PEOPLE HATE HIM. Boy, wow, do they hate him. At first they loved him, and then they were confused by him, and then they were irritated by him, and now they straight-up loathe.

More often than not, the mention of Alex Rodriguez in polite company triggers one of a spectrum of deeply conditioned responses. Pained ugh. Guttural groan. Exaggerated eye roll. Hundreds of baseball players have been caught using steroids, including some of the game's best-known and most beloved names, but somehow Alex Rodriguez has become the steroid era's Lord Voldemort. Ryan Braun? Won an MVP, got busted for steroids, twice, called the tester an anti-Semite, lied his testes off, made chumps of his best friends, including Aaron Rodgers, and still doesn't inspire a scintilla of the ill will that follows Rodriguez around like a nuclear cloud.

Schadenfreude is part of the reason. Rodriguez was born with an embarrassment of physical riches -- power, vision, energy, size, speed -- and seemed designed specifically for immortality, as if assembled in some celestial workshop by baseball angels and the artists at Marvel Comics. He then had the annoyingly immense good fortune to come of age at the exact moment baseball contracts were primed to explode. Months after he was old enough to rent a car he signed a contract worth $252 million. Seven years later: another deal worth $275 million. Add to that windfall another $500 million worth of handsome, and people were just waiting. Fans will root for a megarich athlete who's also ridiculously handsome (body by Rodin, skin like melted butterscotch, eyes of weaponized hazelness), but the minute he stumbles, just ask Tom Brady, they'll stand in line to kick him in his spongy balls.

No father, no college: Those are his two gaping wounds. -

Rodriguez's defenders (and employees) are quick to say: Sheesh, the guy didn't murder anybody. But he did. A-Rod murdered Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod brutally kidnapped and replaced the virginal, bilingual, biracial boy wonder, the chubby-cheeked phenom with nothing but upside. A-Rod killed the radio star, and his fall from grace disrupted the whole symbology and mythopoesis of what it means to be a superhero athlete in modern America.

Some Rodriguez haters are less offended by his mortal sins than his venial ones. For them, it's all about the man's unerring instinct for the eye-scalding optic. Slapping the ball. Poking the Sox. Kissing the mirror. Dissing Jeter. Dating Madonna -- of all his liaisons, the most dangereuse. (From a PR standpoint, he'd have been better served dating Bernie Madoff. In fact, he'd have been better served riding a tandem bike down Broadway with Madoff on the back seat, ringing the little tinkly bell.) Other haters focus on the verbal more than the visual. They footnote their hate to some cringey utterance, of which there have been a few. Rodriguez is that inevitable byproduct of a more image-centric, less literate age -- a bilingual man who's not quite at home in either language.

And yet, if words have not been his friend, they've often been his accomplice. No matter where you come out on Rodriguez -- insufferable phony, tainted legend, harried scapegoat, fallen angel, flawed human -- it's hard to make the case that he's a jolly good fellow, because there's one fact nobody can deny. On multiple occasions Rodriguez has looked directly into TV cameras and radio microphones, into the faces of fans and friends and reporters, and said things that were flatly untrue.

How many pills, creams or needles he used, how much those pills, creams or needles might have enhanced his already towering gifts, and to what lengths he went to conceal it -- these and other questions will be debated forever, and will never fully be resolved, but there's no longer any debate about Rodriguez's credibility. He's a proven liar, a repeated liar, and thus, as he prepares to emerge from the longest steroid-related suspension in the history of baseball, as he readies himself physically and mentally for his 21st spring training, there's tremendous interest in his story, but there's just no point in quoting him.

More than no point, there's just no way.

Take a sentence from Rodriguez, set it between two quotation marks and watch what happens; it curdles like year-old milk. The words become unstable, unusable, weirdly ironic. It's not a choice, to quote or not to quote, it's simple science, obeisance to strict natural laws, to the crazy alchemy between his damaged credibility and basic punctuation. Quoting Rodriguez is like dropping a Mento into a Diet Coke. It makes a big whoosh, everyone gets excited, for about three seconds, and then it's just a mess, and you wonder what's been accomplished, besides some stickiness, and maybe a permanent stain.

