Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (25 page)

Giamatti was less conspicuous in the aftermath. He got away from New York and worked for some days from his home in Martha’s Vineyard. And it was there, on Sept. 1, 1989, just over a week after he had closed his press conference statement by saying “Let it also be clear that no individual is superior to the game,” that an extraordinary thing happened: Giamatti died of a massive heart attack. He was 51 years old and his death made international news and caused widespread sorrow. His wife Toni and the family received many bags of mail, so many condolences and appreciative words, from intellectuals and executives and politicians, as well as from clubhouse guys and doormen, sanitation workers and a particular hot dog vendor from the ballpark in Anaheim. Bart Giamatti, it was said, could just as easily be friends with the man who owned the building as with the man who swept its floors. He was buried privately, before family and friends, at Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, where Yale presidents are traditionally laid to rest.

He had been overweight and a chain-smoker and unhealthy in many ways, and no one could rightly say that the Rose investigation, even with the months of high stress, had been what killed Giamatti. He had not taken care of himself physically and his doctors were not entirely shocked by his fate; an autopsy suggested that Giamatti had suffered a separate, minor heart attack at an earlier time as well. What people around him could and did say, and as Marcus Giamatti will still say today, is that, “The Rose case did not kill my father, but it definitely did not help.” And for those who would go on to preside over the game and to hold the fate of Rose’s continued banishment in their hands—namely the commissioners Fay Vincent and Bud Selig—the sudden death of Bart Giamatti has been another reason that it has been so difficult to ever forgive Pete Rose.

Years later, with his investigation having stood the test of repeated inquiry and reexamination, and with Rose having finally admitted to its crucial findings, John Dowd says that he has only one regret about how the whole matter unfolded. He wishes, he says, that sometime during that spring or summer, long before the banishment document was drafted and signed, he could have gone away with Pete for a day or two. Taken Rose out of the dugout, out of Cincinnati, away from his agent and his lawyers. He and Pete would have gone to Cape Cod and walked together there along the beach, Dowd imagines, just the two of them laying their footprints among the tidal pools on the Brewster Flats, perhaps, or into the soft sand against the high dunes over on the ocean side.

They would have worn bathing suits—and so would have had nothing to hide, no tape recorder, no one listening in, nothing to get in the way of the truth. And Dowd would have laid it all out for Pete, explained everything his team knew and just what the repercussions could be. He would have done it in a gentle, clear fashion without lawyers interjecting or engendering confusion about what was real and what was not. There would have been no misunderstanding and no one looking for a loophole; Pete would have gotten it straight.

Then, Dowd says, he might have offered him a safe passage home. Speaking on the commissioner’s behalf, Dowd would have told Rose that if he would come forward and admit his guilt and take his medicine, agree to quit all his gambling cold turkey, and to do some clinics for kids, talk to them about the dangers of gambling and then to just sit quietly on the sidelines awhile and let baseball recover from the wounds, then, Dowd would have said, baseball would in turn have done some things for him. They would, if needed, help to swab out the gambling debts, just a one-time fee for Pete then no more payments he couldn’t ever get down. And they would have set a path and a timetable for him to get back into the game. Dowd knows that Pete might have laughed all that off, stuck hard to his denial, told Dowd to forget it. But maybe, alone there with Dowd, seeing the waves crashing inevitably into the shore, Rose might have agreed. He might have saved his own life.

“I’ll always believe that I could have turned him around,” says Dowd. “That I could have made him see the error of his ways, and to see how to make it right. He might have still thought I was a prick, but I think he would have understood what had to be done. And if he had done it, had owned up and accepted a punishment, well if you ask me, he could be managing the Cincinnati Reds still today.”

As it was, of course, Rose and his people were not having any of that. Pete was never alone anywhere with Dowd or with any baseball officials or investigators. His lawyers played defense, desperate defense, for as long as they could and Rose himself never budged. As baseball bore down, he only barked in defiance, just as he would bark at his suspension, scornful and dismissive, arrogant behind his bulwark of lies. He maintained a defense for himself throughout the investigation and then for so many, many years afterward, the same stubborn and unchanging defense that in essence and tenor boils down to five words: “Fuck you. I’m Pete Rose.”

