The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (2 page)

John Tiedemann was a tough and simple man who liked to fish, watch boxing, and move the earth with his callused hands. Long before he poured himself into the Greenwood Lake project, Tiedemann was proud of being the first resident on his Jersey City block, 7th Street, to own a television set. He enjoyed having his friends over to take in the Friday night fights.

He finally made some real money with his church improvement business and later bought himself a couple of Rolls-Royces to park outside his renovated castle. But Tiedemann was a laborer at heart, and he had taught his eleven sons all the necessary trades.

As it turned out, none of the boys could match the father as a craftsman. None but Sonny, the one Tiedemann who did not share Tiedemann’s blood.

For years Sonny was John’s most reliable aide, at least when he was not working his full-time job as head of maintenance at Queen of Peace in North Arlington, New Jersey, an hour’s commute from the castle. Sonny would drive through heavy snowstorms in the middle of the night to clean the Queen of Peace parking lots by 4:00 a.m. He would vacuum the rugs around the altar, paint the priests’ living quarters, and repair the parishioners’ sputtering cars for no charge.

Sonny never once called in sick and never once forgot the family that gave him a chance. Every Friday, payday, Sonny would stop at a bakery and buy a large strawberry shortcake so all the Tiedemanns could enjoy dessert.

“Sonny was the spark that kept us going,” George said, “because he never took a break.” Sonny idolized Julia Tiedemann, and he liked to make her husband proud. If John Tiedemann wanted a room painted, Sonny made sure that room got painted while John was away on business so he would be pleasantly surprised on his return.

Sonny married a Tiedemann; of course he did. Dorothy was a niece of John and Julia’s, a devoted Yankees fan who loved hearing the crack of Joe D.’s bat on the radio, and who hated seeing Babe Ruth’s lifeless body when she passed his open casket inside Yankee Stadium in 1948.

Sonny and Dorothy, or Dot, would raise fourteen children, including another Dorothy, or Dot. The Connors family spent some time in the castle before moving to nearby West Milford, New Jersey, where Sonny served as the same working-class hero for his kids that John Tiedemann was for him.

Sonny and his wife took in troubled or orphaned children and made them their own, and it never mattered that money was tight. “Sonny went back to his own experience as a boy,” said Monsignor Thomas Madden, the pastor at Queen of Peace. “The Tiedemanns took care of Sonny, so it was in his nature to take care of others. . . . And Dorothy had just as big a heart as he did.”

One of their flesh-and-blood daughters, Dot, ended up in the army and was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, where in 1972 she met a black soldier named Sanderson Charles Jeter, raised by a single mother in Montgomery, Alabama. They married the following year, at a time in America when the notion of a biracial president was more absurd than that of a human colony on Mars.

Naturally, Sonny did not approve of the marriage. He worried over the way the children would be treated, worried they would be teased and taunted by black and white. “Sonny was very concerned about that,” Msgr. Madden said. “He would ask, ‘Will they be accepted? Will they have to fight battles?’”

His questions would start to be answered on June 26, 1974, when Derek Sanderson Jeter was born at Chilton Memorial Hospital in the Pompton Plains section of Pequannock, New Jersey.

If Sonny initially did not have a relationship with his daughter’s husband, that did not stop him from pursuing one with his daughter’s son.

Derek was four when his parents moved with him from Jersey to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Charles enrolled in Western Michigan University to pursue a master’s and doctorate in social work. But every summer, Derek stayed with the Connors clan in West Milford and made almost daily visits to the castle in Greenwood Lake.

The Tiedemanns put down sand near the water to give the boys and girls the feel of a beachfront, and Derek’s grandmother brought him over to play with the Tiedemann grandchildren and escape the heat. Derek was not looking for a chance to swim as much as he was looking for a partner in a game of catch.

“He was always talking about baseball,” said Michael Tiedemann, one of John’s grandchildren. They played Wiffle ball games and threw footballs and tennis balls around the lake. “And no matter what we played,” Michael said, “Derek was by leaps and bounds the best athlete. He kept his eye on the ball and moved a lot faster than the rest of us did.”

Despite the fact he was reed thin, Derek surely claimed some of his physicality from Sonny, a roundish but powerfully built man who stood five foot eleven and projected the body language of a dockworker—in other words, someone to be avoided in a bar fight. But it was Derek’s father, Charles, who passed down the genetic coding of a ballplayer.

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 perimeter 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.