Alex Rodriguez won over Jennifer Lopez with a thoughtful, all-caps F-bomb text

Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez first met in 2005, when they shook hands in a tunnel at Shea Stadium.

“It was this weird electricity for, like, three seconds,” Lopez told Sports Illustrated in a recent feature on Rodriguez’s second round of superstardom, as a broadcaster and all-around celebrity. “Three to five seconds of looking at somebody right in their eyes, and getting stuck.”

They both were married (to other people) at the time, so nothing happened. But such was not the case 12 years later when they bumped into each other one night at the Beverly Hills Hotel and went out to dinner a few nights later. What happened next doesn’t sound nearly as romantic as their initial encounter, but somehow it led to the celebrity couple’s eventual engagement earlier this year.

Lopez told SI that Rodriguez was really awkward the first time they went out, “saying all this stuff you would never say on a first date.” Then, after the former baseball star excused himself to use the bathroom, she received a text from him that said, “YOU LOOK SEXY AS ...” (of course, A-Rod didn’t really use an ellipsis; he went with an F-bomb).

You’d think that also would fall under the “stuff you would never say on a first date” category, but it worked on J-Lo.

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“Actually, it was good game, because it was very unexpected and it was super flattering,” the singer/actress said. “I wasn’t dressed very sexy.”

Still, it’s pretty easy to guess which of the two is considered the wordsmith of their relationship.

“She knows how to communicate to the masses in ways I never will,” Rodriguez said of Lopez. “She helps me out all the time when I’m trying to land a point on something. She’s just a wordsmith.”

charles.schilken@latimes.com

Twitter: @chewkiii