Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (34 page)

Chapter 24

Where He Belongs

P
ETE ROSE says he really can’t remember when he began spending so much time in Las Vegas, when he first got an apartment there, or how the city evolved from a place he would visit sometimes for a payday and into the primary source of his livelihood. It all happened long after he’d moved to Los Angeles. For a while, beginning in the late 1990s, Pete had commuted between his home in Florida, doing his radio show out of the Ballpark Cafe, and L.A., flying out for a few days a couple times a month to his house in Sherman Oaks with Carol and the kids. Then the Cafe in Boca Raton wrapped up, the investors going on to other things, and Los Angeles became home.

The point of the move to L.A. was to help give their daughter Cara a real shot in show business. Carol had begun putting Cara into beauty pageants by age 4, and by the time she was 11, Cara had been acting for years under the name Chea Courtney. She’d done a few TV commercials, made a few appearances on the sitcom
Ellen
, played a recurring character for half the 1999 season on
Melrose Place
, landed a gig on the daytime soap
Passions.
“I’d love to do a movie in which I’d get to sing and dance and wear cool clothes,” she said in 2001 when she was 12. Part of the reason she used a stage name rather than her own Cara Rose was so that when she went on auditions people didn’t spend the whole time asking about her dad, Pete.
¹

Tyler, five years older, played basketball—he was tall and thin, his mother’s son in that regard—and Pete came to his high school games. Tyler was good, though not a star (he would later play at Glendale Community College) and Pete wasn’t shy about calling out from the sidelines, questioning a referee’s call or encouraging Tyler to be more aggressive. Pete also sometimes went along with Carol on Cara’s acting gigs—such as when she shot a scene for the hit television drama
Judging Amy
, a show whose ensemble cast featured Marcus Giamatti, Bart’s son.

“I saw Rose on the set a few times,” Giamatti says. “And I also saw him once at the Y in Hollywood—I think he’d taken his son over there to play basketball. My father had been dead for more than 10 years, but people still asked me about Rose when they heard my name. It still wasn’t easy. And, honestly, it still isn’t easy today. Each of those times that I saw Rose I had a similar feeling. Part of me wanted to go over and shake his hand and introduce myself. Look him in the eye. Another part of me just wanted to punch him in the mouth. But I knew what my father would have told me to do: He would have said that I should walk away. So that’s what I did.”

LAS VEGAS just made sense for Pete. He could drive there in four hours from L.A. and he’d done radio shows and appearances there for years. He knew the ropes. He
got
the place. In Vegas, and perhaps only in Vegas—to which people come from every state and status of the United States with their wallets open, and where customer turnover is so high—there was money to be made, day in and day out, perpetually selling his signature and himself. Good money.

For nearly a decade, before and after his marriage to Carol dissolved, Rose has held a regular gig at a Las Vegas memorabilia shop; most recently that has been at a store called The Art of Music in the Mandalay Place shopping area, where he sits and signs, five-hour shifts, at least 20 days a month. “He’s guaranteed $3,500 a day,” says J.D. Friedland, the co-owner of Hit King Inc., which employs Pete and organizes the signings and some of Rose’s other ventures. “If he sells more than $10,000 worth of merchandise in a day, he starts getting a bonus percentage. It’s good business for him, and good business for us. Pete is terrific. He always wants to work. We’ll say, ‘Why don’t you take a couple of days off?’ And he’ll say, ‘What for? What am I going to do, go sit on a beach somewhere?’ ” Hit King Inc. and Rose recently extended their contract, for the fixed wage and the guaranteed minimum days per month, through 2017.

