Growing up in Arkansas, I had no geographic affinity for any professional sports teams. I was free to pick and choose my favorites based on such key criteria (for an 8-year-old) as “cool helmets” (hello Oakland Raiders) and “unique court design” (Boston Celtics). In those prehistoric times, the only exposure to televised baseball was the NBC’s Saturday afternoon “Game of the Week” with broadcasters Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek.
The Cincinnati Reds were on the Game of the Week quite often back then — it was the era of the Big Red Machine — and I fell head over hillbilly boots for Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Davey Concepcion…
But my favorite player by far was Pete Rose. A gritty grinder, tough as nails. “Charlie Hustle.” I remember when he was Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year.
The accompanying article in SI mentioned how Pete was so obsessed with getting better at the game that he had a satellite dish installed at his house so he could study opposing pitchers. (With the gift of hindsight, we now know the satellite TV was just a way for him to track his bets.)
My friend Ned and I were at Riverfront Stadium in September of 1985 when Pete broke Ty Cobb’s record.
All hail the new Hit King!
Less than a year later, I got my first real job, working in the marketing department at Turfway Park, a thoroughbred racetrack in Northern Kentucky. Imagine my sheer elation when Pete Rose showed up in the press box where I worked. The 8-year-old inside me was doing cartwheels: “OhmygawditsPete! Pete! Right here! Be cool! Don’t say anything stupid…”
My joy lasted about as long as a six-furlong race. I realized Pete was a bit of an entitled jerk, and clearly hooked on gambling. My bosses allowed him and his cronies (muscle-headed butt kissers – and as we later found out, Pete’s errand boys for booking his bets) and their pneumatic girlfriends/spouses to hang out in the press box, with free food and beverages, because they were really good at increasing the track’s daily receipts. Finally, their loud, boorish behavior got to be too much for those of us trying to earn a living at the track the hard way, so management moved them to another smaller spot (“The Rose Room”) adjacent to the press box. (We could still hear them hooting and hollering, but it was muffled.)
A few years later, Pete was back on the cover of Sports Illustrated, but for a totally different reason:
I didn’t need the results of the official MLB investigation. There was NO doubt in my mind that Pete bet on baseball while he was the manager of the Reds.
“Never meet your heroes” is the old adage, and in this case it certainly was true. Pete was always unabashedly, and unapologetically, Pete, for better or for worse. And it was usually worse. If he could’ve just walked away from the seamy underbelly of sports, he might’ve earned a bit of forgiveness from both MLB and the general public. But that same hard-nosed persistence that made him such a tough out on the field worked against him off it. He set up camp at every casino and race track in the country, selling autographs so he could wager that money right back to his hosts.
Yes, as countless others have already mentioned, now MLB is in cahoots with the gambling that was once so verboten.
But rules are rules, and Pete broke them, and lied about breaking them… he only came “clean” when it helped him sell more books.
I DO think Pete belongs in the Hall of Fame for his feats on the field. This Substack post from Mark Whicker does a nice job profiling a warts-and-all version of Pete. Money quote:
The baseball Hall needs Rose the way the country music Hall needs George Jones or the chess Hall needs Bobby Fischer. It’s not the Hall of Well-Adjusted People. It should be the place where players of impact are recognized. There is no question that baseball was a brighter, richer place because Pete Rose was at its core, or that people who didn’t know a slider from a playground slide knew who Rose was, and that if we all loved what we did the same way Rose loved the game, our national GDP would be unmeasurable.
R.I.P. Charlie Hustle. I’ll always admire your baseball skills, but your off-the-field antics took the bloom off the Rose.
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