by Ian O'Connor
Charles Jeter was a shortstop in the late sixties when he arrived at Fisk University, a small, historically black school in Nashville. He was a shortstop until the coach, James Smith, told him he was a second baseman.
Smith had a pro prospect with a throwing arm to die for, name of Victor Lesley. Lesley was the reason the tall and rangy Jeter was moved to a less taxing infield spot.
Jeter was hardly thrilled with the demotion and yet never mentioned it to his coach. Though he did not have a male figure in his household while growing up—Jeter never met his father—he knew how to conduct himself as a perfect gentleman, a credit to the mother and housecleaner named Lugenia who raised him.
“Cordial, nice, carried himself the right way,” Smith said. “I never heard Jeter use a curse word. Ever.”
On a strong team composed of African Americans from the South and a small circle of Caribbean recruits from St. Thomas, Jeter was an excellent fielder and base runner, a decent hitter who liked to punch the ball to right field, and a selfless teammate who knew how to advance a runner from one base to the next.
Jeter was as reliable a sacrifice bunter as Smith had ever seen. “You could ask him to bunt with three strikes on him if the rules had allowed it,” Smith said.
The head coach was the son of one of Nashville’s first black police officers. Smith was only a few years older than his players, but he was a strict disciplinarian all the same, a man unafraid of leaving behind a couple of important players if they were late for the bus.
The Fisk team, he said, “used to be the laughingstock of the league,” the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. He recruited better talent from American high schools, stumbled upon a pipeline to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and made sure his players were dressed in shirts and ties on road trips.
“They needed to know that when you go to Fisk,” Smith said, “you represent something besides yourself.”
Though Fisk had its share of white professors and white exchange students, Jeter and his teammates forever understood they were members of a predominantly black institution surrounded by a culture often hostile to African-American aims. So Smith took no chances. His student athletes were expected to be ambassadors of the school, the sport, and the cause of racial equity.
Charles Jeter fit the serious-minded mold. Only once did Smith have to reprimand him, and that was after Jeter was thrown out trying to steal second. Smith had never given him the steal sign, and when a teammate committed the same mortal baserunning sin the next inning, Smith went ballistic. “Gentlemen,” he shouted at his players, “this is a team sport. Let’s not put individual statistics ahead of the team.”
Jeter was known for his hustle, for his willingness to run out ground balls, so he was the perfect apostle of this all-for-one, one-for-all approach. (Smith only heard of his dismay over being moved to second base through a relative years later.) Jeter did not play to inflate his numbers on the bases or at the plate. He burned to be part of a winner, so the demoted shortstop focused on being the best second baseman in the league.
Smith shifted the incumbent to right field to clear room for Jeter, whose quickness and hand speed made him a natural at turning the double play. Jeter had a glove as flat as a pancake, “and we teased him about it all the time,” said Ulric Smalls, one of his teammates from St. Thomas. “When Jeter put it on the ground it had no shape, but he was flawless in the field.”
Jeter got his chance to return to shortstop after Lesley left Fisk, and Smalls remembered him outplaying a Vanderbilt star who had all the big league scouts abuzz. Smith had left his coaching position before Jeter finished his collegiate career, but he had scheduled the likes of Vanderbilt so the scouts fussing over the white boys in the SEC would be forced to watch his players, too.
Buck O’Neil, the Negro League star working for the Cubs, was the only scout who made regular trips to Fisk, leaving Jeter without the stage he needed to display his command of the game’s fundamentals.
Smith believed Charles had all the tools and talent to make it to the big leagues. “If he was playing at a different time and a different school,” the coach said, “he might’ve made it. But Jeter just didn’t have the opportunity.”
Charles Jeter made sure his son had the opportunity by providing the strong and nurturing paternal presence he had missed as a child, and by embracing the same code of honor, decency, and hard work that had shaped the Tiedemann and Connors homes.
