*New York Daily News article*

Sunday, July 04, 1999

The black limousine rolls up to the side door of The Official All-Star Cafe, the mayhem of midtown rush hour swirling outside, the heat making West 45th Street feel like an asphalt steam bath. The door swings open and out steps the New York Yankees' All-World, All-Heartthrob shortstop, looking as dashing in a dark pinstriped suit as he does in the white pinstriped suit he wears in the Bronx.

President Clinton is at a function a few blocks to the north, doing gruesome things to the traffic flow, but Derek Jeter pays no mind. He simply does what he always seems to do in his charmed young life, enjoying himself, going with it. It is an off-night for the Yankees, so Jeter is hosting the annual benefit auction for his charitable foundation, Turn 2. By the time the night's bidding is done, he has raised nearly $210,000 for charity. It is but one more spectacular number in a season that has been crammed with them for Derek Sanderson Jeter, the kid from Kalamazoo, who, at 25 years of age, seems to redefine the city's standard for stardom with each passing week.

Don Zimmer, the Yankees' 68-year-old bench coach, has spent a half-century in professional baseball. He is asked about Jeter's 1999 work in progress, which coming into the holiday weekend featured a .377 average, 13 home runs, 55 RBI, 68 runs and daily installments of splendid glove work, and which, by tomorrow, could earn him his first start in the All-Star Game - no small accomplishment in a league whose shortstops include Nomar Garciaparra, Alex Rodriguez and Omar Vizquel.

"I can't remember any middle infielder doing what he's done, offensively and defensively, over these three months," Zimmer says. "He's just very, very special."

Jorge Posada, the Yankees' catcher and perhaps Jeter's closest friend on the team, has seen Jeter's evolution up close, coming through the Yankee system. He glances across the room at Jeter's locker, next door to the one left vacant in tribute to Thurman Munson.

"If he keeps growing as a player, it's going to be scary," Posada says.

The notion of Jeter getting better is indeed almost unimaginable. So is the idea that he could handle things any better. In only his fourth season, the 6-3, 195-pound Jeter has not merely emerged as one of the best players in the game. He has evolved into a long-legged revelation, a turn-of-the-millennium icon who, unlike so many of his superstar contemporaries, has no bloated ego, no whacked-out sense of entitlement, no attitude. With Jeter, the words "Yankee class" are much more than a tired organizational mantra. They are true.

How well-mannered and humble is Derek Jeter? He calls his manager Mr. Torre. He calls his bench coach Mr. Zimmer. He opens - and does all he can to answer - all his own mail. When asked about comparisons to New York sports heroes such as Joe Namath, Walt Frazier and Reggie Jackson, he is quick to rein it in.

"That's unfair to them," Jeter says. "I mean, I've played three full years. It's flattering, but you've got to play longer than that to be mentioned with those guys."

After some 15 minutes of autograph signing recently (he does this before virtually every game), a Hispanic film crew flagged him down and asked, in Spanish, if he would mind doing an interview.

"Sorry, No habla Espanol, man," he said with a smile. Jeter is polite even when he's saying no.

"He cares about people," Posada says. "He does everything the right way. It's tough not to like him."

Spend any time around Jeter, and you can't help being struck by yet another endearing quality: his gratitude for where he is. He is playing out a childhood fantasy, starring for the team he grew up rooting for. He is a pinstriped poster boy for the young, handsome and richly blessed. Three and a half years and two World Series rings into his career, he is on a fast track to Monument Park - and takes none of it for granted. It is no idle gesture when Jeter gallops happily down the blue and white tunnel from the clubhouse to the Yankee dugout, and jumps up to touch the little sign that hangs overhead and quotes Joe DiMaggio ("I want to thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee").

Says Jeter, "I wouldn't trade what I'm doing for anything. I'm living a dream."

Jeter's leap into superstardom has been so swift that people forget that his path has not been without bumps. He hit .202 his first year in the minors, and was so homesick he called home to Kalamazoo every night. One season later, in Greensboro, he made 56 errors in 127 games.

"That's pretty tough to do right there," Jeter says, laughing. "Fifty-six errors is not a good experience."

Dr. Charles Jeter, Derek's father, is a former drug and alcohol counselor who now runs his son's foundation. "People look at him now and think it was always easy, but I'm here to tell you it wasn't. Even in the spring training before his rookie year, he played terrible down there." Charles Jeter says he is proud of the way his son worked his way through it, with a confidence as strong as his arm from deep in the hole.

"He always thinks he's going to do well," Charles Jeter says. "That has been a real benefit to him."

Jeter may have less fear of failure than any athlete in sports. When Torre approached him about moving from second to third in the lineup, Jeter did not give a thought to how it might mess up his MVP-caliber season. He just said, "Whatever helps the club." If he strikes out his first two times up, he heads to the plate for the third time more certain than ever that he will get a hit. Posada still marvels at how Jeter - the rookie - set the emotional tone for the Yanks' comeback from two games down in the 1996 Series, leading off Game 3 in Atlanta with a double.

