The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (3 page)

Discipline and accountability were the laws of the Jeters’ land. Charles was a full-time student by day, a drug and alcohol abuse counselor by night, and even with Dot drawing her accounting paycheck, money had to be spent judiciously.

One day Derek announced he wanted a pair of $125 basketball shoes he thought would improve his modest (at the time) leaping ability. His mother agreed on one condition: Derek had better wear those shoes and work on his jumping 24/7.

Sure enough, Derek would run and hop all over the family’s small living room. “He knew it was important for us,” Dot would say, “that if we were going to sacrifice $125, then he was going to give us his all.”

On the field and in the classroom. By the eighth grade Jeter was a straight-A student who maintained his popularity with students of both genders. The boys were in awe of his athleticism, “and the girls were in awe of his personality and looks,” said Chris Oosterbaan, his creative writing and history teacher. “There were many crushes on Derek Jeter.”

The attention did not swell Jeter’s head beyond the margins of his signed conduct clauses. Truth was, Derek would have signed anything as long as he was allowed to play baseball for the teams that would have him. And there was not an amateur team within a fifty-mile radius of Kalamazoo that did not want Charles Jeter’s boy as its shortstop.

Derek was not anyone’s idea of a braggart, but he had been telling classmates and teachers he would grow into a big leaguer as far back as fourth grade, inside Garzelloni’s class in the basement of St. Augustine. Garzelloni asked her twenty students to declare their future intentions, and she heard the typical answers from most—doctor, firefighter, teacher, professional athlete.

Only Derek was not planning on being just a professional athlete; he had something far more specific in mind, a vision he shared with his parents as a child. He told Garzelloni’s class he was going to be a New York Yankee, and the teacher told the student her husband—a devoted Yankee fan—would be happy to hear it.

Derek did not make this some grand proclamation; he just said it as if he were announcing his plans for lunch. “And if he said he was going to do something,” Garzelloni said, “Derek was the kind of kid who did it.”

Derek told anyone who would listen that he would someday play shortstop for the Yankees, the team his father had hated in his youth. Before Charles started rooting for the local Tigers, he was a National League fan from the South who did not celebrate Yankee dominance; the Yanks were among baseball’s last all-white teams before promoting Elston Howard eight years after Jackie Robinson’s debut at Ebbets Field.

Grandma Dot converted Derek on those summer trips to the castle and lake. She took her grandson to his first Yankee Stadium game when he was six, and years later Derek could not remember the opponent or the final score. “All I can tell you,” he would say, “is everything was so big.”

As big as the boy’s ambition. Derek would stir his grandmother at dawn, throw on his Yankee jersey, and beg her to play catch in the yard. She always agreed, even if she knew Derek’s throws would nearly knock her to the ground.

Soon enough Derek entered Kalamazoo Central High on a mission—to honor his own prophecy, the one laid out for him by his St. Augustine classmates in a 1988 graduation booklet that included forecasts of what the students would be doing ten years later. “Derek Jeter, professional ball player for the Yankees is coming around,” one entry read. “You’ve seen him in grocery stores—on the Wheaties boxes, of course.”

As it turned out, Jeter made his ninth-grade mark with a basketball before he made one with a baseball. Around Halloween in ’88, Derek was dribbling a ball up and down and around a Kalamazoo Central service road just when Clarence Gardner was starting a road trip with the Central girls basketball team (Michigan girls used to play their basketball season in the fall).

The players pressed their noses against the bus windows and expressed wonderment over the freshman’s commitment in the face of a late October chill. “They were all saying, ‘You know he’s going to be great,’” Gardner recalled. “Of course, some of them were talking about how cute he was, too.”

It was the first time Derek Sanderson Jeter was known to have impressed a busload of schoolgirls.

It would not be the last.

Derek Jeter played basketball to stay in shape for baseball, but that did not stop him from approaching every possession as if all of his big league dreams depended on it. In fact, when he tried out for the Kalamazoo Blues, a high-powered team on the AAU and summer ball circuits, Jeter won a roster spot simply by outrunning and out-hustling boys who had played on stronger junior high teams than his.

