LUPICA: A-ROD’S SORRY ACT,
A-Rod’s ‘apology’ routine is sorry excuse for humor
Alex Rodriguez has made hardly any mistakes since he returned to the Yankees after serving a full-season suspension for Tony Bosch and for being up to his eyeballs in baseball’s case against Bosch’s Biogenesis clinic. Mostly Rodriguez has hit, and reminded everybody that if you can still produce in sports, fans will find so much forgiveness in their hearts they’re afraid sometimes those hearts might burst like frozen pipes.
On top of that, Rodriguez has gone out of his way to act more trustworthy and respectful than a Boy Scout. He has said all the right things and attended charity events, and gotten himself straight, at least for the time being, and barring any future problems with baseball drugs, with the commissioner and with Yankee ownership. He has, by all accounts, been a bedrock of good behavior in the Yankee clubhouse, especially with young players.
It is why you wonder, even knowing how desperate he still is to be loved and be in the spotlight — the way he is covered these days, you can probably forgive him for wondering how Caitlyn Jenner beat him out for the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPY Awards — why he thought it was a good idea to stand in the spotlight at the ESPYs on Wednesday night and participate in a painfully lame and hideously unfunny apology skit with Joel McHale and Ken Jeong from “The Hangover” movies.
Because even Rodriguez has to know that what he was accused of doing with Bosch and convicted of doing by arbitrator Fredric Horowitz isn’t funny, with or without penis gags. And isn’t ever going to be funny.
Just so you know: The set-up at the ESPYs was that Jeong would act as Rodriguez’s surrogate as he finally “apologized” to the whole wide world. Maybe the inside joke here, which is as close to a real joke as any of them got, was that they were doing a send-up of that handwritten apology we got from Rodriguez a while back.
So Rodriguez stood there like a prop and kept handing pieces of paper to Jeong, while McHale stood on the other side of Jeong looking as flop-sweat desperate to get laughs as he had been since his opening monologue.
“I’m sorry that Jon Snow died on the season finale of ‘Game of Thrones,’ ” Jeong read from the fake apology. “And I’m sorry I just spoiled that for some of you. I’m sorry for the water shortage in California and the economic collapse in Greece.”
Nobody expects big yuks from award shows, at least when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler aren’t hosting them these days. But somebody thought this material was funny, and Alex Rodriguez clearly signed off on it, so on they went. And on.
“I’m sorry for carrying all of this guilt on my shoulders,” Jeong continued. “I’m sorry for gluten, I invented it. I’m sorry you can’t run near a swimming pool. I, Alex Rodriguez, slipped and fell once and now it’s a rule everywhere. I also apologize to Knicks season-ticket holders, Knicks individual game holders, and people who watch ‘The Knick’ on Cinemax.”
There was some weird, nervous laughter from the crowd occasionally. There was even a shot of Derek Jeter laughing, though it was hard to tell whether he was doing that to be polite, or just reveling in Rodriguez making himself a part of the show like this on a night when Jeter received a Sports Icon Award.
By the way: Here is a part of what Jeter said upon receiving that award:
“I’ve had a special relationship with the fans and my teammates over the last 20 years, but in retirement I’ve come to realize that being a part of the larger community of sports is a gift — and more importantly it’s an honor. You’ve inspired me for years, and you continue to inspire me.”
So Jeter took one route to the stage on this night and the guy who used to play to his right at Yankee Stadium took another. Maybe you could have given Rodriguez some props for being able to laugh at himself on this occasion, except there were no laughs here, about “Game of Thrones” or droughts or Greece or the Knicks or any of it.
At the very end of it, after Jeong stopped reading, McHale asked Rodriguez if there was anything he wanted to say and Rodriguez said, “I’m good.” Before that, of course, we got this supposedly edgy material from Alex Rodriguez’s faux apology at the ESPYs:
“To anyone who has watched ‘The Hangover,’ I’m sorry you had to see Ken Jeong’s penis. It’s tiny . . . it’s grossly misshapen . . . it’s unpatriotic.”
Yeah. These are the jokes. By the time it all ended, you felt as if you’d had to sit through one of those old four-hour Yankees-Red Sox games out of the past. But maybe all that mattered was that Rodriguez, who was up for a comeback award that Rob Gronkowski of the Patriots won (for coming back from injuries that weren’t self-inflicted), was in the room again with the biggest stars in sports, including his old friend Derek Jeter.
Maybe Rodriguez thinks he can be the kind of performer that we’ve found out Peyton Manning can be. Maybe he’s already thinking about a post-playing career in broadcasting, when his Yankee contract finally runs out sometime in the next century. But if he is considering a future career in show business, he might want to take a closer look at the material next time.
He has been one of the great surprise stories of the baseball season. He has hit better than perhaps even he himself thought he ever would again. He’s said and done all the right things. Then came the ESPY Awards. His arbitration hearing was funnier. This is the first dumb thing he’s done since Bosch.