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The Honolulu Advertiser
Updated at 2:13 p.m., Sunday, February 8, 2009

Is anyone clean? Report that A-Rod tested positive makes you wonder

By Greg Cote
McClatchy Newspapers

MIAMI — Baseball's steroids scandal followed us home Saturday, hitting at our heart in a way it hadn't before.

Alex Rodriguez, son of Miami and maybe the greatest ballplayer ever, is tainted now, if the report is true. Dirty just like the rest of them. Holed up to fashion an explanation, scrambling to save his reputation. He always seemed above cheating — he was The Natural amid all the syringes — but that was before the latest news hit like a fastball to the chin.

Reputable Sports Illustrated reported on its Web site Saturday that Rodriguez had tested positive in 2003 for the anabolic steroid Primobolan and for testosterone. That was his last year with the Texas Rangers, before he joined the New York Yankees with the richest contract in baseball history and became the sport's biggest star, for its biggest team, on its biggest stage.

Baseball's drug policy has prohibited steroid use since 1991, but Rodriguez reportedly tested positive the year before the sport established mandatory testing and penalties. That mitigates in his favor from a legal standpoint, perhaps, but doesn't erase what now seems undeniable: A-Rod didn't do all of this naturally. Didn't do it by himself.

Now it is apparent he became the youngest player ever to reach 500 career home runs at least in part because of performance-enhancing drugs.

And now controversy and perhaps an invisible asterisk will fix themselves to the all-time home run record should Rodriguez end up owning it as many think he will.

Now A-Rod, still in his prime at 33, is lumped with Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and all of the other fallen stars whose names and reputations have taken on stink and mud.

Might Rodriguez's future as a certain Hall of Famer even be in jeopardy? You wonder. You wonder about a lot of things now, including a likelihood that the player didn't happen to test-positive for steroids the one and only time he had used them.

Rodriguez has known controversy before, of course. Surely it has toughened his skin to handle the media circus that waits, big and hungry, as the Yankees prepare to open spring training next week in Tampa.

There was the 2007 photo of A-Rod with a Toronto strip-club dancer, and soon after his marriage dissolving with accusations of "emotional abandonment" and infidelity. There were past and present rumors of his relationship with Madonna.

There is former manager Joe Torre's new book, The Yankee Years, that portrays Rodriguez unflatteringly as a prima donna whom his own teammates sometimes called "A-Fraud."

There even were steroid suspicions — unsurprising because of his prolific power hitting in the midst of baseball's steroids era — fueled when Jose Canseco, in his 2008 book Vindicated, wrote of once introducing Rodriguez to "a known supplier of steroids."

But Canseco offered no details or proof and admitted a hatred of Rodriguez in the book, so, his implicating A-Rod in the world of steroids was easily dismissed and forgotten.

This isn't.

This smells like proof.

This feels like A-Rod's reputation is branded now with the scarlet letter S.

If the report is true, Rodriguez lied in a December 2007 "60 Minutes" interview three days after the release of the Mitchell Report on steroids in baseball, when A-Rod stated he had never used performance enhancing drugs.

The career home run record of 755 held by Barry Bonds is steroid-addled beyond rational debate. Rodriguez was supposed to restore the record's good name. He was supposed to be a symbol of baseball surviving its steroids era — not a part of it.

This is sad. Disappointing. It has to be a gut-punch to millions of kids who held up Alex Rodriguez as proof that athletic excellence and being clean were not mutually exclusive. It invites you to wonder, "If A-Rod used steroids, who DIDN'T?"

You always feel as if you have lost something when trust is betrayed, when your belief in someone ends up feeling like naivete.

We've grappled in the past week with the news (and photographic proof) that Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps smoked marijuana — another sports hero demoted in public perception from seemingly perfect to fallible.

But that we could dismiss as a youthful mistake of Phelps' private life, nothing that called into question his athletic integrity or accomplishments.

So it was with Rodriguez's apparent infidelity. That was private. He was human.

This is different. Maybe it says more about us than about the athletes, but cheating on one's wife is somehow acceptable in a way that cheating one's sport is not. More forgivable, at least.

A-Rod has been beloved in our community, integral to it, and for good reason. He grew up here, a product of Southwest Boys and Girls Club. He went to Miami's Westminster Christian School, and signed to play at the University of Miami before opting (wisely, it turned out) for pro baseball instead.

His roots remain here. He was working out in a Miami gym when a Sports Illustrated reporter confronted him Thursday on the story about to break.

Say it isn't so, Alex? He didn't say it wasn't so. He offered a no-comment in lieu of a denial.

Meanwhile, over at UM, where the Hurricanes open their baseball season later this month, major renovations are being completed on the stadium, thanks largely to a $3.9 million donation to the program by Rodriguez in 2003, the same year he would test positive for steroids.

The university's refurbished baseball facility will be rechristened, in a ceremony scheduled for this coming Friday, as Mark Light Field at Alex Rodriguez Park.

Renaming the place seemed right, a point of pride. Seemed perfectly natural.

Saturday, the park's new name began to look a little different under the cloud that had found it.