Chapter 16

Main Street to Marion

T
HE HALL of Fame’s half-century anniversary celebration began in Cooperstown on June 10, 1989, 50 years almost to the day after the building had first opened its doors and a little more than two months before the banning of Rose. An event across from the post office unveiled a Lou Gehrig stamp; Hall of Fame president Edward Stack presided over the ribbon-cutting for the museum’s new $7 million wing; and, in the downtown parade, firefighters, girl scouts and veterans joined a line of convertibles stocked with Hall of Famers. The parade route followed a familiar, Rockwellian path of streets (Chestnut to Main to River to Church to Pioneer…) and American flags flapped everywhere. Bart Giamatti sat on the reviewing stand beside New York governor Mario Cuomo watching the procession roll by. Later the Hall of Famers and other old-timers played a ball game at Doubleday Field.

That anniversary spirit was still very much in the air six weeks later on induction weekend. Red Sox outfielder Carl Yastrzemski was going into the Hall of Fame as was Johnny Bench, a Red for 17 seasons and Pete Rose’s teammate for 12. Bench had been named on a remarkable 96.4% of the ballots—then more than any inductee ever save for Ty Cobb and Hank Aaron—and Cooperstown was thick with fans from Cincinnati and Boston. The Reds and Red Sox had been slated to play an exhibition game until the Reds’ plane had mechanical trouble getting out of Montreal, forcing the team to cancel its trip. Even before that, Rose, in the crosshairs of baseball’s investigation, had said he would not make the trip to Cooperstown with his club, feeling he would be a distraction.

He’d got that right. For all the excitement of the weekend, the swarm of more than 25,000 fans that Cooperstown mayor Harold Hollis called “the largest crowd ever” and the many Hall Famers on hand (“Ted Williams is John Wayne,” said Bench, and pitcher Bob Gibson announced that he would spend the day
getting
autographs, not giving them), the topic of the weekend, without question, was the ugly news swirling around Rose, and the uncertainty of his fate. Discussion and debate about Rose has, at varying levels of intensity, been part of every induction weekend since.

Bench didn’t like the Rose buzz one bit. He said he thought Pete had made a “great decision” to stay away from Cooperstown. “He [Rose] said it was my day, my glory,” remarked Bench, pointing out that he himself had once stayed out of Rose’s limelight by not going on the field to celebrate at Riverfront on the night of the Ty-breaking hit.

When Giamatti was introduced before the Sunday induction speeches, some in the big crowd chanted “Pete, Pete, Pete” and booed the commissioner. “Boo some other time, folks,” Bench later admonished the gathering. “This is a time for celebration.”

Rose and Bench were never peas and carrots as teammates—around the clubhouse they could needle one another with an edge—but through an angling rivalry, there was a symbiosis, an on-field camaraderie and a clear respect. They were deeply linked, the Big Red Machine players with the brightest names on the marquee, and they became, and remain, the two most beloved ballplayers in Reds history. Irksome to Bench, there has never been a doubt about who on the ground in Cincinnati is No. 1.

Even as Pete embarked on his exile, continuing his lies to everyone, wading into too many cesspools, his place in the hearts of most Cincinnatians could not be dislodged. He remained the everyman. Their everyman.

“The difference between the two of them is that if you run into Pete outside the Skyline Chili, he’ll talk with you and bring himself right to your level—look you in the eye, crack a joke,” says the longtime Cincinnati writer Mike Shannon. “When you meet Bench you feel as if he is extending his hand in your direction and saying, ‘Kiss the rings.’ ”

It was not lost on Reds fans, nor on those who played with him, that Bench got through his entire induction speech in 1989 without thanking or even mentioning any of his teammates. Seventeen seasons in the major leagues and no mention of a single one.

“There would be no chance of that happening with Pete if he ever had an induction speech,” says Joe Morgan, who himself went into the Hall of Fame, in 1990. “Pete spends half his time talking about what the players around him did.”

Over the years Bench has made it publicly clear that he was not in favor of Rose’s being reinstated to baseball (“He broke the rules!”) and at times he bristled when he was asked for comment. (“It has nothing to do with me.”) In 2000, Bench approached Marty Brennaman the day before Brennaman was to receive the Ford C. Frick Award at the Hall of Fame for his work as a broadcaster; Bench, saying he was speaking on behalf of aging Hall of Famers Bob Feller and Ralph Kiner, told Marty that he was not to mention Pete Rose in his speech. Brennaman did mention Rose, briefly but in kind terms, and soon afterward Bench quit the radio show that he and Brennaman did together in Cincinnati.