In fact, don't even bother taking out a recorder or notebook in Rodriguez's presence. Aside from the fact that it induces in him a physical condition, Resting Zombie Face, and aside from the fact that he says off the record more than an allergist says gesundheit, he's forfeited his right to exactitude. No more verbatim for him. Not right now. His suspension is over, but so is the public's suspension of disbelief. If he hopes to recapture the public trust, to repair his image, it will be through actions, not words. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action, Aristotle said, and though he was speaking of storytelling, life is a never-ending story, and what holds for plot often holds for ethics. Rodriguez, deep down, knows this. He knows he's not talking his way back from purgation. Reminded, he nods, I know, I know, you're right. And then he's condemned to learn it again, and again.

For instance: He drives one night from his office in Coral Gables, Florida, to a college in downtown Miami to attend a lecture by Magic Johnson and billionaire Mike Fernandez. The two are speaking about their many successes in business, and hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs are on hand. At one point Magic asks the crowd to recognize a few luminaries in attendance. We got Ray Allen! Thunderous applause. And over here we got Alex Rodriguez! More applause, only slightly less thunderous.

Later, at a café in the Design District, sharing a plate of grilled fish and some calamari with a friend, Rodriguez glows. Uplifted, emboldened by that applause, he talks about how badly he wants to get back and play, help the team, blend into the team, have it not be about him anymore, and his words are unusually cogent, his tone nakedly earnest, altruistic. He's once again that phenom with nothing but upside. He looks hopeful, sounds hopeful, and while there's something stirring about such hope in the face of so much hate, it also seems uncharitable to continue hating in the face of such hope. When asked how it all sounds to her ears, however, his friend frowns. Total bullshit, she says.

Rodriguez's face falls.

I believe you, the friend says. I know you mean it. But your words aren't going to convince anybody.

Rodriguez looks down. He studies the grain of the wood table. He looks as if the calamari suddenly isn't sitting right in his stomach. But he nods, he gets it.

NO ONE CAN say precisely when the education of Alex Rodriguez began. Certainly not Rodriguez; his mind doesn't work that way. And surely not the people around him. Like the Red Cross right after a South Florida hurricane, they've been a little busy. But they swear it's a thing, this education, this radical home schooling he's undertaken. And maybe it's an unfair question anyway. How do you measure the start of an evolution, a metamorphosis, an accretion of character? A learning curve isn't a home run's trajectory. It doesn't always start at home plate.

Still, one date jumps out. Jan. 12, 2014. Ish. He's sitting in his Manhattan apartment, sulking like Achilles, fuming like Milton's Satan, exhorting his troops to battle Major League Baseball, and commissioner Bud Selig, desperate to get a reduction of his 162-game suspension for using banned, performance-enhancing substances. He's pledged to fight to the death, to sue everyone, but today the fight has begun to feel doomed, futile -- wrong. He is, after all, at fault.

He reaches out to Jim Sharp, a feared Washington litigator, a Navy man, a plain-spoken Oklahoman in his early 70s, and on the phone Sharp puts it to him real straight: You're ruining your life.

That jolts him. That sinks in. That's the thing that makes Rodriguez stop and take stock.

He paces his apartment, as much as any man can pace after two hip surgeries. Just two years ago his doctor sanded and shaved the ball joint of his left leg, to make it fit more smoothly into the hip socket. Three decades of swinging a bat, of violently torquing his hulking 6-foot-3 frame, had caused a calcium buildup, and the buildup had become an impingement, and the impingement had begun to stop the rotation of the hip, not simply slowing Rodriguez's swing, causing him to look like a pigeon-specked statue at the plate in the 2012 postseason, but shutting down his lower torso. On the day of the surgery he couldn't lift his leg one half inch off an exam table.

Now, he sits. Through the pain, through the fatigue, he sees with new, dazzling clarity that Sharp is right. It's over. He calls off his dogs, tells his inner circle to issue a statement that he's dropping all litigation, accepting his suspension, effective immediately.

His inner circle tells him he's making a terrible mistake. Fight, fight, fight, they say -- one of them actually uses those words. So he redraws his inner circle. He forms a new inner circle, a smaller circle, this one made up of levelheaded Midwesterners, peacemakers -- and deal makers.

Worn out, depressed, verging on despair and unemployed for the first time in his adulthood, he locks himself away and takes a vow of media silence, which isn't easy. As Henry Adams says in The Education of Henry Adams: "He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue ..."

