By Pete Williams

Some people like to drive around during the holidays and look at Christmas lights.

Not me. I decided to pay a trip to Derek Jeter’s new house. I had seen the photos taken by boat and helicopter but had to get a glimpse for myself.

It’s Ruthian. A 30,875 square foot colossus going up in Tampa’s Davis Islands section. The Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year paid $7.7 million for two adjacent lots and now is putting up one of the biggest homes in the Tampa Bay area.

It’s still under construction. At this point, it looks like small gray college. Jeter’s neighbors will include Vincent Lecavalier, who lives in a modest 7,636-foot home; and someone named David Wright who is not the Mets third baseman.

For the last decade or so, Jeter has lived in the gated Tampa community of Avila. It’s modeled after a walled Spanish city. Virtually every house in Avila is 5,000 square feet or more and it’s a popular place for sports figures. Warren Sapp, Jon Gruden, Tony Dungy, Fred McGriff, Lou Piniella, and Jorge Posada have called Avila home over the years.

A few years back, Jeter got tangled up with the IRS. The Feds took issue with Jeter claiming his Florida home, modest by Avila standards at just 4,493 square feet, as his primary residence and enjoying the tax benefits of the Sunshine State, which has no state income tax. After all, Jeter spends quite a bit of time in New York and traveling around the country with the Yankees.

Jeter, who paid $675,000 for the Avila home in 1997, settled with the IRS. Now he’s extending a middle finger to the Feds by building the type of permanent residence Jerry Jones would envy.

Unlike in Avila, not all of the folks in Jeter’s new neighborhood have mansions. Many of the waterfront homes, like Jeter’s, replaced smaller houses. But just two doors up the street from Jeter sits a 1,620 square foot bungalow built in 1959.

That home sold for $325,000 in October of 2007. Hillsborough County currently values it at $294,500, which might pay for the roof on Casa Jeter. Imagine having a home 20 times larger than yours going up two doors down. You’d feel like Ray Drecker in “Hung.”

Aside from the waterfront homes, the bungalow is typical of this well-maintained, tree-lined section of Davis Islands. Walk a block from the Jeter project along Bahama Drive, away from the army of contractors, and the neighborhood seems sleepy and private.

Still, Jeter has applied for a variance to get a six-foot privacy wall built. Paparazzi apparently will have to come by air and by sea.

When the house if finished, presumably late in 2010, the three biggest homes in the Tampa Bay area will be owned by Jeter, Hulk Hogan, and Matt Geiger.

That’s probably everything you need to know about the Tampa Bay area. Geiger, the 7-foot former NBA stiff who somehow once commanded a $48 million contract from the 76ers, has a 28,000 square foot compound near Tarpon Springs.

The house served as the home of John Travolta’s character in “The Punisher” and was for sale for $19.9 million in 2007. Hogan put his waterfront Clearwater home, which served as the set of “Hogan Knows Best” before his family fell apart, on the market recently.

Like Geiger, he’s found little market for homes in the ten-figure range.

With Geiger and the Hulkster apparently downsizing, it’s nice to see Jeter putting down more permanent roots, at least for tax purposes. He’d better enjoy it.

He won’t find a buyer anytime soon.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Sports Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.