The Slugger's Wife

It began with one of the most embarrassing bobbles of the decade.

Nineteen-year-old Jessica Sekely, fresh as the Ohio farm on which she'd been raised, was on her third day of training at Hooters in Cleveland when Jose Canseco, one of the greatest sluggers of his era, walked in and cast his gaze upon her. Clearly he was smitten, though not until the next night was it clear how deeply her glorious image had been impressed on his mind. That night, during a game against the Indians, the Havana-born Texas Rangers outfielder, the first player in major league history to hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases in the same season, lost a fly ball in the lights. It plunked him on the head, bounced over the wall for a home run and earned him a prominent spot in the pantheon of great sports bloopers.

"I guess I distracted him," Jessica says with a smile, sitting pretty in her luxury high-rise apartment in Los Angeles. "Maybe I should have taken it as a warning."

Instead Jessica got an all-stadium pass to one of the wildest periods in modern sports. As Jose's girlfriend and then wife (his second), she quickly learned a little secret. "Baseball is not the apple-pie experience everybody makes it out to be," she says. There were the countless sex partners Jose listed by hair color in his little black book. There were the steroids that hobbled him with injuries and caused his testicles to disappear. Then there was the threesome Jessica arranged with one of her friends in a desperate effort to keep Jose interested. "Honestly, I don't think I ever said no to him," she says. "Jose was always in complete control."

At the time they met, Jose was one of the game's most luminous stars. In the late 1980s he and Mark McGwire were the celebrated Bash Brothers who slugged the Oakland A's into three consecutive World Series. He'd won a Rookie of the Year award in 1986, was the American League's MVP in 1988 and was a regular at the All-Star Game. He made his mark off the field as well, with an appetite for high-performance automobiles, a fondness for exotic pets (he kept a collection of lynx and cougars), a proclivity for getting into trouble (he earned a number of notorious speeding tickets and was cited for carrying a loaded handgun in his car) and an eye for the ladies. In his recent tell-all on steroids and fast times in baseball, Canseco estimates he slept with a "couple hundred" women in 17 seasons in the majors. He would sometimes organize a "beauty contest" in his hotel room to select potential dates, and the winners would be allowed to join him in public later that evening. The guy also toyed with the Material Girl. (The New York Post once dubbed him "Madonna's bat boy.")

But it's easy to understand why a man who could have any woman would choose Jessica. In her black tank top and sweatpants, she is as voluptuous as her ex-husband was rock solid, and she devoted herself wholeheartedly to pleasing him, she says, whether that meant riding shotgun on 200-mile-an-hour joyrides in his $225,000 Lamborghini Diablo or merely having sex with him in Fenway Park. "I can't tell you where exactly," she says. "I don't want to get in trouble."

Almost from the beginning Jessica knew she was in for a different kind of relationship. Jose would sometimes shower before going out in the middle of the day and then not answer his phone for hours on end. Soon Jessica started hearing stories from other girlfriends and wives about ballplayers having mistresses in different cities whom they'd fly to away games for assignations. One of the wives specifically said that Jose was part of that group. At first Jessica didn't want to believe it, but the evidence kept mounting. "One time I went to Orlando, and when I came back, the girlfriend of Jose's brother Ozzie [also a major leaguer] told me another girl had been there," she says. "Then the woman started calling the house, claiming she was pregnant." Meanwhile Jose was extremely suspicious of Jessica's behavior. "He hated it if I went anywhere where guys might hit on me," she says. "There were days when I couldn't leave the house."

All that injected testosterone wasn't making the situation any easier. Jessica first learned of Jose's steroid use four or five months into their relationship, though she didn't really know what steroids were. As she delved into the subject, she began to realize the source of her husband's bulky physique. Jose carried 240 pounds on his six-foot-four frame, though Jessica knew (text concluded on page 138)Jessica Canseco(continued from page 133) that, with more bulges than a pack of 12th-graders at a strip club, his size wasn't natural. "He had this buildup of muscle on a frame that's thin and tall," she says. "You can see it in his legs. He has these bird legs. Jose wasn't supposed to be so big."

Jessica saw firsthand what the fans could only speculate about. The roids were slowly destroying Jose's career. His excess muscle mass was wreaking havoc on his back and joints and accounted for many of his trips to the disabled list. As his power faded, general managers began to conclude he wasn't worth the investment. (Eventually he changed teams eight times.) After numerous surgeries he deteriorated to the point where he could barely function off the field. "I used to have to dress him in the morning," Jessica says, "put his socks on because he couldn't bend. His body just kept shutting down." Although Canseco ended up with 462 home runs and won another World Series ring with the Yankees in 2000, noted baseball columnist Peter Gammons says that he ranks with Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden as the biggest wastes of talent of their era.