Then he makes a list. He loves lists, makes them all the time, usually in one of his special yellow notebooks, and on this list he writes the names of people he must phone right away. People to whom he owes an apology. People to whom he owes an explanation. Friends, owners, fellow players with whom he should shoot straight. He goes down the list, one by one, dialing his BlackBerry with an unsteady hand. He tells each person on his list that he's deeply sorry for all the drama he's caused, that he's determined to regain their trust and he hopes they'll give him that chance. Of course, he doesn't tell them the whole story, because he's never told the whole story to anyone. Not a single person, living or dead, knows the whole story, though two people know something close. Still, he tells the list people more than he's accustomed to telling, more than he's willing to tell, which makes each call a crucible. He's relieved when the list voices thank him for the call and wish him good luck in the trying days ahead. Mercy, grace, compassion -- it's more than he hoped for, more than he deserves. It means he's on the right path.

Now he makes another list. People to whom he owes a special apology, a more complete and detailed explanation, and one that will be a thousand times more difficult to deliver. On this list he writes only one name.

Natasha.

Rodriguez has two daughters -- Ella, 5, and Natasha, 9. They're the first thing you see when you walk into his office, two enormous color portraits on the wall behind his desk, even before you see the MVP trophies. Throughout this scandal Rodriguez and his ex-wife, Cynthia, have been on red alert, scrambling to shield the girls, clicking off TVs, hiding newspapers. But soon, they fear, Natasha is going to hear something. She's old enough, her friends are old enough -- some arrow of derision or ridicule is bound to pierce her parental bubble. She's also smart, and any day now she'll be able to piece together all the little things that don't add up, like why Daddy is suddenly around all the time, why Daddy's able to drive her and her sister to school. She'll start to ask questions, and Rodriguez intends to pre-empt her questions with a flurry of answers. This will be a vital part of his suspension, he decides. If he does nothing else in the coming year, he must do this. Love is truth, and the way out of this dark place in which he finds himself is telling Natasha the truth.

Just not now.

Not in January 2014.

He's just not there yet in his education.

HE MEETS A friend for coffee at a bookstore café in Coral Gables. His game, his career, his life, it's all hanging by a hair. He tells her he's scared. He's really scared. She's known him since he was a boy, and she's never seen him like this. Before parting, they walk over to the self-help section and she helps Rodriguez find a book. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One.

Books, he tells himself, lots of books -- this too will be a vital part of his suspension.

Breaking the habit of being Rodriguez -- does this mean quitting baseball altogether? Maybe so. Maybe there's no other way, he thinks, and thus in these first tender days of banishment he spends hours and hours considering retirement. He's had two hip surgeries, he's 38 -- what's the point? Why not just give the people what they seem to want and fade away. Let go.

He stares into space, imagining how it will feel never to don pinstripes again, never to

dig into the batter's box again. Never to win. But he can't imagine it. He has a vivid imagination, but that he can't picture.

Which comes as no surprise to the people who know him best. This is a man whose idea of a perfect evening is polishing his bats. He has them custom made -- coal black, 34 inches, 32 ounces, triple-dipped, his name lasered on the barrel -- and few things give him more pleasure than shining them up, wiping them down with a soft cloth, meticulously examining the scuffs to see exactly where and how he's striking the ball. This is a man who breaks down everything into baseball terms. A difficult problem is a slider on the black. A stressful situation is a bases-loaded jam. A stressful situation with

no time to solve it is a bases-loaded jam in the bottom of the ninth. The top person in any line of work is the Babe Ruth of Such and So. Rodriguez always wants to know: Who's the Babe Ruth of your field? Who's the Babe Ruth of Writing? Who's the Babe Ruth of Banking? Who's the Babe Ruth of Baby-sitting?

No, no, he can't walk away from baseball, not yet, his love for the game is too strong. And he still has plenty of game left, he believes. He knows that if he can rehab his hip, get his mind right, he could be great again. Maybe only for a season, or half a season, or a game, but still -- to be great again. He owes that to the fans, the game, his team.

Of course, there's also the $61 million in salary he gets if he returns. He could say

that money doesn't matter, and he often does say it, but who in their right mind would believe him?

THE MERE CONTEMPLATION of retirement flings open the door to memory, and he can't get it shut again. His mind drifts back, like an infielder under a high pop fly. He can see the beginning, the first stirrings, sitting beside his father in their tiny house in Westchester, Florida, watching the Mets and Braves. The TV is ancient, the reception is atrocious, but his father, a former catcher in the Dominican Republic's professional league, doesn't care, so the 9-year-old Rodriguez doesn't either.

As long as they can see something, anything, cleated shadows mincing across a staticky diamond, they're good.