Starting when Derek was in kindergarten, Charles competed against him in checkers and in card games and challenged him to guess the value of an appliance on the television show The Price Is Right. Charles tried to beat Derek at everything, and he told his wife their son “needs to learn how to lose and how to play the game the right way.”
Charles coached Derek when the boy was a Kalamazoo Little Leaguer, when Derek loved nothing more than throwing on his uniform, standing proudly before a mirror, and marching in the opening-day parade with his chin high and his shoulders thrown back, so proud to be part of a team.
Only one day Derek decided he was too proud to finish on the wrong end of a Little League score. He refused to join the handshake line to congratulate the winning team, and Charles got in his son’s face and made a tough-love stand.
“It’s time to grab a tennis racket,” he barked at Derek, “since you obviously don’t know how to play a team sport.”
In fact, Derek knew how to play a team sport, baseball, better than any other kid in Kalamazoo. He could hit, field, run, and throw the ball from shortstop with more power and accuracy than any pitcher could throw it from the mound.
Derek would play all day, any day, for as many weeks and months as the Kalamazoo climate would allow. Of course, those summer days in West Milford and Greenwood Lake were best spent throwing around the ball, too, at least when Derek was not busy swimming in the lake with his younger sister, Sharlee.
The alternative? No, Derek did not take to the alternative work with his grandfather at Queen of Peace, especially when the chores involved a lawn mower and a wide-open field of unruly grass.
Over time Sonny Connors had grown close to Charles Jeter; the church handyman had gotten past his concerns for his biracial grandkids. But Sonny had a special bond with Derek, who lived to please Sonny as much as he lived to please Charles.
Sonny got a kick out of bringing his grandson to work. One day he asked Derek to mow a Queen of Peace football field that had the overgrown look of a Brazilian rain forest. All elbows and knees and ankles, young Derek was no match for the job.
“The poor kid was going crazy with it,” said Madden, the Queen of Peace pastor. Derek was pushing the mower, emptying the bag, and pushing it again, and it was so hot the nuns felt sorry for him. They brought him inside, gave him a cold soda, told him to relax.
As soon as Sonny found out his grandson was cooling off and catching his breath, he ordered Derek to get back to work.
Sonny did not believe in fifteen-minute breaks, weekends, vacations, or holidays. “We used to open presents on Christmas Eve,” Sharlee would say, “because our grandfather worked every Christmas Day.”
Sonny did not want his children using the word can’t in his home, and his daughter imposed the same ordinance on Derek and Sharlee. So when children laughed at Derek’s claim that he would be a Yankee, and when teachers advised Charles and Dot to steer their son toward a more realistic goal, the Jeters did not budge.
No, the black social worker from Alabama and the white accountant from New Jersey would not listen to people tell them Derek could not be a big league ballplayer any more than they would listen to those who told them they should not marry for the sake of their children-to-be.
Derek refused to acknowledge those who thought he was banking on a fairy tale. “People laughed at it, and I just shrugged it off,” he would say. “It just made me work harder.”
The Jeters built their social lives around the ball field, particularly the Kalamazoo Central High School field just beyond the p
erimeter of their backyard. When Dot was not throwing Wiffle balls for Derek to hit in that yard, mother, son, father, and daughter were scaling the fence to take infield and batting practice. Derek hit his baseballs, and Sharlee hit her softballs.
“Some people go to the movies for fun,” said Sharlee, who was Derek’s athletic equal. “We went to the field. It was all part of being very close.”
They lived something of a Rockwellian existence in their modest home on 2415 Cumberland Street, where Charles and Dorothy enjoyed watching The Cosby Show with their son and daughter, and where they maintained order by signing their children to binding behavioral pacts. Derek signed his just before going off to high school, and the provisions covered phone calls, television hours, homework, grade-point averages, curfews, drugs and alcohol, and respect for others.
Even back then Derek was one to live up to the terms of his deals. His teachers described him as industrious, self-motivated, and willing to lend a hand to a student in need.
“He epitomized what every mom wants in a son,” said Shirley Garzelloni, Derek’s fourth-grade teacher at St. Augustine.
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.”