Alex Rodriguez: Lying Is Equally Addicting

America isn’t accustomed to seeing admissions of guilt streaming coast to coast on the air.

The expectations are of denial—they never did it, they’re being slandered, or someone simply “misremembered” a conversation or occurrence. It doesn’t matter if the questions are asked in the comfort of their own confines or inside the walls of intimidating Capitol Hill, because the answers remain the same: "No."

Without confession, there’s nothing to regret, as lies are equally addicting as the drug dependency for peak performance.

It took guts for Alex Rodriguez to have a sitdown with ESPN’s Peter Gammons last week to discuss his past and most recent discovery. But some things are habitual, and the Yankees slugger apparently didn’t know when to end a conversation.

Rodriguez took an unfamiliar road, coming clean and offering his apology to fans and the league. His publicist drew it up perfectly, resulting in many having post-interview admiration for a man stepping up to the plate at the end of a game.

Six years after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs, A-Rod gave a confession, and the reparation stage had begun, supposedly. But a week later, it’s learned that the “admirable” man, apologizing for fabrications of old, couldn’t finish the interview without lies anew.

For reasons unknown to most, Rodriguez used his “come clean” opportunity to take jabs at someone else. Maybe the thinking is, "If I make someone else dirty, then I may come up clean." You know how the old childish theory goes: “I may have done something bad, but that’s nothing compared to what so-and-so did to me.”

Whatever the reasoning behind it, it didn’t work, and he appears even more a liar now than before the cameras started rolling.

A-Rod called his shot, and pointed a finger in the direction of Sports Illustrated reporter Selena Roberts.

What was her wrong doing? Breaking the story? Not according to “Mr. Come Clean.” Rodriguez claimed that Roberts stalked him, including “trespassing and breaking into his house where his daughters slept.”

He went on to say he notified the local authorities and a report was taken, but it was just another lie. The Florida authorities had no record of the incident, and days later A-Rod is giving another apology, this time for untruthful statements made about Roberts.

How quickly we can go from credible to possessing no credibility at all. If you’re going to agree to an interview addressing past lies, you don’t pack new lies to bring along.

Suddenly you’re no different from those in denial. You come across as someone who no longer knows what the truth is, living so many years in a fabricated world that you’ve convinced yourself that imagination is truth, and easily forwarded to the rest of us as such.

Rodriguez has been clean for six years? I believe that as much as I believe Roberts picked his lock and sat in his living room. Why should I believe it? Because he said so? That’s more reason not to believe, isn’t it?

I’m not singling out one of hundreds, simply because he’s in pinstripes and is named Alex Rodriguez. I single him out for expecting the public to be mindless and accepting of any words rolling off the tongue of a professional athlete.

People are sometimes skeptical of words spoken by close friends and family, so why are we often gullible when it comes to the words of a stranger? I’m not that easy.

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