Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!
The Player

The Player
Vogue Magazine, May 1999

What it's like to be both hero and heartthrob? At 24, Derek Jeter is the ultimate Yankee

Derek Jeter, the 24-year-old Yankee shortstop, glides slowly across the carpeted clubhouse and chooses a chair in the dead center of the room. He’s freshly showered after a spring-training game and plainly dressed-high-top white Nikes, new 34-by-34-inch Levi’s as black as fresh asphalt, an immaculate white cotton T-shirts. He oozes confidence and style. The gaze is direct. These are the eyes of someone who is at his best when he lets the world come to him. And why not? He’s the best player on arguable the greatest team in baseball history, and Derek Jeter has only begun to explore his potential.

It’s five days since the death of Joe DiMaggio, the class of the old Yankees. "He was the type of guy that kept the himself," Jeter says admiringly. "Even if you hear his old teammates talk, he just showed up and played; he didn’t really say too much. He kept his private life private. I think when people don’t know a lot about you, there is this certain mystique, and I think people had that sense about him."

Jeter is secure and friendly, but his off-the-field appeal is rooted in a similar combination of easy grace and inscrutability. Yes: He’s beautiful; his six-feet-three inches of curvy muscle accentuated by the Yankees’ tight pinstripes is enough to generate Hanson-decibel squeals from the stands whenever he come to the plate. But his face gives away very little in the way of internal drama. Exotic light-green eyes are enigmatically curtained by droopy Elvis lids. Even after more than three years of microscopic New York media attention, Jeter retains a magnetic mysteriousness.

Still, Jeter enjoys people far more than DiMaggio ever did, so there’s little chance of his turning into a haughty recluse. He’s animated and funny when debating the merits of Foxy Brown versus Lauryn Hill, and laughs and blushes when told he looks so good in his Hilfiger boxer-briefs, he should consider underwear endorsements. Smart and unfailing optimistic, Jeter says he’s thrilled by the Yankees’ vast following. He isn’t however, particularly eager to share his off-the-field life with the celebrity-hungry public. In 1999, fans eager to claim the new star as their own happily speculated that he was Italian, Puerto Rican, Jewish. Jeter busy racking up statistics that would win him Rookie of the Year honors, was amused by all the guessing, but he didn’t rush to clear up the details. When reporters finally asked, Jeter politely supplied the facts. His father, a therapist, is African-American; his mother, an accountant, is Irish-American.

Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Jeter kept a poster of Dave Winfield, the Yankees star of the early eighties, on his bedroom wall, and dreamed of playing shortstop, his father’s position in college. School came first, however, for Charles and Dorothy Jeter. "The way you raise good children is by giving them plenty of love and being demanding in terms of them taking responsibility," says Charles Jeter.

Jeter has always been quiet, says his father, hinting at a season for his son’s watchful distance. "As a biracial family, you get a lot of those stares," Charles Jeter says. "You can’t live in this world without running into ignorant people, and we felt our children were sometimes left out of social situations, all-star teams, things like that, for racial reasons. We would just tell Sharlee (his sister) and Derek, ‘You’ve got to be good, and for some people you’ve got to be better.’ "

Curiously, the one area of Jeter’s life where he hasn’t been able to achieve a nonchalant serenity is with women. "Everyone tells me, ‘You can’t look, you’ll just meet the person,’ " Jeter says. "I think I’ve been looking too hard." He sighs, the only time he shows mild perplexity. "I don’t know if it’s a slump, not having a girlfriend, but I’ve stopped looking. I’m not looking anymore." He sounds as if he’s reminding himself. "If it happens, it happens." But then, of course, Jeter shares on other thing with the great DiMaggio: a failed attempt at a very public romance. His dates with Mariah Carey last year inevitably made the papers, which made Jeter cringe. It didn’t help when the singer showed up at Yankee Stadium in a box seat right next to the Yankee dugout and smiled for the tabloid cameras. The team’s imperious owner, George Steinbrenner, denies making it known to Jeter that he should keep his girlfriend away from the ballpark.

Jeter will be 25 in June, but ever since he turned 21 he’s been mentally subtracting a year whenever he celebrates a birthday. "So now I’m eighteen years old, going on seventeen," he says, and he does seem the type that still gets teenage crushes. His attraction to Carey was clearly something deeper, though, and he politely declines to discuss her. It’s easy to see why they fit: For all her recent attempts at hip-hop badness, Carey, as a person is square verging on cornball, just like Jeter.

One of a handful of Yankees to actually live in Manhattan, Jeter seems to have made the long psychic trip from Kalamazoo without losing his head. In March, he won a massive raise from the Yankees, bumping his baseball paycheck from $750,000 to $5 million a year. He helped his parents buy a new house and allowed himself a small indulgence: a rocket-ship-silver 1999 Mercedes SL600 convertible. It’s an uncharacteristically flashy accessory for Jeter, who insists he never pushes the sleek machine past 65 mph. The key to Jeter’s success from the beginning was learning not to try too hard. As a homesick teenager stuck in minor-league outposts like Tampa and Greensboro, North Carolina, Jeter frequently struck out at the plate and kicked as many groundballs as he caught. He cried every day. What turned it all around, besides hours of practice that honed his raw physical gifts, was the discovery that less is more. Jeter allowed his naturally laid-back rhythm to take over. He began to have fun again, truly playing baseball. Now the world, like a lazy midsummer groundball, is hopping straight into Derek Jeter’s soft hands.

Back to Derek Jeter Articles