The father calls his son Pipiolo, Spanish for Young, or Naive, and he teaches Rodriguez all about the game, and still it's never enough. Rodriguez assails his father with questions. He wants to learn, of course, but the questions aren't really about education. The boy is trying to capture the old man's heart, hold his attention, which isn't easy, because his old man is a drinker -- two six-packs, every night -- and a gambler. He plays the horses, and bolita, a kind of lottery, and he loses more than he wins.

Then one day, when Rodriguez is 10, he comes home from school and the house is strangely still. The TV is off. His father is gone. His father's shoe store has been failing, so he's gone up to New York to scout locations for a new store. At least that's the story Rodriguez gets from his mother. He'll be gone only a little while, she says, and then a little while becomes para siempre.

Growing up, Rodriguez blames himself for his father's disappearance. Surely he did something, said something, to drive his father away. He hates himself, and also pities himself. He fears that not having a father will cripple him, hold him back in life. A father is an educator. A father teaches a boy about more things than baseball. A father teaches about money and women, about right and wrong. A father instills morals, discipline. Rodriguez's mother doesn't discipline. She's too sweet, and he's too big. Also, they both know that he's their only way out of this house, this neighborhood. So he can do no wrong. Early in his suspension it occurs to him with the force of revelation: My whole life, I've never been punished, never been told no -- until the 162.

But the worst part of losing his father? All those questions. He had so many more, and he never got to ask them. Thirty years have passed, he still asks. Everyone around Rodriguez says he asks questions constantly. Each conversation is an interrogation. It's his process, it's how he interacts with the world. It's how he learns.

It's also how he re-creates that lost paradise with his old man.

Maybe only for a season, or half a season, or a game, but still -- to be great again. He owes that to the fans, the game, his team. -

TWO DAYS AFTER he surrenders, drops all litigation, Feb. 11, 2014, he gets an email from his friend Jose. Hey, need to talk to you. Urgent.

He worries. He dials Jose right away.

Are you sitting down? he asks.

Yes.

It's your father.

Rodriguez hasn't talked to his old man in years. Still, dios mio, it's his father. Gut punch, he calls it, and it lands when he's least expecting. Can it be mere coincidence, he wonders, that his father passes now, at the start of his suspension, in the dead of winter? He walks the streets, looks at the bare trees, hunches his shoulders against the February wind. Clearly the universe is angry with him, is penalizing him -- but for what? He doesn't dare go too far with that line of questioning.

Hours after receiving the bad news, he attends a talk by Malcolm Gladwell, who's just published a book, David and Goliath. Gladwell described Rodriguez in a 2013 essay as one of the most disliked athletes of his generation, but oh well. The book topic interests Rodriguez, and besides, readings and lectures and bookstores are his guilty pleasures. Especially bookstores. You can go in, he says, have a cup of coffee, and for an hour or two pretend you're smart.

This night, however, he's not feeling smart. He's feeling hopelessly distracted. While Gladwell is talking, Rodriguez is floating somewhere outside his body, time-traveling back, back, to the late 1990s. He can hear Cynthia urging him to find his father, to reconnect, before it's too late, and he can see himself finally heeding her advice, finding his old man, flying him up from Florida, to Minneapolis, of all places, where the Mariners are playing the Twins. Better to have the reunion in a small town, he and Cynthia figure, far from the paparazzi and prying eyes of larger cities.

He installs his father in a hotel near the one where the team is staying, and for four days he and Cynthia and his father pass the mornings and afternoons sharing meals, catching up. Rodriguez asks his father a million questions, but never the uppermost question. Why'd you leave? And his father never volunteers an answer.

Sometimes Rodriguez will slip and ask his father a question in Spanish, and his father always takes Cynthia's hand and admonishes his son: We have a beautiful woman in the room; we must speak in English.

At night they all head out to the ballpark, and Rodriguez is deeply touched to see his father wearing a dark suit and tie, befitting a special occasion. And it is special. Rodriguez has a reputation for shrinking in big games, but this series with the Twins is among the biggest of his career, his personal World Series, and he becomes a snarling, fearsome beast. Every ball he hits goes clanging off the wall, or sails over. The Twins wonder what they've done to piss off Alex Rodriguez; they don't know that this is the first time he's ever played in front of his father, that dapper gentleman in the front row who looks as if he just arrived on the 20th Century Limited from the 1940s, and Pipiolo is determined to make him proud.

Hitting a home run is a strange way of getting love, of giving love, but it works for Rodriguez, and always has. A home run doesn't just stop the game, it stops the world, lets you get off. A home run asserts control, announces wordlessly but unmistakably: You will ALL deal with me! Which feels so damn good after a childhood feeling powerless. You don't reach 654 home runs, fifth on the all-time list, without to some degree fetishizing power.