St. Augustine was not a feeder program for the Blues, whose coach, Walter Hall, had never before seen Jeter play. Derek caught his eye with his speed and pure perimeter stroke. Hall also was impressed by his parents, Charles and Dot. The Jeters did not try to talk up their son during tryouts the way so many other parents did; Hall did not meet them until after Derek made the team.

Jeter was a reliable reserve player for the Blues, a team stocked with talent that would attract major college recruiters. Derek was the designated shooter, instant offense off the bench, and yet his intensity and willingness to dive for a loose ball and race back on defense to slow a fast break distinguished him from his more gifted teammates.

“Derek probably got dunked on more than anybody in the state of Michigan,” said the Blues’ assistant, Greg Williams. Jeter never gave up on a possession, even on a breakaway for the other team. Derek always thought he could catch an opponent and strip him, leaving him vulnerable to the slam.

Jeter separated himself from teammates in a more conspicuous off-court way. On trips to regional and national tournaments, when the rest of the Blues were wearing Michael Jordan jerseys or Detroit Pistons T-shirts, Derek was dressed from head to toe in Yankees gear, including the omnipresent gold Yankee pendant dangling from his neck.

His teammates kept teasing him about his allegiances, and Jeter kept assuring them what he had assured everyone else—he was going to be the Yankee shortstop someday, whether or not they reached the NBA.

The Blues often slept four to a room, and many a night their cheap hotels were filled with laughter over Jeter’s baseball jones. They traveled to Kingsport, Tennessee, for a national tournament, and the one truth about the trip that intrigued Jeter the most was this:

Darryl Strawberry started his minor league career there.

Jeter was so serious about baseball and his favorite team, said Monter Glasper, one of his roommates, “he even wore Yankee boxers to bed.” The Blues joked with him about that. “But you could tell he was never joking when he said he’d end up playing for them,” Glasper said.

Once on the court, Jeter was no longer a daydreaming shortstop, but a basketball player as serious as Glasper and Kenyon Murray, who would earn scholarships to Iowa. If Jeter was not a strong ball handler, at least not by top-shelf AAU standards, he was among the Blues’ best shooters and defenders and perhaps their most fearless presence in the final minutes of a frantic game.

Jeter’s favorite shot was the three-pointer from the corner. David Hart, a point guard who would earn a scholarship to Michigan State, would penetrate and kick it to the gunner many Blues likened to the Pistons’ trigger-happy reserve, Vinnie Johnson.

“It didn’t matter if Derek had missed twenty shots in a row,” Hart said. “If the game was on the line and he got the ball again, he was putting it up.”

Jeter’s parents, Charles and Dot, took in every game from the stands, “and it was definitely unique,” Hart said, “because I came from a two-parent home, too, but a lot of our guys didn’t.” Charles and Dot filmed the Blues’ games, and with no operating budget to speak of, the Blues’ coaches would borrow their film and show it to the team on the locker room or hotel walls, complete with Dot’s running commentary on her son’s play.

Dot knew the game. “Sometimes she was hollering, ‘Go, baby, go,’” Williams said, “but she was very on point. She could be very critical of Derek’s performance.”

So could the Blues’ coaches. During one film session, Williams drove Jeter to tears by repeatedly pointing out open big men in the paint while he was firing away from the perimeter. The assistant coach had to apologize to Derek a few times for shredding him in front of the team.

But all in all, Jeter was a basketball coach’s best friend. The Blues played a powerhouse Oklahoma team in one prominent national event, “and on paper,” said Hall, their head coach, “we didn’t belong in the same gym with those guys. And Derek came off the bench and shot Oklahoma right out of the tournament.”

Everyone agreed Jeter had major college ability, even if basketball rated as a distant second love. Derek had what his father called a quiet arrogance on the court. “He always wanted the last shot,” Charles Jeter said. “He usually didn’t make them, but he was never afraid to fail.”

The Blues made their share of overseas trips to compete against the best available international competition, and one summer they planned to travel to South America. Charles and Dot wanted Derek to make the trip for the cultural experience.

Hall talked them out of it, told them Derek could not afford to miss that much time away from baseball. The coach knew what his players did not.

The Blues were so caught up in the city game, in reaching for faraway NBA careers, that they paid little attention to what Jeter was doing on the diamond for Kalamazoo Central or for his summer league teams.

