In a new documentary, Derek Jeter talks about why he and Alex Rodriguez are no longer friends

After Alex Rodriguez's infamous interview with Esquire in 2001, Derek Jeter realized that he was not a 'true friend.'

Jeter himself says that in "The Captain," a seven-part documentary series that starts on ESPN on July 18 after the Home Run Derby. Jeter talks about the incident.

One day, Jeter and A-Rod would play together, but their stories began to intertwine a long time ago.

Jeter and A-Rod are both great shortstops who were born about a year apart. In the 1990s, whenever the Yankees played the Mariners, the press and fans talked a lot about their friendship.

When their teams played each other, their friendship was so strong that they slept over at each other's houses. Even the famous bench-clearing fight between their teams in 2000 made Jeter's fiery teammate Chad Curtis angry.

In the end, Jeter became a huge star at the same time that the Yankees won the World Series four times in five years. Then there was A-Rod, whose impressive stats led the Texas Rangers to give him a 10-year, $252 million contract. At the time, this was a record contract that shocked everyone.

People were always comparing and contrasting what each of them had done. It turned into a debate between faith and reason, with staunch believers in intangibles choosing Jeter and staunch statisticians being sure that A-Rod was much better.

Then came the story in Esquire.

In the documentary, author Scott Raab said, "We were able to convince Esquire Magazine that this would be a good story." "We were able to write about not only a player, but also an agent, Scott Boras, who many people thought was the devil.

During a Heat game in Miami, they talked for a couple of hours. Raab was feeling competitive when he saw that a writer from GQ Magazine was also in town to write about A-Rod. Raab wanted to find out more about A-Rod in the interview. He said he didn't expect the star to say something that would make Derek Jeter mad.

“I ran into the guy, and said I’m gonna destroy you. We’re competing on the same story? Don’t even bother,” Raab recalled.

The tape of the interview has survived to this day, and it revealed the context of Raab asking A-Rod about the friendship/rivalry between the two shortstops.

“No, there’s not a rivalry at all. Not even, I mean rivalry? Like, ours is such a brotherhood that there’s definitely no rivalry there. And it’s weird, because even with my brother [we] have a a little rivalry,” Rodriguez said. “But with Derek, I’m his biggest fan and I think it’s vice versa.”

Then Raab asked A-Rod what he thought about Jeter’s character.

“He’s reserved, quiet. Jeter’s been blessed with great talent around him. So he’s never had to lead. He doesn’t have to, he can just go and play and have fun, and hit second. I mean, you know, hitting second is totally different than hitting third or fourth in a lineup because you go into New York trying to stop Bernie [Williams] and [Paul] O’Neill and everybody. You never say, ‘Don’t let Derek beat you.’ That’s never your concern.”

Raab knew right away he had his ammo to demolish the relevance of GQ’s profile.

“I knew especially when I transcribed those tapes, that those quotes were gold,” he recalled.

More than two decades later, Jeter still does not seem to have completely shaken the remarks.

“Those comments bothered me because, like I said, I’m very, very loyal,” Jeter said. “As a friend, I’m loyal. I just looked at it as, ‘I wouldn’t have done it.’ And then it was the media. The constant hammer to the nail. They just kept hammering it in. It just became noise, which frustrated me. Just constant noise.

“When that came out, I felt really bad about it,” A-Rod said. “I saw the way it was playing out. The way it was written, I absolutely said exactly what I said. It was a comment that I stand behind today. It was a complete tsunami. It was one of the greatest teams ever. To say that you don’t have to focus on just one player is totally fair. By the way the same could be said about my team with the Mariners. We had Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner. If someone said that about me, I’d be like, ‘No s–t. Absolutely. You better not just worry about me.’”

Nonetheless, Rodriguez apologized to Jeter at the time.

Jeter was inclined to accept it — except A-Rod gave a similar interview to Dan Patrick, telling the radio host about Jeter something to the effect of, “There’s not one thing he does better than me.”

Jeter thought that A-Rod was “diminishing” him to justify his own blockbuster contract.

“In my mind, he got his contract, so you’re trying to diminish what I’m doing, maybe to justify why you got paid. When you talk about statistics, mine never compared to Alex’s. I’m not blind. I understand that. But, we won! You can say whatever you want about me as a player. That’s fine,” Jeter said.

“But then it goes back to the trust, the loyalty. This is how the guy feels. He’s not a true friend, is how I felt. Because I wouldn’t do it to a friend.”

Jeter said that his father told him when he was young to make a lot of acquaintances but keep his inner circle of friends very close. So, Jeter came to the conclusion that if he felt he had been wronged, he would have no problem cutting people out of his life.

Raab said he sent a fax to Jeter at Yankees spring training to clear things up and tell him that Rodriguez had also said nice things about him during their meeting, but Jeter doesn't remember getting it. In any case, he didn't think that sending a fax would have done anything to fix the problem.

A-Rod, for his part, knew that this was the end of their close friendship and tried to figure out why he might have done something wrong.

“From that moment on, it was never quite the same ever again,” he said. “I think it’s really [my] not understanding the way things work. In many ways, my father leaving when I was 10, not getting that schooling at home — the hard knocks, the tough love — it resulted in insecurity and some self-esteem issues. As I got older, I realized, all you had to do is be yourself.”

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