The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter Read Online Free PDF

brush with his parents’ draconian law. The Jeters did not have to worry about far more serious teen behavior issues; as a seventeen-year-old Derek told a family friend and a Kalamazoo scout, Keith Roberts, “Life is tough enough without drugs and alcohol.”
    Tough enough? Even as he projected an altar boy’s disposition, Derek’s was not a trouble-free youth, not when he was subjected to the bile spilling out of small and ignorant minds.
    Sonny Connors’s fears for his biracial grandchildren were realized. Though most of his teachers and coaches said they never heard others direct racial slurs at Derek, Courtney Jasiak recalled an incident after a play at the plate in a heated tournament game against a suburban Detroit team.
    “They had this huge catcher,” Jasiak said, “and he didn’t like the way Derek came in. He called Derek the
N
-word. . . . The catcher got ejected, but Derek was about to fight him. We got in between them.”
    Growing up, Derek and Sharlee were sometimes called hurtful names. When Sharlee was young, Derek nearly threw a punch at one kid who called his sister an Oreo but did not succumb to the urge. “Why give them the gratification to where people know something bothers you?” Derek would say.
    Dot Jeter moved to assure her children that everything would be OK, that she would deal with the offender’s parents. “I’m going to take care of this,” Dot said, and place the phone call she did.
    Halfway between Detroit and Chicago, Kalamazoo was not unlike other midsize midwestern towns, where the vast majority of the 1980s populace appeared progressive-minded when measured against the whites who lorded over Charles Jeter’s segregated South.
    But Charles and Dot were once denied a vacant Kalamazoo apartment by a Jurassic-thinking realtor, and they were pained to see their children followed by suspicious salespeople, and to know their complexion drew stares from rude strangers.
    “Kalamazoo’s not too big,” Derek would say, “but if you go somewhere with just your mother, you’re a little bit darker than your mom. You go somewhere with just your dad, you’re a little lighter than he is. So you got some funny looks. . . . Sometimes you felt the stares.”
    Charles and Dot did what they could to wrap a protective cocoon around their children.
    “You can’t get away from the fact there are racist people in society,” Charles would say. “Some things happened, but our kids never let that affect them. We told Derek and Sharlee to chase their dreams, to not let anyone stop them.”
    When Derek closed in on his big league dream, sharpening his swing by swatting an endless procession of baseballs into a net installed in his garage, Keith Roberts heard the sounds of intolerance around the Kalamazoo Central batting cage.
    “I know with some scouts it was an issue, that the Jeters had a biracial marriage,” Roberts said. “I mean a few scouts, not a lot. You overhear scouts talking.”
    Roberts’s older brother, Duane, was influential in integrating local schools and establishments and ran the Kalamazoo chapter of the NAACP. “Kalamazoo is an accepting place,” Roberts said, “but there is still some ignorance.”
    David Hart, Derek’s basketball teammate with the Blues, sometimes traveled into Kalamazoo from nearby Battle Creek, met up with a fellow black player, Kenyon Murray, and a couple of white girls, and immediately felt a community’s glare.
    “It’s a small town, not a melting pot like New York City,” Hart said. “So you do have those little rules where you stick to your side of the tracks and I stick to mine. We didn’t grow up in the South with traditional bigotry, but there was an underlying feeling there, an invisible line, and growing up you were always conscious of it.”
    The Jeters were so conscious of the invisible line, they suspected Derek was left off the all-district baseball team in his junior year of high school because of his biracial