Game Over 
Our Juan and Only
In Arlington, Texas Rangers slugger Juan Gonzalez is merely a two-time Most Valuable Player. In his native Puerto Rico, he’s a national hero. ¡Viva Igor!
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Not long after we pulled into a newer, more affluent neighborhood of Vega Baja, Gonzalez finally materialized. We caught up with him outside the Tu Casa seafood restaurant, his cell phone and his wallet in hand. When he saw Mayoral, there was an explosion of chatter and a motioning of hands so expressive that I knew more or less what was being said, even though the speed-demon Spanish blew right by me. Then came laughter, handshakes, friendly shouts, backslaps all around. This was Gonzalez’s turf. After exchanging greetings with owner Alberto Meléndez, the management, and half a dozen waiters, he was shuttled off to a private room, and we followed. It was star power all the way; heads turned as we passed.
My first thought was that he’s more handsome than he looks in photographs: the close-cropped sweep of jet-black hair, the smoldering brown eyes, the thick mustache and traces of a goatee on his chin. He’s much hipper too. On that day he was coolly decked out in a gray Reebok tee and baggy madras warm-ups. Out of uniform, his physique isn’t as intimidating as you might think. At six-foot-five and 220 pounds, he’s long, lean, and lithe—the antithesis of a bruiser on steroids.
For more than a hour we sat and talked about baseball, Puerto Rico, and nearly everything else. We conversed mostly in English—his English was far easier to understand than my Spanish—with Mayoral jumping in now and then to elaborate and clarify. Here’s what I learned:
He’s in the best shape of his career. “Before, all I was doing was pumping heavy weights,” Gonzalez told me. “It was a stupid situation. Now I have a personal trainer. Instead of pumping, I’m doing light weights, abdominal stretching, working with the rubber bands, throwing a medicine ball, walking in water in a swimming pool. That makes my body more elastic and gives me great flexibility. I’m not all bulked up like a wrestler.”
He knows baseball. “Everybody talked about the home run race, but for sluggers like me, RBI are more difficult. You need more concentration when you go to home plate and see men on base. You have a smaller zone to hit the ball where you want. Everything’s inside my head. I believe what Yogi Berra said: The game’s ninety percent mental.”
He’s no party boy. “I stay away from distractions. I never go out. When I retire, I’ll go out. For now I’ll stay inside the lines. When I’m inside the lines, the rest of the world doesn’t exist.”
But he’s no machine, either. “People look at baseball players like robots. We have families. We have pressures. But that’s outside the lines. Inside the lines you need to relax, be positive.”
He’s greedy when it comes to superlatives. “I’ve won the homer title twice and the RBI title twice. Why not both in the same season? I know I’m human, but so are the other guys in the league who are hitting as well as me.”
He recognizes the problems that wealth brings. “I know I have a lot of money. When people come up and say they have an idea, I tell them they should go to the bank.”
Unlike Roger Clemens, he doesn’t want to play for the Yankees. “I like New York, but on weekends only. There are too many pressures there: owners, players, fans, press. There are a lot of bad vibrations in that city. I’d like to stay in Arlington for my entire career.”
And there will be life after that. He dropped a few hints as he described his monastic approach to his job. “Juan Gonzalez doesn’t talk politics,” he said at one point—referring to himself, as many pols do, in the third person. Mayoral interjected that Gonzalez may not talk politics, but he follows it.
Okay, then. What about George W. Bush? “I think he is going to be president,” Gonzalez said.
And Juan Gonzalez? The mayor of Vega Baja someday? “Maybe,” he said. “It depends if I have the support of my family and of my city. My party, Partido Nuevo Progresista, the New Progressive Party, wants statehood. This is a small island with too many people and no jobs. We need closer relations with the United States. Right now, everybody pays the same taxes or more than if we were already a state, but only sixty percent of the population has a formal education and maybe forty percent speaks both languages.”
For now, being el lider of the Texas Rangers is enough. For the rest of our time together, he signed autographs and posters proffered by Mayoral with a flourish. On our way out he worked the restaurant again, talking with anyone who walked up, shaking hands, offering words of advice to several young boys who crowded around him, coaxing a smile from a young lady sitting at the bar. He posed for several snapshots with a man named Santos López, who presented him with a brown parchment copy of a poem, “Homage to Juan ‘Igor’ Gonzalez.”
We piled into Mayoral’s car again. Gonzalez folded himself into the back seat, and began to shout greetings to familiar faces. “Good people live here,” he said as we drove past a housing project. We passed his parents’ neat two-story home in a newer part of Vega Baja, but nobody was there, so we headed downtown to Gonzalez’s old stomping grounds.
“This is Alto de Cuba,” Gonzalez said. In the U.S., the indelicate word for Alto de Cuba would be “slum”: mostly two-story tenements, with not an inch of open space between them, occupied by people on the edge of poverty, on narrow streets wide enough for only one vehicle. Men with tattoos hung out on the sidewalks and talked, all the time observed closely by uniformed policemen. “That’s my uncle,” Gonzalez said, nodding toward an older man in a white undershirt who was clutching a can of Budweiser.
At the main plaza, Mayoral turned up another street. He paused in front of number C-17 Calle Sánchez López, a two-story domicile no more than twenty feet wide with a front porch set against the curb. “This is where I lived,” Gonzalez said.
When we stopped again farther up the block, Gonzalez jumped out, bid us good-bye with a “Thank you, man,” and walked across the street. He had decided to spend some time with his cousin, the son of the man with the beer in his hand.
As I watched him bound away, I thought: He looks different. Igor the future Hall of Famer could just as likely be Gobernador Gonzalez. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s already running.
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