'ALEX VS AROD' series on HBO: Revealing look at Alex Rodriguez promises to be fascinating

Toward the end of the new HBO series “ALEX VS AROD,” Alex Rodriguez acknowledges the obvious: that some viewers will roll their eyes while watching the three-part documentary.

“I know the haters, they’re saying, ‘BS, I don’t believe it,' ” Rodriguez says in Part III, later adding, “They’re going to think I’m slippery, and they’re going to find something in this documentary to say, ‘See, I told you so, that guy’s an [expletive], that’s why I don’t trust him. I don’t like him.’

“And that’s fine. But I’m done saying I’m sorry. I’m done. New day. Moving on. New [expletive] decade. I’m in a great place.”

The road to that great place was famously rocky, and it is chronicled in detail in the series, which premieres at 9 p.m. on Thursday and continues the following two Thursdays on HBO, and streaming on HBO Max.

That includes deeply personal details that shaped his life, notably his father, Victor, abandoning the family when Alex was 10.

And it includes a visit to the office of his late therapist “Dr. David” in a remote cabin in Colorado, where Rodriguez made crucial progress in understanding himself.

Co-directors Gotham Chopra and Erik LeDrew told Newsday the film was not an easy process for them or for Rodriguez.

“The intention was, we’re going to talk about the difficult stuff,” Chopra said. “This has to be a guy willing to be accountable and honest. That was certainly the intention. Getting there, it was real work with him.

“But he also signed up for that, he knew that, and that was what the goal of this project was.”

LeDrew said everyone involved agreed that the series would not be worth the effort if it wound up being mediocre.

“So what will make it great?” he said. “It’s authenticity, honesty, integrity, vulnerability, going to hard places, being raw, not censoring yourself. When things get tough, you step back and revisit that and make sure you're all aligned.

“It's not as easy as that. I can say it easily now, but it was definitely a process of two steps forward, one-and-a-half steps back.”

Rodriguez always has been self-aware to a fault, and more concerned than most about how others view him.

“He's very prepared,” Chopra said. “It's one of the things that made him a great baseball player. He’s always taking notes. He's always thinking through, ‘OK, I’m going to say this, but then what's that person going to think?’

“It’s like reading a pitcher. We had to embrace some of that, undo some of that. Again, it's why it took a long time.”

Among those interviewed for the series:  former Yankees and current Fox Sports teammate Derek Jeter. By Jeter standards, he is open and interesting in talking about Rodriguez.

Others interviewed include Ken Griffey Jr., Lou Piniella, Mike Francesa, Michael Kay and Rodriguez’s two daughters, his brother and old friends.

The series covers the entire saga, from his early years in New York, the Dominican Republic and eventually South Florida to Seattle, Texas and the Bronx, with Hall of Fame-caliber production but performance-enhancing drug scandals that for now will keep him out of the Hall of Fame.

Much of the story is familiar. Seeing it summarized in about 3 1/2 hours is a whirlwind experience as the film chronicles Rodriguez’s evolution from Alex to A-Rod and back to Alex, at least most of the time.

“What you have here is the luxury of perspective,” Chopra said. “He’s had a lot of success outside of baseball. He's come to understand that he's more than, as he says, just the mistakes that he made. The comeback matters, too.”

The first two parts of the series cover much of Rodriguez’s baseball arc, the pinnacle of which was the Yankees’ 2009 world championship.

Part III is when things veer far off course, prompting Rodriguez to wonder if he would have been better off simply retiring after that ’09 World Series and quitting while he was ahead. But that would have deprived him of the personal revelations to come.

“This is difficult material,” LeDrew said. “Some of the worst moments in a person's life, we're asking him to relive those now that he's kind of put them behind him. That's really hard.”

While Rodriguez says he is ready to move on, he does not spare himself from blame. He recalls waking up one night during the height of his PED mess and telling himself:

“I’m the only [expletive] in the world that has pocket aces and figures out a way how to lose the hand . . . I cringe when I think about how much I hurt myself and I have no one to blame but myself. Looking back at it now, it’s like: Why?”

Still, he says, “I’m a weird way, that suspension [in 2014], thinking about it 10 years later, while I cringed and I’m embarrassed and I burned bridges, someday, not quite yet, I will be able to say that’s the best thing that happened in my life.

“Because I took the opportunity to pause, turn the lens inward, and I came out on the other side not a Hall of Famer, which sucks, but a happier person.”

By Neil Best

neil.best@newsday.com@sportswatch

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.