from the New York Times

May 13, 2001

By JACK CURRY

Derek Jeter sat beside Joe Torre in the dugout during Friday night's game, as he had done hundreds of times before, and told his manager that it was a good day. Then Jeter told Torre exactly why it was a good day. Jeter's sister, Sharlee, no longer had to worry about having Hodgkin's disease. Torre was shocked because he did not even know the 21-year-old woman had had cancer.

"It knocked me back a little," Torre said.

Jeter found out last November that his little sister, the feisty one, the one he had always considered the best shortstop in the family, had Hodgkin's disease. It was a month after Jeter had been named the most valuable player of the World Series and two months before he signed a 10-year, $189 million contract. Those baseball issues were secondary to his sister's undergoing chemotherapy treatments every two weeks for six months.

When the chemo finished on Thursday and doctors told Sharlee she would not need radiation treatments because there were no more signs of cancer, the Jeters were relieved. Other than telling a few friends, Jeter had kept his sister's condition private. The only reason he revealed the news, on Friday, was because "now it's a success story," he said.

The Yankees have been a remarkably successful team, but hardly immune to the human problems facing any other group of three dozen or so workers. Sharlee's situation is the latest example of how the Yankees' players and coaches and their families are just as susceptible to tragedy and sickness as their fans and their families. Torre and Mel Stottlemyre, the team's pitching coach, overcame cancer; Darryl Strawberry is fighting it a second time; Paul O'Neill, Scott Brosius and Luis Sojo buried their fathers while the Yankees won a title in 1999; Chuck Knoblauch's father has Alzheimer's disease; and Bernie Williams has missed 10 games and may miss more because his father has a terminal illness.

But Jeter? Just 26 years old, he has four World Series rings, owns the second-richest contract in sports history, has dated Mariah Carey and Miss Universe, has a foundation that helps steer children away from drugs and alcohol and has the job he wanted since he was 8 years old. Most fans see Jeter playing shortstop every day, or see him blast a game-winning three-run homer, as he did yesterday in an 8-5 victory over the Baltimore Orioles, and speculate about how splendid his life is. Cancer disrupts that portrait.

"Our family is not immune to anything that goes on in society," Jeter said. "We never expect nothing like this to hit our family. It's just one of those things you have to deal with and, fortunately, it's over with."

Jeter is so close to Sharlee that they sometimes speak five times a day, and that was before she became ill. Sharlee gave a speech about Derek when Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan honored him in 1996, thanking her brother for his honesty and support and calling him her hero. Jeter cried as she spoke and has the speech framed over his desk at home in Tampa, Fla.

Even after homering yesterday, Jeter is batting .289 with 2 homers and 17 runs batted in and 7 errors, subpar statistics for him that are partly attributable to shoulder and quadriceps injuries that have nagged him since the spring. Jeter steadfastly refused to link his listless start to his sister's illness.

"It was more difficult for her," Jeter said. "We don't want to make it out that it was more difficult for me. She's the one that was going through it."

While Torre said that Dorothy Jeter, Derek's mother, had told Torre's wife, Ali, that Sharlee was sick, Ali Torre did not pry for specifics. There is no way to gauge how much Jeter was affected by seeing Sharlee lose some of her hair, but Torre, who had prostate cancer, said "the whole family is affected" by cancer.

"It's certainly part of him," Torre said. "He's not going to say that. There's a lot going on. That's what makes it tough to play. You still have all the problems other people have, but you can't call in sick here."

Sharlee Jeter was an excellent high school softball player, and her dream was to attend Michigan and play in the Olympics, but she changed her plans, in part, because she was constantly compared to Derek. "He didn't have that shadow over him," she once said. "I had it every day of my life."

After she fell in November, she felt lumps on her neck and was told by a nurse at Spelman College in Atlanta that she probably had a pulled muscle. When the lumps remained, she had tests and the Hodgkin's was found. Sharlee continued a reduced class schedule at Spelman while splitting her treatments between Atlanta and Manhattan.

Sharlee is disappointed that she will not graduate with her class this month and will have to wait until December to earn her bachelor's degree in mathematics, but Jeter told her to "look at the big picture." The big picture is that Sharlee strolled into Yankee Stadium on Friday night to watch her brother play for the Yankees and walked in cancer-free.

"She's 21 years old, man," Jeter said. "You don't expect this to happen at such a young age. But the good news is she doesn't have cancer anymore."