The Rose-Bench relationship has mended some in recent years, a conciliation that began in the summer of 2010 when Rose called and then later apologized to Bench for the years of lying, for all the nuisances that had been visited upon Bench because of Rose’s sins. Rose would never see his own behavior as a betrayal, in the way that Bench saw it, but he understood that his life had had an unhappy impact on Bench’s, and for that, he said, he was sorry.

Even now, one would never stumble upon Rose and Bench sharing an embrace or locked in discussion. But there is at the least a stiff and smiley cordialness that attends them when circumstance lands them in the same place at the same time. In late 2012, Bench organized and headlined a charity banquet and he agreed to let Pete attend and take part as a highlighted guest.

It has been vexing for Bench, and understandably so, that despite the generous public life he has led, the money he has raised to improve so many lives, the reliability he has shown as a baseball ambassador, the respect he has accrued around the game—“If JB calls and asks me to do something, I’m doing it,” says Hall of Fame outfielder Dave Winfield, “and a lot of guys feel that way”—and also that he can be sharp and funny on the radio and on the dais, that for all of that it is still Pete’s light that shines more brightly. Pete is still the one.

By the end of his induction weekend in 1989 Bench stopped answering questions about Rose and baseball’s investigation. “Everything has been said,” he responded tersely when asked (and asked again) for comment. As if. As if there would not be so much more to say, and as if Bench, bound forever with Rose, wouldn’t be hearing questions about him at most every public appearance he made for the next 25 years. And counting.

ALL THE inmates at the federal prison camp at Marion—the roughly 225 of them—had to wake up around dawn each day, and Pete rose even a little earlier. He made up his cot tight and smooth the way he had as an Army Reserve back in Fort Knox, and he kept his space clean. Breakfast might be a bowl of corn flakes with green bananas, or biscuits and gravy. Hard French toast on the weekends. This was the minimumsecurity facility in Marion, Ill. Acres of woodland surrounded the grounds and there were no thick window bars or coils of barbed-wire fencing. The idea was that the white-collar types serving their sentences here knew better than to try to leave. If you pulled a walkaway, as the guards called it, or if you got into a fight or other trouble, you’d wind up being sent to a much worse place.

Each morning after headcount Pete and dozens of other inmates were led across the street to work at Marion’s federal penitentiary, the super-maximum-security fortress which was sometimes called the Rock because it had gone up in 1963, the same year that Alcatraz was shut down in San Francisco. Now it was the fall of 1990 and the penitentiary contained about 350 very hard men—convicted murderers and rapists, a leader of a Colombian drug cartel, a turncoat spy. Pete went through the sally gate into the penitentiary each morning, through the metal detectors and subject to search. His job assignment had him sweeping up in the welding room; he also helped out on the paint crew for a while. He worked hard and steady, not a lot of standing around like some guys. “Put his head down and got it done,” says Billy Guide, an inmate and ex-cop who befriended Pete at the correctional facility. Guide, who’d been nicked in a bribery scheme, spent 10 years of his life in prison, 5½ at Marion. Pete was in for five months.

He had pleaded guilty to two counts of filing false tax returns and for Rose this was clearly a bargain. Both he and the IRS knew there were plenty more Rose violations out there. He had admitted to stiffing the government on more than $350,000 in taxes from cash he’d earned selling autographs and memorabilia (along with some gambling winnings) between 1984 and ’87. He had long since gone too far and the Feds, emboldened in part by the way Dowd and baseball had taken on Rose, were keen to get their due. The sentencing judge—U.S. District Judge Arthur Spiegel, the same man who had sent away Ron Peters on tax and drug convictions—levied a $50,000 fine, 1,000 hours of community service, and, along with the five months at Marion, three more months at a halfway house in Cincinnati. It could have been worse: Sentencing guidelines allowed for up to six years in jail. Pete stood up in court. “I lost my dignity, I lost my self-respect,” he said, and added, “I really have no excuses because it’s all my fault.”

Rose checked himself into Marion on Aug. 8, 1990 (two days before Spiegel had ordered him to report), which meant that when Aug. 24 rolled around—that is, the date on which he could first apply for reinstatement to baseball—Pete was just getting used to doing time. Commissioner Giamatti had suggested with deliberate nonspecificity that Pete should “reconfigure” his life before weighing a reinstatement bid and, well,
reconfigured
is what Pete’s life certainly was. Headcount happened three times a day.