He thinks often of his early years in the league, playing for Seattle, desperately searching for his stroke. He sees himself driving home from the ballpark sobbing, punching the steering wheel, because earlier that night he got hold of a pitch and smashed it high into the seats, but the cavernous Kingdome, with its jet-propeller air conditioners, blew it back. To be robbed of a home run -- it's beyond endurance. He'd rather be robbed of his wallet and car keys. Every home run is precious, every home run has meaning. More, every home run has a separate identity, and a home run that fails to achieve its identity, to reach its full home run potential, is a tragedy.

He's hit 654 home runs, and each one, he says, is different. They're all like his children, he says. Each home run is his child.

TWO MONTHS INTO his suspension, April 2014, while the Yankees are hosting the Angels, Rodriguez is in Anaheim at the Milken Global Conference, a gathering of financial gurus, world leaders, all the Babe Ruths of money and power, plus scores of students eager to learn their secrets. Milken, who went to prison in 1990 for securities fraud, is one of the featured speakers, and it's strangely comforting for anyone in the crowd who's ever erred or fudged or sinned to see a felon presiding with such aplomb over this distinguished company. But that's not the pleasure of the conference for Rodriguez. For him it's all about being a student. Having his own desk. Taking notes in a notebook with pristine yellow pages. Feeling at the end of each day that he's learned something, that he's smarter than he was yesterday. This, he thinks -- this is what my suspension needs to be about.

When the conference wraps up, he reaches out to officials at the University of Miami, broaches with them the idea of taking a class at the School of Business. To what end? they ask. In other words, er, why?

Where to begin? Should he tell school officials that he's been obsessed with college since he was 17? Should he tell them that he wanted more than anything to follow all his high school friends to Gainesville or Tallahassee or Coral Gables, but he was the first pick in the 1993 draft and the money he stood to make was the salvation of his mother and his two half-siblings, Joe and Suzy? Should he tell them that his stealth hobby is visiting college campuses, that he's been to nearly 40 so far, that he almost always takes the campus tour, visits the bookstore and buys a sweatshirt and a backpack? Should he tell them that college represents normalcy, and serenity, that college is the place with all the answers? Should he tell them that he's already frantic about which colleges his daughters will attend, or that he recently suffered a meltdown when his nephew considered playing minor league ball instead of attending NC State? (Rodriguez spent hours with the nephew, pleading, bargaining, and finally got the kid shipped off to Raleigh.)

No. He just tells school officials that he might one day apply the class credit toward his undergrad degree, or his MBA, but that short-term his goal is simply to gain some classroom experience. To find out what kind of student he might be. To test himself.

When they say yes, when they offer him a spot in Marketing 644, he feels as if he's been accepted to Harvard. He takes his daughters to Target and they pick out three backpacks, one for Ella, one for Natasha, one for Daddy.

Just before the summer semester begins, however, school officials suggest that Rodriguez take a skills assessment. They need to know if he has the math and writing proficiency to keep up; otherwise he'll be wasting his time. And theirs. Dutifully, he sits at his computer, takes the assessment, and whoa, it's rougher than he feared. He takes it again. Still rough, but slightly better. At least he and the school now know what they're dealing with.

Then comes that intense first day, July 19, 2014, the professor going around the room, making everyone give their life stories. Is this a marketing class or an AA meeting? After the students recover from the shock of Rodriguez's presence, he manages to blend again into the background. Just another guy trying to get an education. Even when the class breaks into smaller groups, to focus on case studies, his group elects a leader and they don't even consider him. He's delighted.

Toward the end of the first class there's an exam. It covers the day's material and the preassigned reading. It's been two decades since Rodriguez last took an exam, so he's aware when he walks out of class that he hasn't exactly aced it. But he's not emotionally prepared for the professor's phone call a few days later.

You got a ... 44, the professor tells him.

In baseball 44 percent is a batting title. At the University of Miami it's an F.

Rodriguez is mortified. He can't remember when he's been so embarrassed. For three

days he doesn't sleep; he wanders around his house in Miami Beach feeling like a failure, a dummy. Eventually he forces himself to look over the test, to honestly critique his effort, and he realizes that he didn't work as hard as he could have. He didn't do all the reading. He vows to bear down before the next class, and in three weeks he manages to bring his grade up to a B.

He talks about that B the way he talks about 654.

He's not giving it back.