Derek Jeter was a great baseball player. He’s a New York Yankees icon, an all-time legend, and a Hall of Fame. While Jeter excelled on the field, he intentionally tried to suck at giving media interviews, and if you ask any reporter who had to talk to him during his career, he was even great at sucking. He went out of his way to be boring and say nothing.
But as vanilla and dull as he tried to present himself, he loved to party and enjoyed the New York City nightlife as much as anyone. A new seven-part docuseries called “The Captain” will debut on ESPN on July 18. Spike Lee produces it, and there are a lot of cool and interesting stories that fans will find fascinating.
Here’s one. Remember when Diddy and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez got involved in a nightclub shooting in 1999? Jeter was supposed to be there too, but because he had a game the next day, he decided to take a pass, or he would have been in the middle of it.
Here’s what Jeter said in one of the episodes.
“We got lucky. We would have been right there, so my name would have been a part of the story.”
Jeter had an interesting quote that seems beneath a player as savvy as he was. He was the Yankee’s biggest star, one of the biggest in all of sports during his prime, so obviously, as a single, good-looking A-lister who had a habit of dating young starlets including Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Scarlett Johansson, and Minka Kelly, his nocturnal habits would be mentioned frequently in the NYC tabloids frequently.
Almost unfathomably, Jeter found that out of line. Again, he was a mega star, living in the media capital of the world, and he was apparently put off by newspapers and gossip columns talking about his personal life.
“Members of the media—they didn’t go around asking Bernie [Williams] what he and his wife did the night before. They didn’t go out and ask Tino [Martinez] or Paul O’Neill where they went to eat, and how late they were there, and who they were with. So, I just didn’t think it was fair to ask me. You know, I think you have to draw the line. I drew the line at a very young age and I just wasn’t going to let them cross it.”
Would Derek Jeter have preferred playing in Kansas City, Pittsburgh, or Milwaukee, where the media would have been less obtrusive? These comments make you wonder.
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