On page 45 of I’ve Got a Story to Tell, the new book from Derek Jeter’s The Players’ Tribune and Assouline, there’s a short story penned by Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese soccer star. For all of the adulation around Ronaldo—he’s the most-followed person on Instagram, with an audience of 638 million—his words are notably human.
Titled “My First Fans,” it recalls his humble beginnings: “I was only playing in the streets of Madeira with my friends. We didn’t have goals or anything, and had to stop the game whenever the cars would drive by.” As he began to play professionally, initially only his father cared about his soccer. His mother and sisters showed little interest, barely acknowledging when he scored.
But: “Then one day—I will never forget this image—I was warming up and looked over and I saw my mom and sisters sitting together on the bleachers. They looked…how do I say this? They looked cozy. They were kind of huddled close together, and they were not clapping or yelling, they were just waving to me, like I was in a parade or something. They definitely looked like they had never been to a football match before. But they were there. That’s all I cared about.”
It’s one of dozens and dozens of stories in the book, reflecting the reach of The Players’ Tribune, a sports content platform Jeter launched 10 years ago for “direct-to-athlete” narratives, where athletes can, he notes, “share their own stories in their own way, on their own time.”
“What I’ve always understood is that athletes are not two-dimensional,” Jeter tells me on a Zoom call from Miami. “They had and have other interests and other beliefs and things they want to share and talk about, but they just weren’t asked those questions. It’s not just what you did on the field, what you did on the court—fans want to know who you are as a human being. I think we recognized that a long time ago.”
