Like his contemporaries in the hustling game, he made something of a specialty of maneuvering around bankers in the world of finance, and found acertain vicious joy in doing it well (frontier hustlers swindling East Coast bankers before the rise of the telegraph was a common occurrence).
Shawn McBride, vice president of sports marketing at Ketchum Public Relations, says Rodriguez emits an image of smugness and ego, making him a target for a public that takes acertain amount of joy in knocking someone like that down a peg.