They knew he wore Yankee caps and jerseys and interlocking “NY” pendants, and they knew all about his prediction that he would land at shortstop in the Bronx. But they were shocked when they found out Jeter was far more proficient on a baseball diamond than they were on a basketball court.

The Blues were all so focused on earning Division I basketball scholarships, Hart said, “it just didn’t dawn on us that Derek was better than all of us in another sport. I mean, as it turned out, what we were doing was nothing compared to him. We were just trying to get into college, and this guy was already making himself a pro.”

Courtney Jasiak was the first baseball coach to tell Derek Jeter he was not ready to play shortstop. Just as James Smith had moved Charles Jeter to second at Fisk University, Jasiak moved Charles’s son to third on his sixteen-and-under Kalamazoo team.

A right-handed batter and thrower, Jeter was fourteen when he started playing for the twenty-one-year-old Jasiak, whose over-the-top, treat-every-game-like-it’s-the-World-Series temperament unnerved Derek. Jasiak put his team of teenage warriors in a men’s city league to compete against twenty-five-year-olds, and when he went winless in his first eight games, the coach decided to jump his third baseman hard.

Derek rarely said a word during practices or games. “I was kind of crazy back then,” Jasiak would say, “but I just felt he had more to give from a leadership standpoint and I let him know it.”

Jeter responded, and Jasiak’s Brundage Roofing team scored a couple of victories against the men. Meanwhile, Brundage destroyed local opponents in its own age bracket and did so with a tiny sixteen-year-old at shortstop, Bobby Marks, an accomplished diver who made his mark in baseball by gobbling up everything hit his way.

“Derek did not like being shuttled to third base at all,” Jasiak said.

He got some time in at short all the same, and Jasiak used to roll balls to Derek’s left and make him field them with two hands. The teacher marveled over his pupil’s lateral movement, and Jasiak assured people Jeter would someday be a first-round pick in the big league draft.

Derek did nothing at Kalamazoo Central to temper that optimism. On a bitter February day during his freshman year, Jeter showed up for junior varsity tryouts in the large and drafty Central gym. Norm Copeland, the jayvee coach, hit the prospects a series of soft grounders on the hardwood to test the strength of their arms.

Jeter fielded one and fired a ball on a line no more than three feet off the court. The poor kid assigned to catch it never had a chance; the ball crashed into the boy’s stomach.

Copeland absorbed Jeter’s long and lean athleticism, the foot speed, and the turbocharged arm and told his son to find the varsity coach, Marv Signeski. “He’s got to see this kid,” Copeland said.

Signeski watched from the balcony above the floor. “Hey,” he called out to Jeter, “varsity tryouts aren’t for another two hours.”

Derek was one freshman who could have played on any varsity team in America. He remained with the jayvee because Central had an all-state baseball and hockey player at short, Craig Humphrey, leaving Copeland to try to maximize his phenom’s potential.

The coach pulled Jeter aside after the team’s first full practice.

“Derek,” Copeland said, “I want to make sure you always give me 110 percent.”

“Oh,” Jeter answered, “you don’t like the way I play?”

“No, I like the way you play very much. You’re head and shoulders above everyone else, but I’m worried you might play down to the level of the other kids.”

“OK. I understand.”

Jeter understood. He loved baseball too much to ever dumb down his game.

Despite the vast difference between his skill set and his teammates’, Derek never criticized a fellow player, never rolled his eyes or kicked the dirt over an error committed by a lesser light. He maintained his father’s demeanor on the ball field and ran faster, threw harder, and hit better than his old man ever did.

But when he was a teenager, Charles had been the one with the better glove. “Derek was not a good fielder in high school,” said one summer teammate, Chad Casserly. “He’d field the ball and then always pack his glove, pack it and pack it and pack it, before finally releasing the throw. He butchered some ground balls.”

Jeter was a dead pull hitter, too, and pitchers started nibbling away on the outside corner of the plate. The Kalamazoo Central coaches worked with Derek to take those outside pitches to right field, and before they knew it he was spraying balls all over creation and developing an inside-out swing that would put batters twice his age to shame.