As far as a reinstatement effort, however, that would wait: “Now,” said a Rose representative, “is not the time.” The prisoners wore green khaki clothes and Rose, like everyone else, had been assigned a uniform number: 01832-061.

“I can’t say enough about him,” says Rose’s fellow inmate Guide. “He was a regular guy, went to work every day, came back to his room, never asked for special treatment. And people were on him—some of the guards and the other guys. He got a lot of attention as you can guess. He was kind of nervous and he was naive. It’s like he thought he was in the locker room; he would leave his stuff out when he went into the shower. His first couple of days there someone stole his commissary card. I had to remind Pete that it’s not all good people in that place.”

Carol came on Sunday afternoons sometimes, bringing Tyler and little Cara. Tyler was just old enough that the kids at school teased him, he said, about his father’s being a jailbird. When Pete Jr. visited, he and Pete talked baseball the whole time, like normal almost, until dusk neared and the guards announced it was time to leave. Petey got up to go and Pete stood too, and as Petey walked away he turned back and saw his father in his prison issue, hand up in a wave, and with an unfamiliar expression on his face—a look of vulnerability and uncertainty. The expression, the whole tableau, rattled Pete Jr. for days after, and has never, he says even now, fully left him.

Jeff Ruby showed up to see Pete at Marion as well, first on his own and then again late in Rose’s sentence with WLWT-TV’s Jerry Springer. Pete had lost some weight. “That was a different Pete Rose,” says Ruby now. “He wasn’t exactly comfortable, but he was making the best of things. The first time I saw him he was friendly and tried to make light, but I had the sense he was a little lost, even despondent. I’d never seen that. By my next visit he had brightened up. Pete has an ability to isolate himself from the pressures and troubles around him. It’s extraordinary.”

Ruby has long carried the belief that he might have saved Pete from his banishment, or at least done something to delay it. Long before base-ball got involved, as Ruby recalls it, he knew what Janszen had on Pete and what his plans were for exposing him.

Rose and Ruby went back a lot of years together, back to when Ruby ran bars in the Holiday Inns around Cincinnati and Sparky Anderson and the Reds used to go there. Later Rose (and Bench) backed Ruby’s restaurants—his signature steakhouse, the Precinct, opened in 1981— and at the time that Rose was managing the Reds and his troubles with gambling (and with Janszen) were beginning to get away from him, Ruby and Rose were working out together a few times a week at the Scandinavian Health Spa on Montgomery Road.

Outside of the spa one day, Janszen came up to Ruby. They knew one another through Rose. “Pete owes me $30,000,” Janszen said. He was using Ruby as an intermediary because Pete wasn’t talking to him anymore. Janszen told Ruby that he wanted his money but that Pete wouldn’t pay. He also said he had betting slips that could be bad news for Pete if they got out; one day Janszen and Ruby arranged to meet at the Kenwood Mall and Janszen produced the slips for Ruby to see—betting slips with the teams and games logged on them and Pete’s name attached.

“Paul is telling me he’s going to go to the FBI, he’s going to go to baseball, he’s going to go to everybody but the SPCA,” recalls Ruby. “But when I talked about it to Pete he said, ‘That guy’s full of it, I don’t owe him nothing.’ I called Reuven Katz—he was my lawyer too—and asked him what he knew about it and Reuven said Pete says he doesn’t owe Janszen anything, and that it would be better for me to stay out of it. So I didn’t do anything. I don’t know who owed who what, but Paul sounded pretty convincing that he would take those betting slips to baseball. I believed him. I look back sometimes and wish I had just paid Janszen that $30,000 and made him go away. I don’t know what would have happened—it turned out Pete was into so much—but things might have gone a little differently.”

Ruby and Rose don’t see each other much these days, but when Pete is in Cincinnati he might stop in at the Precinct or at Ruby’s place downtown—Rose will eat there for free for so long as he lives—and they’ll pose for a photo together grinning widely in their brimmed hats. They run into each other at Reds games sometimes too. “We’ve gotta do a steakhouse together in Vegas,” Pete might say. It was, and will always be, Ruby who in the fall of 1990 came into the big room at Marion and took off his cap and sat at the table among the prisoners and their guests and shot the shit with Pete for a while.