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did,” Victor says. “It made me feel good that he had something that always made him smile.”
    Victor himself was struggling with just what would make him happy. He was a searcher in need of something new, different and exciting. He was antsy again. He was having trouble fi nding a business venture that suited his ambitions. He was 59 now but not ready for the sedentary life of bingo parlors amid the swaying palms. He had business ties to a pharmacy, but he wanted something bigger,
one more hit of adrenaline. He decided that New York City was the best place for him. Victor says Lourdes had no desire to return: “I told her, ‘Let’s move back to New York. I have my credit in New York. We know how to do business in New York.’ And she said, ‘I don’t go back to New York. If you want, you can go.’ I said to her, ‘You want to go or you want to stay?’ She said, ‘I want to stay.’ I said, ‘Okay, bye-bye.’ I went by myself to New York.”
    Victor took one suitcase when he left in 1985, when Alex was 10. Day after day, Alex waited for him to return. He would stop bouncing his ball on the pavement to look down the street whenever he heard a car. How long can a man live out of one suitcase?
    “He’d always say, ‘Daddy’s coming, Daddy’s coming,’ ” Susy says.
    It was a natural response of a boy who couldn’t imagine any fi rst in his life— fi rst date, fi rst driver’s license, fi rst stolen base— unfolding without his daddy.
    “What did I know back then?” Alex once said. “I thought he was coming back. I thought he had gone to the store or something.
    But he never came back. He had been so good to me, actually spoiled me because I was the baby of the family. I couldn’t understand what he had done. I still don’t know how a man could do that to his family: turn his back.”
    At night, for a couple of years after Victor left, Alex would wait for his mother to drift off and then crawl into bed next to her, sleeping where his father had slept.
    He was suddenly a kid of divorced parents. He wasn’t the only one in the world. But to Alex, it certainly felt like it. Wasn’t he worthy of a father? Wasn’t he smart enough and talented enough to deserve a dad? Alex would go through his life always trying to overachieve and please to be forever good enough. Even great.
    What Alex couldn’t have known was that the grieving went both ways.
    Victor was liberated but devastated by his distance from Alex.
    “You cannot imagine how much I suffered when I separated from him,” Victor says. “I cannot describe it. Sometimes, when I woke up, my face was covered with tears. I was crying. I gave so much love to that small child.”
    Victor still left, though. He didn’t turn back. There would be no father to shield a boy from the minefi eld of opportunists ahead, all of whom believed one thing: that Alex could be the best ballplayer of all time.
    Chapter Two
    THE PHENOM

OF WESTMINSTER
    To watch Alex Rodriguez swing a bat in Yankee pinstripes is to witness a split-second gala of force and grace and confi dence.
    The clumsiness comes after the game, when questions sometimes result in awkward answers and contradictions. “I don’t think Alex is very good at communicating,” says Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman. “This isn’t something he does well.”
    He doesn’t talk as refl exively as he hits. It’s as if he’s pulling the cord on a See ’n Say in search of the right phrase. Where does the arrow point? This scripted Alex reveals the frailty beneath the brawn, a layer not at all surprising considering the roots of his vulnerability.
    In the spring of 1993, Alex was a teen pinup in the offi ce of every major-league GM. The scouts practically had personalized
parking spaces in Miami’s Westminster Chris tian School lot as they tracked Alex’s every throw, swing and slide during his senior year. They raved about his fi ve tools— hitting for average, hitting for power, running speed,