Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (15 page)

There had been another reason that Wagner and the Reds had drawn a hard line in the Rose negotiations, a reason beyond the club’s thought that $475,000 was a hell of a lot of money. There was a feeling among some in the front office that Rose’s unsavory side might not sit so well with fans in the heartland. Wagner, suspicious about Rose’s gambling habit, reportedly groused to other Reds executives that Rose’s “legs may get broken” if the betting got out of hand—but that wasn’t the real worry. One of Rose’s extramarital affairs had gone too far and he was facing a potential paternity suit, one that would be officially brought forward in February of 1979 by a Florida woman named Terry Rubio. Her daughter had been born in ’78 and named, in what rang as an odd homage to Pete’s sidekick in the Cincinnati infield, Morgan. Pete had gone around with Rubio for quite a while, including during her pregnancy. He had given her a car. The paternity suit was fodder, briefly, for national TV; eventually, Rose and Rubio settled out of court.
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Pete’s marriage to Karolyn was nearing its end. She and the kids began their 1979 season living in Philadelphia—Karolyn was hollering in the stands at the home opener as Pete got three hits in a Phillies win— but were back living in Cincinnati by the end of it. The main reason was that Pete continued to see Carol Woliung, who was soon to find work as a Liberty Belle cheerleader with the Eagles. As the relationship with Pete unraveled, Karolyn made it publicly clear (leavening her story with what-the-heck humor) that Rose had been stepping out on the marriage for years, a fact that those around the game well knew. Pete was brazen. At Riverfront Stadium he had reserved seats not just for Karolyn and the kids (and for his sisters Caryl and Jackie, and for Dave when he was in town) but also had a single seat along the third base line set aside each night for his girlfriend. Old West Side buddies of Pete’s used to tweak him by getting to the Reds game early, sitting in the girlfriend seat, and, for the longest time, refusing to move.

1979 was also the year of the Pete Rose
Playboy
interview, a long and wide-ranging exploration published in late summer, that became a noisemaker around baseball and an instant classic of its form. If the magazine’s pair of interviewers (Maury Z. Levy and Samantha Stevenson) were at times smug in their questioning—haughty, even, when set against Pete’s defiance and straight-shooting cockiness—they were also challenging and persistent. The interview took place in several locations over several weeks and ran, with its introduction, at close to 14,000 words. “I don’t talk good but you understand everything I’m saying,” Rose observed about halfway through. This was and remains a marvelously entertaining thing to read.

Pete rambled, and just kept being Pete. He nipped at Dick Wagner and the Reds for the failed contract negotiations, saying that maybe the G.M. didn’t like “the flamboyant style I have off the field.” He talked about his $8,000 wristwatch and his Rolls-Royce, and all the money that he made. “I don’t give a shit what people think,” he replied when
Playboy
suggested his big salary rankled some fans. He pointed out that he got just as dirty on the ball field earning $800,000 a year as he did when he was nine years old. He revealed some intimate details, for example that he liked women with pretty mouths but that during lovemaking he did not like his nipples “to be kissed. I don’t know. I can’t stand it.”

Pete suggested in the
Playboy
interview that baseball eliminate all off days (he certainly didn’t need them). “Winning and losing is everything,” he said and asserted that he hoped to be remembered as the guy who worked “the hardest and the longest to become a switch-hitter, the best that ever lived.” He suggested that his being white—or better put, not black—at this point in American history might help him when it came to his advertising opportunities. “Look if you owned Swanson’s Pizza would you want a black guy to do the commercial on TV for you? Would you like the black guy to pick up the pizza and bite into it?…I mean would you want Dave Parker [a black superstar then with Pittsburgh] selling your pizza to America for you? Or would you want Pete Rose?”

Pete wasn’t saying this was right or this was wrong. He was just saying. Swanson responded that it had done ads with black athletes, football players, in the past.

Pete described Karolyn to
Playboy
as a “perfect baseball player’s wife” (this was before the impending divorce was known) and added, “She knows what I like for her to say and not to say.” With her warm and outgoing way, Pete asserted, Karolyn was, “like a Jewish person. You know, all they do is kiss and shake hands.”

“Is that right?”
Playboy
responded. And Pete said: “Yeah, you know it’s true.”

