Authors: Jose Canseco
It's an ego booster to have women wanting to be with you, and there's always a natural need for companionship on the road. Strip clubs were always very popular with baseball players.
You had plenty of money for tips and drinks, and didn't have to think twice about it. And people usually don't bother you in a strip club the way they would in a regular bar. Every city had a quality strip club where all the ballplayers would congregate.
There were always sex acts going on in the strip clubs. Any players could get a blow job, and plenty of them had sex with strippers. I never had sex in a strip club myself-not in any way, shape, or form. I may have fondled a girl in there, but I was always too scared that there would be cameras around to try anything more serious. It was much better to hook up with a beautiful stripper and then go back to your place. As I mentioned, I happen to have a specific taste for women who are very fit. I'm in great shape, and I've maintained my body, so I respect people who stay in shape, too. I like fitness models-not to the point where they are bodybuilders, but lean and ripped. It's just what I enjoy. I don't like women who are too tall, or too fat. I'm very picky when it comes to women. They can be blonde or brunette or redheads; that part doesn't matter to me. But they have to be a certain type-around five foot three to five seven, and with a good lean physique and a real appetite for exercise. I've never really deviated from that.
There was kind of a code among baseball players about how you got away with things on the road. We always looked out for each other. Let's say I went out and ended up bringing three or four women back to the hotel. I'd call up my friends on the team. "Meet me in the room," I'd tell them. "I've got three or four girls here. I can't handle all these girls, so come and hang out with us."
Usually these girls travel in packs, so you'd make sure that her girlfriends would hook up with your baseball buddies. Most of the time, I'd have a big suite; we'd have some fun there, and then guys would disperse, going back to their own hotel rooms with one or two wmen.
Sex is such a big part of life on the road, baseball players have some techniques and habits that most people don't know about.
Here are a few.
SPECIAL TREATMENT
If a girl is gorgeous and I want to impress her and make sure she comes back, I call it special treatment. That involves catering to her-you know, completely tending to her needs, not your own.
That can mean anything, from a little massage or a foot rub to licking the toes you're massaging-really taking care of her, and for a long period of time. The idea is to do everything perfectly-which helps to make sure you'll get a second date.
OTHER PLAYERS' WIVES
I can't mention any names, but it wasn't at all unusual for players to sleep with other players' wives. I can remember several occasions where a player would bring his wife or fiancée out with the rest of us to a nightclub when the team was on the road. If the player knew he had a big day ahead of him-say, a pitcher who knew he'd be on the mound-he would go back to the hotel early, and his wife or fiancée would stay out with the other girls. Then, if she was feeling a little lonely and had a few drinks, she would come on to you.
Some players in that situation were only too happy to take the wife or fiancée up on such an offer. That kind of thing happens a lot in baseball, especially when the woman wants to get back at her husband or fiance for sleeping with another woman. Some players even exchanged wives. I was never into that kind of thing, but there were plenty of other guys who were willing to pick up the slack.
SLUMP BUSTERS
As everyone knows, baseball players are very superstitious. Players who are struggling start talking about how they need to go out and find something to break their slump. And often enough it comes out something like this: "Oh my God, I'm 0-for-20. I'm going to get the ugliest girl I can find and have sex with her."
That was never for me. I'd rather go 0-for-40. I never believed in the superstitions of baseball, like the idea that if one day you go four-for-four, you have to do all the same exact things the next day. I never bought into any of that-and I sure never went out and looked for a slump-buster. But it was a term you heard a lot. It could mean different things to different players, I guess. It could mean the woman was big, or ugly, or a combination of both. One manager I used to play for described a slump-buster this way: "She's so big, you don't even know if you're in there or not."
Mark Grace defined a slump-buster as the "fattest, gnarliest chick you can uncover, and you lay the wood to her." However you slice it, it was bound to be unpleasant.
Sometimes players used the slump-buster line as an excuse: If their teammates started razzing them-"We saw you with that girl last night and she was ugly as hell"-the player would say, "Hey, she was just a slump-buster." But as often as not I think the players just couldn't do any better.
But there were always some players who believed in the power of a slump-buster. They were ready to try everything they could to get out of a slump, and if that's what it took, they would go out and find it.
ROAD BEEF
This one is pretty simple: Any girl you met on the road and had sex with was referred to as "road beef." I wouldn't say the term had any special meaning or special connotation. It just meant a piece of meat, a piece of ass for the player to enjoy while he was away from home. Just about every player I ever knew used that term.
IMPORT
What's an import? Let's say you got a hankering for your favorite road beef, one of your quality girls. If you decide you want to see her before you're scheduled to be in her town, you just pay for a plane ticket and fly her in. That way, you spend time with her, get to know her better, not just in her city but Imports, Road Beef, and Extra Cell Phones
anywhere you want. That's an import. I know one player who went on a family trip with his fiancee, broke up with her, and returned from the family trip with a different girl. That's why most organizations have forbidden girlfriends, even fiancees, from flying on family charters any more-they don't want to be in the adultery shuttle-bus business.
SECOND CELL PHONES
Most baseball players keep a Little Black Book, like guys have been doing for years and years. But technology has changed this, too: Nowadays more and more players keep a separate cell phone in their locker, registered to a John Doe alias, which they use to call all their girls.
This kind of thing can get a little tricky. Some players have tried keeping two numbers registered on the same phone; just punch in a special numerical code, and the second number would pop out. I did that myself for a while, but I got caught with it. One day I called my second wife from the wrong number by mistake, she looked at the caller ID, saw it was a slightly different number, and realized what was going on. That was pretty stupid of me, and she wasn't happy about it.
Before I wrap up this chapter on men, women, and baseball, there's one other, er, little matter I want to set straight.
