten or twelve cars anymore. I think my favorite car right now would be my Bentley, for its combination of luxury, looks, and sports-car power. It's a 450-horsepower turbo, it's all handmade, and it weighs two and a half tons. Not bad for a practical family car.

I loved the feeling of going fast, but some other players would get scared if you took them out on the open road and let it fly which made for some pretty hairy episodes. One night back in 1990, I was back in Florida for the off-season, and Frank Thomas was one of several players who had come down there for a card show. We did what we had to do at the card show, pocketed the cash, and decided to go out afterward.

Frank rode with me in my Ferrari. We were leaving the restaurant, and two Porsches pulled up and wanted to race me.

That happened a lot in Florida. If you had a car like that, people always wanted to see what it could do. So the next thing you knew, Frank and I were racing these two Porsches-or I guess I was doing the racing and Frank was just holding on for dear life.

He was already really nervous at that point.

We had the Ferrari out on the highway doing about 130 miles an hour, and I didn't realize that up ahead, the highway was turning right on the short side. Frank, sitting in the passenger's seat, had a better view. I could feel him tensing up. "Jose!" he said.

"Frank, I got it," I told him.

"Oh shit!" he said.

I downshifted and braked hard and the Ferrari went into a spin. We almost hit the railing, but I pulled out of it easily enough, and once I did, I glanced over at Frank. I've never in my whole life seen such a big guy look so scared. Frank thought for sure I'd killed us both. He was white, just stone-cold white - which is kind of unusual for a black man.

8. Imports, Road Beef, and Extra Cell Phones

If you're really interested in finding out
about a city's pro athletes, go straight to
where they hang out... strip clubs.
-
ZEV BOROW,
ESPN The Magazine

Here's something you probably don't know about Roger Clemens: He's one of the very few baseball players I know who never cheated on his wife. I was amazed by him, to be honest. His wife should be very proud of him. You see all these other guys-oh, my God, every chance they got, they would be hitting the strip clubs. They would have extra girls staying in the team hotel, one room over from their wives, so they could go back and forth from room to room if they wanted. They would have their choice of women in damn near every city imaginable.

Roger was the exception to that. I went out with him a bunch of times when there were beautiful women around, and he had a lot of opportunities and never took them. I was with him enough times to realize: This man never cheated on his wife. He was one of the rarities, the anomalies, in baseball. I can hardly think of anyone else who never cheated on his wife. I wish I could count myself as an exception, but I can't.

Sex is a big part of the game. The main reason is that it's just so easy to find. Wherever baseball players go, women want them. The women let the players know they want them and they make themselves available. I truly believe that if it weren't made so easy for them, 60 percent of baseball players wouldn't cheat at all. But it's just made too easy for us. We're men; we have egos and libidos, and that's a tough set of forces to combat.

The women I was involved with were always drop-dead gorgeous; you just couldn't turn them down. You never lost any love for your wife at home. But men are men, and many of us want something different than our wives back home. That's just human nature, even if your wife is spectacularly beautiful and you're truly in love with her. Men can cheat at times without having it mean anything at all. The only problem is that you might find a girl, realize that you really like her, and start to have a real relationship with her-that kind of thing tends to damage your marriage.

When I was out on the road, men I'd never met before were trying to hook me up. On two different occasions, I went to do a card show and, at the end, when they were supposed to be paying me, one of the organizers pulled me aside and made me an offer "Jose, for your payment, you can have sex with my wife-and I'll watch," each of these guys said.

"I'll take the money," I said.

But I was no prince. Sometimes, when I was down in Anaheim hanging out in my hotel suite with a few friends and business associates, and we would organize beauty contests with twenty or thirty girls. We would have these great-looking women all gathered in the suite, and they would parade around in bathing suits as we played the part of the judges, with an elaborate rating system and everything. Based on those ratings, we would choose the top fifteen girls-and then later, after the game, we'd take all fifteen out with us in a limousine to hit some clubs.

I always saw myself as more of an entertainer than a baseball player, and I was always very up front about it. Some people didn't like to hear that back then, but now I think most people have accepted that baseball is as much an entertainment business as a game. I never had a problem with thinking of baseball as entertainment. Actually, I always enjoyed that part of it.

People used to like to come out to the ballpark just to watch me during batting practice. When People magazine named me one of their fifty most beautiful people, I just laughed-but I think it was because they saw me as an entertainer, too.

I was a novelty. I was six four, 240 pounds, and I could run the forty-yard dash in 4.3 seconds. I was unusual looking for a baseball player, and I think that kind of fed the public's curiosity about me. That was definitely true of women. They wanted to meet me, and talk to m e . . . and see where things led from there.

Did I sleep with a lot of those women? Sure I did. But I'm not talking about outrageous numbers of women. That was never my style, trying to work on my personal statistics. I know Wilt Chamberlain says he slept with thousands of women, but that sounds crazy to me. I don't keep count, but if I had to guess, I'd say maybe a couple hundred. I know a lot of ballplayers who have slept with far more women than I did in my years on the road.