A-GREAT DIVIDE
Jeter opens up about Alex rift in new doc: 'Not a true friend'
Derek Jeter realized Alex Rodriguez was not a “true friend” after the latter’s infamous interview with Esquire in 2001.
That’s according to Jeter himself, who opened up about the incident in “The Captain,” a seven-part docu-series that debuts on ESPN on July 18 after the Home Run Derby.
One day, Jeter and A-Rod would become teammates, but their intertwined saga began years before.
Star shortstops who were born about a year apart, Jeter and A-Rod forged a friendship that was constantly covered both in the press and during games whenever the Yankees played the Mariners in the mid-to-late 1990s.
The bromance ran so deep that they actually had sleepovers at each others’ homes when their teams played each other. There was even the infamous moment in 2000, when their teams had a bench-clearing brawl, and Jeter and A-Rod’s chumminess amid the scrap was enough to aggravate Jeter’s fiery teammate, Chad Curtis.
Eventually, a juxtaposition emerged, where Jeter became an enormous star as the Yankees won the World Series four times in five years. And then there was A-Rod, whose gaudy stats propelled him to receive a 10-year, $252 million contract from the Rangers, an eye-popping record contract at the time.
There was constant chatter comparing and contrasting their respective accomplishments, and it became something of a faith versus reason debate where stark believers in intangibles would choose Jeter and devout statisticians were certain A-Rod was far superior.
Then came the Esquire story. The interview took place for a couple hours, during a Heat game in Miami. Author Scott Raab went into the interview trying to learn about who A-Rod is; he said he did not go into it expecting the star to say “something that would piss Derek Jeter off.”
The tape of the interview has survived to this day, and it revealed the context of Raab asking A-Rod about the friendship/rivalry between the two shortstops.
“No, there’s not a rivalry at all. Not even, I mean rivalry? Like, ours is such a brotherhood that there’s definitely no rivalry there. And it’s weird, because even with my brother [we] have a a little rivalry,” Rodriguez said. “But with Derek, I’m his biggest fan and I think it’s vice versa.”
Then Raab asked A-Rod what he thought about Jeter’s character.
“He’s reserved, quiet. Jeter’s been blessed with great talent around him. So he’s never had to lead. He doesn’t have to, he can just go and play and have fun, and hit second. I mean, you know, hitting second is totally different than hitting third or fourth in a lineup because you go into New York trying to stop Bernie [Williams] and [Paul] O’Neill and everybody. You never say, ‘Don’t let Derek beat you.’ That’s never your concern.”
More than two decades later, Jeter still does not seem to have completely shaken the remarks.
“Those comments bothered me because, like I said, I’m very, very loyal,” Jeter said. “As a friend, I’m loyal. I just looked at it as, ‘I wouldn’t have done it.’ And then it was the media. The constant hammer to the nail. They just kept hammering it in. It just became noise, which frustrated me. Just constant noise.
“When that came out, I felt really bad about it,” A-Rod said. “I saw the way it was playing out. The way it was written, I absolutely said exactly what I said. It was a comment that I stand behind today. It was a complete tsunami.
It was one of the greatest teams ever. To say that you don’t have to focus on just one player is totally fair. By the way the same could be said about my team with the Mariners. We had Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner. If someone said that about me, I’d be like, ‘No s--t. Absolutely. You better not just worry about me.’ ”
Nonetheless, Rodriguez apologized to Jeter at the time.
Jeter was inclined to accept it — except A-Rod gave a similar interview to Dan Patrick, telling the radio host about Jeter something to the effect of, “There’s not one thing he does better than me.”
Jeter thought that A-Rod was “diminishing” him to justify his own blockbuster contract.
“In my mind, he got his contract, so you’re trying to diminish what I’m doing, maybe to justify why you got paid. When you talk about statistics, mine never compared to Alex’s. I’m not blind. I understand that. But, we won! You can say whatever you want about me as a player. That’s fine,” Jeter said.
“But then it goes back to the trust, the loyalty. This is how the guy feels. He’s not a true friend, is how I felt. Because I wouldn’t do it to a friend.”