Then there was the matter of Jose's other, well, teammates. In his autobiography Canseco is frank about the effect steroids had on his private parts. Jessica is even more candid. "It does definitely affect your testicles," she says shyly. "That's for sure. Jose's were nonexistent. They're not there." Didn't she think that was odd? "A little. Because, you know, men have... balls. It wasn't until we separated and I dated that I realized it." Jessica dated Kansas City Chiefs tight end Tony Gonzalez, among other men. "With other guys," she says, "I was like, Wow, those are some very large balls!" At the same time, the human growth hormone Jose was taking actually made his penis larger. "Your penis is a muscle, so it makes it heavy, solid," she says. "He was very well-endowed down there."

Not that it made him happy. One day Jose would be on a high; the next it was as if the world was crashing. Because Jessica didn't have anyone else in her life, she had to adapt to his moods. And there were worse things, though some of these she isn't quite ready to reveal. Jessica admits she engaged in activities she knew weren't healthy for her husband, but when asked point-blank whether she was forced to inject Jose with steroids, she hedges. "I think it's best I don't talk about it," she says. "You can imagine what I saw, but yeah, I just can't. Ask me something else."

Did she ever use steroids herself? She laughs nervously and says, "I don't want to talk about that, either, but I've been around women who have, and it's not good for them at all. Putting testosterone in a woman isn't normal. It affects women badly."

Surely the temptation to use them would have been enormous. Jose was quite specific about how he wanted Jessica to look, and although she had been a gymnast and dancer and had been named "best body" in high school, she was a little too thin for Jose. He was constantly telling her to eat. Says Jessica, "He doesn't like skinny girls. He wanted me to be meaty. One time my mom came and saw me and was mortified. I wasn't fat, but I was about 130 pounds of solid muscle--all because Jose wanted me that way."

Today, despite all the differences, Jose and Jessica's relationship is amicable. They talk on the phone nearly every day because of their eight-year-old daughter, Josie, and Jessica is supportive of Jose shining a light into the dark corners of baseball. "If it can help America's pastime get under control, writing the book was great," she says, "because I think steroids are horrible. There are times when you need to use them under a doctor's care, and that's fine, but recreationally they can really mess with you."

•

Jessica's apartment in the Westwood section of L.A. is elegant and cozy but not nearly as opulent as her former surroundings. The palace she and Jose shared in Weston, Florida was 22,000 square feet, with enough room for their fleet of impossibly expensive automobiles. She admits she loved the lavish lifestyle but is freer and happier today without it--and without a steady man in her life--than she's ever been before.

The Florida house was the setting for the Cansecos' wildest and darkest times. Their relationship was on a roller coaster: She would leave, Jose would beg her to return, and then things would go haywire again. Despite his promises he kept seeing other women. Once, Jessica caught Jose with a secret cell phone he used to contact other women. "I managed to get his password, and there were, like, four messages from girls saying, 'Oh, I'm waiting for you to meet me.'"

Jessica also got hold of notes and numbers, as well as a book with contact information for women in various towns. Says Jessica, "There were things like 'Two girls in Detroit. Strippers. Brown hair.' He'd have to write down descriptions because there were so many of them." Another time she found a note that read, "Your number-one regular." Jessica suspects it was from a woman in Oakland whom Jose had been seeing for years, dating back to his first marriage. The woman started showing up at games, she says. "Jose always said she was there for another player, but I knew," Jessica says. "The other wives couldn't believe she was there. We knew Jose had slept with her. I didn't know if all the other guys were sleeping with her too."

Out of answers, Jessica resorted to desperate measures. By this time she and Jose weren't living together but were still having sex. Taking one last shot at making the relationship work, Jessica invited a friend of hers to join them in the bedroom. "We had a threesome," she says. "It was at a point where I thought, What else can I do? He can have me and another woman, and we'll see if this will finally sow his wild oats." No such luck. "It doesn't work," she says. "I thought, This could be perfect. We'll be together forever. What a disappointment!"

That was pretty much the last straw. Jessica moved out and the divorce was finalized in 2000. These days she's writing her own book, due out this fall, and taking acting lessons. Sometimes she thinks back on that fateful day in Hooters and the man with the oak-tree arms who appeared at her table. She wonders what might have happened if she had that afternoon to live over again. Slipping the band off her ponytail, she says, "Looking back on the way things happened, all the things I went through and the way I felt all those years, I wouldn't have stayed. Then again, I wouldn't have become as strong as I am now." That's the sort of strength even someone as big as Jose Canseco can't take away from her now.

See more of Jessica's pictorial at cyber.playboy.com.

"I used to have to dress him in the morning," she says. "His body just kept shutting down."