"He just kept swinging, and we followed him," Posada says.

One of Jeter's favorite TV commercials is the Nike spot in which Michael Jordan talks about how many times he has failed over the years.

"You're going to make mistakes," Jeter says. "I don't care who you are. You can't be afraid. A lot of people, when they are doing well, walk around with a smile on their face. I think you can tell a lot about a person with how they react when things aren't going well." Says Zimmer, "Some guys come in here and have a look on their faces like they've just come out of jail. Like it's a job. The thing with Jeter is that it's still a game. He has fun. He laughs. He says funny things to the manager. He's a kid playing baseball."

Probably no other Yankee could've pulled off the tension-lifting stunt Jeter did last year before Game 4 with the Indians in Cleveland, the Yanks' dream season perilously close to ruination. In the dugout, Jeter walked up to Torre, poked a finger in his chest and said, "Mr. Torre, this is one of the biggest games you've ever managed in." Jeter has reprised the routine many times since. Torre enjoys it.

Often as not in the on-deck circle, you can see Jeter engaged in conversation with a fan right up until it's time to hit. He has silly nicknames for most everyone on the team. "If you can't have fun playing a game, something's (wrong)," Jeter says.

Before every game for four years, Jeter has walked up to Zimmer, taken off the coach's hat and rubbed his bald head. Then he rubs Zimmer's round belly. When Zimmer's nubs of hair get a bit long, Jeter will come over to him and say, "Tighten it up."

The flip side of Jeter's pressure-free approach is a passion for perfection that is second to none. He lives in Tampa in the offseason so he can has easy access to the Yankees' complex. He spent countless hours there last winter, lifting weights, retooling his swing, learning to turn on the ball better. The payoff? He's on a nearly 30-home run pace, leads the league in triples (7) and leads the Yanks in RBI (55). A year ago, the buzz was that as fine a player as Jeter was - and he was third in AL MVP voting - he was not in the offensive class of Rodriguez and Garciaparra, two of the premier power-hitting shortstops in history. Nobody is saying that this year. Certainly not Tiger lefty Justin Thompson, who watched Jeter lay his black 32-ounce Louisville Slugger on a shin-high fastball and drive it over the left-center field wall at the Stadium last week.

"He used to be a guy who'd inside-out everything," Thompson says. "He still will do that, but now he can pull the ball, too. He's become a complete hitter."

"I like it when people doubt me," says Jeter, who has attacked another common criticism of his game this year, improving his walk-strikeout ratio to almost 1:1, after having 119 K's and just 57 walks a year ago.

The combination of Jeter's glorious skill, sunny spirit and uncommon maturity explains why he has become the unofficial Yankees' captain. There is a right way to do things, and he expects it from others as much as from himself. When David Wells threw up his hands in disgust when a pop fly landed between three Yankee fielders in short left last year, Jeter went directly to the mound. "Hopefully you're not showing me up," Jeter said. "We're trying out here. The whole team is trying. You don't need to do that."

"He's the youngest (starter), but he's the oldest in so many ways," Posada says.

It was not as if nobody expected big things from Derek Jeter when he first put on his pinstripes. Uniform No. 2 is not given to anybody by accident. But who could've foreseen that he'd just keep getting better, that he'd wear his stardom with such grace, that he'd grow into the sleek standard for Yankee shortstops right before our eyes?

"I'm not surprised," Tino Martinez says. "I'm just surprised it's happened in four years." It's a great life, and doesn't Derek Jeter know it? As he runs off for pregame stretching, and touches the Joe DiMaggio sign one more time en route, Jeter smiles.

"If you're looking for complaints," he says, "you're talking to the wrong guy."

He Likes Mike

Derek Jeter is fast becoming one of the most recognizable sports celebrities in the nation. He is inundated with business proposals and autograph requests, to say nothing of squeals. As he sifted through a stack of fan mail the other day, he was asked a simple question: Who would you want to be if you could be another athlete for a day? "Michael Jordan," he said, without hesitation.

"I mean, this guy can't go anywhere," Jeter said. "You could put him in any country on Earth. To be at the top like he was, I'd just like to see what it would be like for a day, maybe a week. After that it might get to be too much."

Jeter's admiration for Jordan is not hard to detect. Attached to his locker wall is a silhouetted photocopy of a Jordan dunk. On the floor of the locker are a dozen pairs of baseball cleats with the same silhouette.

It is the logo of Brand Jordan, a newly launched Nike subsidiary that hired Jeter as one of its charter endorsers.

Jeter first met Jordan in the fall of 1994, at an Arizona instructional camp during Jordan's fling with baseball.

"He was very nice, very down to Earth," Jeter said. "I was very impressed with the way he treated me."