Reverend said:
He's not obsessed with Jeter but with the phenomenon of Jeter. Having lived in the NY area in the past, I found myself pretty fascinated by the phenomenon and the related mythology too.
People would hear that I was from Boston or that I was a Red Sox fan and they'd ask me what I thought of Jeter. Jeter was a good hitter, so they decided he was a plus fielder as well and the New York Frickin' Times runs an article that he's a gold glover after making a nifty backup play at home. Elderly gentlemen bring Jeter up for no real reason and talk about what a nice guy he seems to be despite the fact that his interviews sound like a well trained Nuke LaLoosh on quaaludes. Women decide he's the most handsome man in imagination.
More to the point, people flip the fuck out if you say anything less than glowing about him. Not everybody, but some. And it doesn't even have to be terribly negative--deny that he's an amazing fielding short stop, or (until recently) that his offensive numbers were on decline, or that he won on some fairly stacked clubs and it was like you had beaten Santa Clause with little Billy's toy train in front of a group f orphans or something. I lived with a guy in grad school for 7 years and two summers ago performed his marriage ceremony, he's a fantastic guy and one of my closest friends and the only time in the 14 years I have known him that he showed me any disrespect was when he threw a hissy fit over my "Jeter thing" when I suggested that the new fielding stats being developed were causing people to consider that Jeter was below average.
I've never seen the equivalent. Not even with Bird in Boston--try to diss Bird's game and people just roll their eyes and laugh. Around NYC, people jealously and fiercely protect Jeter like the followers of a movement protect their leader in movies.
As though Jeter even needs that. I put forth that it's objectively fascinating.
Maybe Ripken in Baltimore? As a person living in MD when I would talk about Ripken and the free pass he got for everything down here and how it was a little tedious, folks elsewhere reacted as though I was out of my mind.