The Swinger Quotes

“Besides, he was also a hell of a ballplayer. THE END”
― Joseph Bottum, The Swinger

“Jeter was “warmly cold,” Sherman added in a telling phrase. The truth is, we don’t know the man at all. Over the twenty years we’ve watched him, Derek Jeter has been willing to give us his professional performance on the baseball field. And off that field, he’s been willing to give us a learned, practiced smile. But it’s a smile designed mostly to keep us from seeing that there was one thing he wasn’t going to give us. He wasn’t going to give us himself.”
― Joseph Bottum, The Swinger

“Someone as locked down and in control as Jeter was probably not much tempted by gambling and recreational drugs. (His only admitted addiction is the nicely self-deprecating one of too much movie watching. “During the off-season, I go to the movies almost every day,” he’s told reporters. “You hear about women buying shoes? I buy DVDs. I definitely have a problem.”)”
― Joseph Bottum, The Swinger

“The smile wasn’t there at the beginning. In a few of the early pictures, you can see a derisive smirk beginning to curl up on the right side of Jeter’s face, almost as though the young player had found a cocky persona and was trying it on for size. Still, he didn’t use the smirk for his first glossy publicity shots with the Yankees or the pictures on his rookie-year baseball cards. Not quite scowling—although his eyebrows angle down in a V that aims the viewer’s eye at the unsmiling center of his face—he looks … serious, I guess, in those early photographs. Unswerving. A young man with an almost childish openness about his furious drive and discipline. A young man who allowed the outward projection of his public ambitions to show on his face. By 1999,”
― Joseph Bottum, The Swinger

“I wish I trusted people more,” Jeter has said. “But when I meet someone, the first thing is, ‘What does this person want?’ And I put up a defense mechanism.” For that matter, he would add, “I’ve always been that way,” and his first seasons as a Yankee”
― Joseph Bottum, The Swinger