He engaged as well in a discussion of amphetamines in baseball, calling them greenies, uppers and diet pills interchangeably, and during a quixotic foray divulging that “a lot of guys” took them. Rose implied that he might take greenies too, so
Playboy
asked: “You keep saying you might take a greenie. Would you? Have you?

Said Rose: “Yeah, I’d do it. I’ve done it.”

A few months later a Pennsylvania state investigation began into whether the Phillies had received illegally prescribed amphetamines. Players were questioned, along with some of their wives. There were denials, and hedging comments, and ultimately the investigation went away.

Near the end of the
Playboy
interview, Rose articulated a disarmingly cogent description of the philosophy—a kind of nihilism—that guided him (and has guided him to this day). Asked about rocky times in his marriage, Rose said, “Nothing bothers me. If I’m home in bed, I sleep. If I’m at the ballpark, I play baseball. If I’m on my way to the ballpark, I worry about how I’m going to drive. Just whatever is going on that’s what I do. I don’t worry about a bunch of things.”

If there is one thing to understand about Pete Rose, to understand what helped him keep an almost inconceivable level of concentration on the field and also to understand the mental blinders he wore at crucial times through both his ascent and his fall, it is this: He did not worry.

THE PUBLIC sense of Rose may have begun to slip out of the Rockwellian and toward the noir (as Wagner and the Reds had feared), but for most fans, in Cincinnati, Philadelphia or anywhere else, this hardly mattered; not next to what Rose continued to represent on the field. A couple of years later, early in the 1980s, after Pete and the Phillies had won the Series and the Reds had become unglued, a Cincinnati zealot named Dennis “Wildman” Walker flew a banner above Riverfront Stadium that read
PETE ROSE FOREVER, DICK WAGNER NEVER
and was widely cheered. (The banner lifted Wildman’s profile and his popularity, and his decadeslong career as an exuberant Cincinnati radio host has been anchored by his near maniacal support of Rose.) If a baseball fan did not like Pete, and of course some did not, it was because of his brashness or because he rattled a favorite team, not because he had slept around or owned up to popping a greenie or even because he had fathered a child out of wedlock. Rose was still the river rat turned folk hero, baseball’s biggest and richest star and a man approaching middle age who remained, for all to see, in perpetual boyhood. Or adolescence really. Peter Pan with a pecker. Hanging on the wall of the home Rose still owned in Cincinnati was a picture of a baby’s body with his head on it.

True to his word Rose stayed baseball-focused, neither softened by the big money nor hardened by the upheaval in his life. On the September afternoon in 1979 that Karolyn officially filed for divorce, citing “gross neglect of duty,” Pete received the news at Shea Stadium before a game against the Mets. That night he went 4 for 5. Though the Phillies, beset by injuries, fell out of the pennant race, Rose did not flag. He hit .331 in ’79 and, on Aug. 5, with a hit to leftfield off the Pirates’ Bert Blyleven, broke Honus Wagner’s career record for singles. After his 44-game hitting streak in ’78 and the promotion and excitement it caused—he’d appeared on scads of TV shows and visited with President Jimmy Carter at the White House—Rose had convinced Aqua Velva to establish an award for the major leaguer with the season’s longest hitting streak. The Aqua Velva Cup it was called and the winner got $1,000 for each game in the streak. Big surprise that Pete himself won it in ’79, reeling off 23 straight in September. He gave his prize money to Philadelphia’s coaches and trainers to divide among themselves.
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He dressed funky sometimes: big rimmed sunglasses, supertight, pinkish polyester pants and nifty alligator shoes, that mop-top and oversized sideburns. Disco fever was hot in the U.S.A., Donna Summer and Chic high on the charts, and a little RCA record label, Free Flight, put out a dance single by Pamela Neal, “Charlie Hustle.” Techno-beat, synthesizer, lyrics about Pete Rose sliding and winning, and Neal’s refrain “Dooooo the Charlie Hustle.” Pete got a slice of what profits there were. “I like it,” he decreed of the song. “It has the disco sound.” The amphetamine probe had been a pain in the neck for the Phillies and it was true that Pete sometimes said things his teammates wished he hadn’t, but there was no denying that the team was lifted wholly and completely when he came on board. “Just get us to the playoffs and I’ll do the rest,” he would say. He embraced everyone, flattering the stars, bringing the bench players into the fold, versing himself on the particulars of each player’s game. “He’d say to me, ‘How can you still hit good, playing just three days a week?’ ” recalls reserve outfielder Greg Gross. “He’d say something about my preparation and then he’d say, ‘I could never do what you’re doing.’ That was ridiculous. Of course he could. It was just his way of making you feel better so that you played better.”