In general, I would say I've noticed very few side effects from my steroid use. I've had my system completely checked. I'm perfectly normal. But that's because I know exactly how to use steroids-what combinations to use and for how long. But people still hear all kinds of strange things about the side effects of steroids. For instance, I've always had a little nervous twitcheven when I was younger-but people are constantly jumping to conclusions and saying, "Look-he's so juiced up he's twitching." I just tell them, "I've been married twice and divorced twice. That's enough to give anybody a nervous twitch."
But one definite side effect of steroid use is the atrophying of your testicles. I can confirm that. Whatever size they start out, they will definitely shrink if you are taking steroids over a period of time. But here's the point I want to emphasize: what happens to your testes has nothing to do with any shrinking of the penis. That's a misconception. As a matter of fact, the reverse can be true. Using growth hormone can make your penis bigger, and make you more easily aroused. So to the guys out there who are worried about their manhood, all I can say is: Growth hormone worked for me.
9. Madonna's "Bat Boy"
He was Michael Jordan, Steve Young and Dennis
Rodman all rolled into one. He was a Hollywood star,
and the playing field simply was his stage.
-
BOB NIGHTENGALE,
The Sporting News
I always thought Madonna was very sexy, and I always wanted to meet her. I'd listened to all her records and saw her in Desperately Seeking Susan time, she had pretty much become the Marilyn Monroe of our time, not just a sex symbol but a larger-than-life personality. The whole world was infatuated with her.
Later on, once I had established myself with the MVP Award in 1988, I found out that Madonna was as interested in meeting me as I was in meeting her. Of course, I found that intriguing. Madonna heard about me through her publicist, who checked me out one day when I was playing against the Giants during spring training in 1991. She couldn't wait to call Madonna after that.
"There's this guy you gotta meet," her publicist told her. By then Madonna had decided that she wanted to have a baby; specifically, she wanted to have a baby with a Latino man.
She had developed a real infatuation for Cubans-all Cubans-and she put out the word that she was on the lookout for interesting Cuban men to meet. Somehow our representatives contacted each other, and right away all these rumors started flying that Madonna wanted to meet me, even though at the time I was still married to my first wife, Esther. To me, it was all hard to believe.
"Who am I?" I kept asking myself. "This athlete is going to meet Madonna?"
But I did want to meet her. I was sure it would be interesting. So when the A's headed off to Anaheim on a road trip, I decided to go see Madonna. I brought along my agent at the time, Jeff Borris, and we drove up into the Hollywood Hills the day of a game to meet her and get acquainted. I remember parking in front of her house and honking the horn, then watching as the door opened up for a minute. This head popped out to take a look at us, and then disappeared again. "Was that Madonna?" I asked my agent. "It didn't even look like her."
We both kind of stared at each other, not sure what to think.
Madonna at that time had black hair in an unusual style, parted down the middle; she didn't look anything like what we were expecting. We sat there in the car, waiting for something to happen, until finally she came out and brought us back into her house.
She looked at me, then over at Jeff, and then back at me.
"Does your agent follow you around everywhere?"
"No," I said.
So Jeff just sat there on the couch, and Madonna gave me a tour of her house. We walked around for a few minutes and wound up in her bedroom. Right away, she walked over and closed the drapes. I knew she had something in mind, but I didn't know what. "Sit down," she told me.
So I sat down. Who wouldn't? She hit the remote control on her VCR and started showing me parts of Truth or Dare, her documentary, which hadn't yet hit the theaters. I think you can guess which scene she showed me. It was the famous masturbation scene on that big bed.
"This is crazy!" I was thinking to myself.
There I was, sitting about a foot away from Madonna as she played that part of the movie for me. A million guys would give anything to be in a situation like that, but the truth is actually kind of funny: Mostly I was just scared. I had a kind of blank feeling; as sexy as it all was, it was hard to be turned on when I was busy wondering what Madonna was going to say or do next.
She can be a very intimidating presence-and we were in her territory, so she was very much in control. I wasn't used to that. My eyes were glued to the TV, but eventually I realized that she was watching me even more closely. There was a long, awkward silence, but I could tell she was getting ready to say something.
"So what do you think?" she asked after the scene ended. I looked back at her for a minute.
"It's very interesting," I told her.
She smiled, but didn't say anything. It was like I could hear the gears working, she was thinking so hard. She seemed to be checking me out, studying my body like I was a champion racehorse, inspecting me to see what sort of potential I had for stud service, and what sort of genes I'd be passing on.
We walked around the house some more after that, then went back to see how Jeff was doing. Madonna kept asking me questions, one very specific question after another, as if she had drawn up a list beforehand. She wanted to know about my background, and my family, my personal philosophy, what I thought about every subject you could think of.
"Why do you wear that big diamond ring?" she asked, looking down at this six-carat diamond ring I had then. "Do you feel like you need more attention?"
"No," I told her. "I just like jewelry."
There were so many questions, Jeff and I stayed at her house longer than we should have, and when we got back into the car to drive to Anaheim Stadium for the game, we realized there was no way we were going to make it in time. I was going to be late, and that meant I would have to confront Tony LaRussa, my manager, who was going to be mad. I decided that I'd better tell him the truth.
"Tony, I was at Madonna's house, talking to her, and I'm late," I told him. "So I missed batting practice." Tony was pretty pissed off, but he let me play, so that was the end of that.
With Madonna, though, that was just the beginning. Before long, she was calling me every day, wherever I was. She was amazing. She knew exactly what my schedule was and exactly where I was.
A lot of the times, she would call the clubhouse, using the code name Melissa. But all of my teammates and other people around the team figured out who it was, and they were always talking about it. You can just imagine what it was like. I didn't tell them much. I wasn't the type of guy to brag about anything.