Free Out of Control by Richard Reece Page A

subsequent grounder. The Roadrunners went quietly in the ninth and lost by two. But by then the game itself seemed like a sideshow to the main event. When people left the field that night they were talking not about who won or lost, but about crazy Julio Costas.
    My father.

CHAPTER 2
    Y es, my dad is the Julio Costas. Your parents probably have some of his records. Maybe they’ve even seen him perform in Vegas, where he pretty much stays now except for when he has TV appearances and recording sessions. He never liked touring, and now he doesn’t need to.
    Here’s a description from Wikipedia:
Julio Costas is a Venezuelan singer who has sold over 200 million records worldwide in fourteen languages. He has released forty albums and is one of the top twenty best-selling musical artists in history. He became internationally known in the early ’80s as a performer of romantic ballads.
    His story is more interesting than that, and he’s very fond of telling it, so I know it by heart. Dad was born in the La Dolorita barrio of Caracas. He took me and my brothers on a trip to Caracas once, but we didn’t go near La Dolorita. It would have been too dangerous. The dream of the people who live in its violence and dirt is to get out, but the options for escape are limited. Some choose crime. A few with the talent try sports, and that was Dad’s dream.
    Venezuelans are crazy about baseball, the way Brazilians are crazy about soccer, and the amateur leagues there have been attracting major-league scouts for years. The country produced a Hall of Famer in the ’50s in Chicago White Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio, plus a lot of other stars along the way. Today you could point to Bobby Abreu or Magglio Ordonez or Carlos Zambrano. Anyway, Dad also had talent. He’s a lefty, and he could pitch.
    By the time he was thirteen, baseball scouts had noticed him, but he’d also been noticed by a scout of another kind. Dad and a few of his buddies would make extra money singing on downtown street corners—traditional Latin stuff and songs from movies. One day a music executive named Domingo Villa stopped to listen, and he was sure he heard something special in Dad’s voice. In two years, with Villa as his agent, Julio Costas had a bestselling album and an international tour, and the two men began to get rich together. Dad left baseball behind. Well, not entirely.
    When he was twenty-five, my dad married his second wife, a nineteen-year-old Spanish tennis star who gave him three sons, my older brothers and me, before she and Dad split. I was only two when the divorce happened, but apparently there was some bitterness because she has never tried to involve herself with us. She married a Swiss doctor and is now raising a second family in Europe.
    Meanwhile, Dad has married three more times, most recently a Vegas dancer seven years older than me. None of Dad’s wives have really been “moms” to us, but it hasn’t seemed like an issue. We’ve had nannies, Dad has always paid plenty of attention to us, and there’s been baseball since we could walk.
    Dad still dreams of sports glory, but now it’s for his sons. So we’ve had private coaching, the best equipment money could buy, and constant encouragement. Well, “encouragement” is putting it mildly. Dad has always been pretty over-the-top about our working hard and succeeding in his favorite sport.
    And, by and large, we’ve made him happy. My oldest brother Julio Jr. (J.T.) plays Triple-A in North Carolina, while Alex, the middle son, is getting attention as a catcher at UCLA. And Dad has the biggest ambitions of all for me. He thinks I’m the most athletically gifted of the three of us, and he wants results.
    All three of us have played for the Roadrunners. In fact, Dad is probably the biggest financial backer of the team. He makes sure the team is what he calls a “class act.” We travel in comfort, and we