The busty woman smiling with Alex Rodriguez on the cover of the Daily News today is Alicia Marie. She's a fitness model, meaning she appears in magazines like Flex, Muscle & Fitness, and Ironman — but she's also a champion bodybuilder and TV personality. The News describes her as A-Rod’s “muscle gal pal.” But I’ve known her for years as Alicia, John Rocker’s girlfriend a and sports blogger. It’s no surprise she’s making headlines for her time with A-Rod — she really is quite muscular — but readers should take her at her word when she says their “friendship” was just that. Alicia Marie is the type of overgrown innocent who would appeal to A-Rod; she might be the world’s nicest, most normal media-savvy bodybuilder who dates athletes, a club that’s less exclusive than you might think.

Alicia Marie once admitted to me that she had set up an interview with Rocker partly because “he’s so cute.” She called him an “athletic Adonis” in a March 2006 article, and within weeks they were dating.

Six months later, I interviewed Rocker and his now-serious girlfriend at a Lower East Side bar, in which he famously claimed, “I'm not Republican in everything — I mean, look at my girlfriend.” Alicia was smiling and playing along — she has a neuroscience degree from the University of Connecticut and referred to her parents as “the only black Republicans on earth” — and sent me an e-mail the next day to thank me for “being so nice to John.”

After I included the interview in my book, Alicia told me, “I feel famous!” I sincerely hope she liked the feeling, because she's certainly famous now. —Will Leitch