Alex Rodriguez looked me in the eyes. It was last May. His New York Yankees teammates were stretching on the field at Kauffman Stadium. I asked him if he had used performance-enhancing drugs since 2003. His face turned serious. He leaned forward. This was a new Alex, he swore. One who respected people and the game and told the truth.

"I have not," he said. "I would not."





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He never broke his stare, the product of all the time spent with the thousand-dollar-an-hour handlers who preached genuineness, as if that was something he could learn, as if a career-long fraud ever could be mistaken as real.

In Alex Rodriguez's world, one still infused with human growth hormone and synthetic testosterone as a bombshell Miami New Times report detailed Tuesday, there was no more potent cocktail than desperation and hubris. The continuum of A-Rod spans gifted to inept with all of the requisite bus stops in between. The marriage of his two prevailing character traits – how somebody so desperate for success was felled by his stop-at-no-costs chase of it – gives the greatest insight into the wild, confusing case of one of the biggest cheats in a sport full of them.

A-Rod denied the report's accusations in a statement Tuesday and immediately inherited Lance Armstrong's mantle as most desperately obvious doper who tromps along denying the existence of evidence that is either the biggest coincidence in the history of coincidences or, you know, true.

[Related: Alex Rodriguez denies using PEDs from Miami clinic]



Let's see: The ledgers of an anti-aging quack in Miami, A-Rod's hometown, include more than half a dozen major league players – including one referred to as, at different times, "Alex Rodriguez," "Alex Rod," "Alex R." and "Cacique," which is loosely translated to mean "boss." If that weren't enough, Rodriguez's cousin and ever-present steroid bagman, Yuri Sucart, shows up in the diaries as well.



Anthony Bosch, the 49-year-old linked with the distribution of the drugs to Rodriguez as well as Nelson Cruz, Melky Cabrera, Bartolo Colon and Yasmani Grandal, kept damning records on all of them at his Biogenesis lab. And when a former employee leaked the records to the New Times, it shattered any picture of innocence Rodriguez wanted to portray before or going forward.

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