Rose might pick up a lunch tab on the road. He’d bring in new, hot-stuff clothes for a young player who’d just joined the team. He never stopped telling Schmidt that he was baseball’s best player, and that he had to be that for seven days of every week, not just four of them, and reminding Schmidt that even on a day when he did not hit the ball 400 feet he could help the team win a game. He gushed over shortstop Larry Bowa’s glove—“Hey Gnat, I’d take you over Ozzie [Smith] any day!” After a loss, Pete would sit at his locker before the horde of reporters and talk and talk in his inimitable scat, answering even the most ill-conceived questions and leaving Schmidt, Bowa, Maddox and the others to shower and dress in relative peace.

Pete Jr. worked as a Phillies’ batboy sometimes when school was out in Cincinnati and Dave Rose, then making a go of things in Florida, would drive up to meet the team when it played in Atlanta, pull on a Rose Philadelphia uniform and take some BP on the field.

Rose never went out much with his teammates. That was partly because he did not drink alcohol—nothing but coffee and orange juice—and partly because he liked to go to sleep early or had something going with a girl. He hung around sometimes with a twentysomething kid named Tommy Gioiosa, a rough-edged but amiable little truckler who kept Pete company and helped get things done. Gioiosa would run an errand, or give one of Pete’s girlfriends a lift home. Rose had first met him in Florida a couple years earlier and saw in him a certain spirit and a pliability. Gioiosa learned to place bets on Pete’s behalf.

In the clubhouse Rose talked about wagers he had won or lost on basketball and football games. “The only reason they play
Monday Night Football
is so you can make up what you lost on Sunday,” he started quipping in those years. No one thought much of it—other players and even Bill Giles went with him to the dog track—and when Pete put together betting pools for the NCAA tournament or the Kentucky Derby he had plenty of takers. Pete sometimes wrote things down with a red pen.

But away from the ballpark in Philadelphia, Rose went in his own directions, led the life that he led and did not talk much about it. He volunteered what he wanted to volunteer, told his stories with his happy verve, but did not, in gabbing with his teammates, answer many questions about his life. Nor did he make people feel comfortable about asking them. For all his effervescence there was something palpably unknown and unseen about Pete. This was the great Rose dichotomy—the paradox that a man so open, so clearly from the heart in his style, his talk, his way, had also about him the thin air of disguise. There was something concealed, unreckoned. When he got that late-night ticket over in Newport, Ky., in 1965 there were no teammates in the car. “At certain moments a shield came over Pete and there was nowhere else to go with him,” says Giles. “And then the shield would be gone.” Not that the public, or even many of the people often near him, recognized this. After all, if a man flaunted his extramarital affairs and talked about pill-popping in a magazine article and strutted daily among younger, fitter teammates while as naked and unabashed and full of fresh life as Adam before the fall, then what could he be hiding?

Rose’s teammates knew with certainty what they saw. They saw, for example, that when Rose took pregame batting practice, out early in the session and then back again late, he took it with purpose. He stood in the box lefthanded and hit 10 pitches to leftfield, then 10 up the middle, then pulled 10 to right. Then he stood in righthanded and did the same. Once after he had gone hitless in the last game of a road trip, and the Phillies had flown home, Rose called Giles and told him he was going to the park to hit. It was 3 a.m.

His teammates saw
The Sporting News
name Rose its player of the decade for the 1970s. They saw the way that he could foul off a pitch, any tough pitch, better than anyone in the game, his eyes forever down on the ball. And they saw this: During one Phillies home game at Veterans Stadium, Rose was being heckled sharply by a man in a seat down the third base line.
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The man wore a Sunoco gas attendant’s uniform and he kept standing up and giving it to Rose really good. “Before Pete stepped in to hit, he turned to us and winked like ‘Watch this,’” recalls Phillies pitcher Larry Christenson. “Then he lined a foul ball straight at the guy, almost hit him in the head. Two pitches later Pete did it again. Foul line drive right at the guy. We looked at each other in the dugout like Pete was a god or something, like he could control things in the game the rest of us could not control.