Rose makes money in other ways too, through speaking engagements and private appearances, or doing the occasional advertisement. For $5,000, you and a few friends can have dinner with him at the Palm in Vegas. Good steaks, plenty of side dishes, and Pete, all meal long, being Pete. Brides-to-be like to give that dinner to their oncoming husbands as a bachelor’s party gift. All told Rose might earn between $1 million and $1.5 million a year.
²

Pete’s garrulous self, his off-color humor and buddy-boy irreverence, works perfectly at his signing table in Las Vegas. Customers, in town for a lark, are up for exactly what Pete provides. Rose gets asked about winning the World Series and playing in All-Star Games (Ray Fosse still comes up a lot) and his hitting streak of 1978. He has stories, it seems, from whatever U.S. city a customer is from—a story about a teammate being caught in a hotel there
in flagrante
, perhaps, or about a game he won there with a bunt in the ninth. He’ll tell you about the frowsy postgame locker room, and he’ll look at you and ask where your kids go to school. Sitting there chatting while watching a newly purchased ball or jersey or photograph being inscribed, the customer feels, and this isn’t necessarily a false feeling, that he is getting a real piece of Pete.

Many customers, perhaps most, ask Rose about the Hall of Fame and whether he thinks he will ever get in. The conflict clearly lends him a cachet, the lure of the unresolved. That people see him as tainted—the outlaw hero—or as the victim of an injustice adds an attraction he would otherwise not have, something beyond his being the Hit King. Most retired baseball stars benefit greatly in the marketplace after getting into the Hall of Fame: Their autograph becomes more coveted, their time more valuable. Their profile is raised. In Rose’s case, however, it is not in any way clear that being inducted in Cooperstown would increase his demand. “I don’t think it would, actually,” says Steve Wolter, a Cincinnati memorabilia collector who bought, among numerous other bits of Roseabilia, the bat that Rose used on the night of hit 4,192, as well as the bright red Corvette he received. “Pete’s unique that way.”

If anything, being inducted might, some collectors say, work
against
Pete Rose as a commodity, might take away the edge. “Yeah, not being in the Hall of Fame—I guess that’s my shtick!” Rose once said to me, laughing.

Not surprisingly, Rose gets along famously with the employees, gofers and hangers-on at the venues where he signs. A few years ago he was working his table at the Field of Dreams store at The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace (I sat beside him, interviewing him as he worked) when a bleached blonde and conspicuously endowed woman in her early 20s swept in. She came right up to Rose, bent down and hugged his neck. The woman had formerly worked in the mall, but now she was just coming in to visit. She wore a white tank top with no bra in the airconditioned room, creating a happy diversion for some of the men waiting in line to get with Pete.

She hung around for awhile, lamenting a broken cellphone and a problematic boyfriend, and after some chat and advice—“Sure, you could move to a new town, honey,” Rose said, “but for a girl who looks like you, every town is the same town”—Pete took out some cash and asked the woman to go to one of the mall’s betting windows and put something down for him on a horse race at the Hollywood Park track in Los Angeles. As soon as she left, Rose turned to me and said, “Do you see those boobs? She won them in a fake orgasm contest.…A $5,000 boob job that she won for faking an orgasm!”

Set up on a table to Rose’s right was a television showing those races from Hollywood Park. It was an unremarkable Thursday at the track. This was not a significant race card, but rather the daily fare that appeals only to a devoted lover of thoroughbred horses or to an avid gambler; a telecast decidedly for the bettor. All the odds relating to the upcoming race—each horse’s win odds, as well as the odds for exactas, trifectas, daily doubles, Pick-Sixes and other exotic bets—ran continuously across the bottom of the screen.

Rose kept an eye on the TV. Now and then he would break from signing and use his cellphone to call, he said, a trainer at Hollywood Park and see if there was “anything going on.” Then he’d reach into the front right pocket of his jeans and pull out a thick wad of $100 bills. He had more than 40 of them when the day began. Counting out five or six bills, Rose would call over one of the Field of Dreams employees—or his visiting Morganna—and say something like, “Go get me the 4-6 exacta box in the third race.” The employee would go out to place the bet, then return with a ticket and give it to Rose.

And then, as he continued to sign autographs and to engage the public, that third race at Hollywood Park would go off. Rose’s eyes would drift to the screen; he appeared interested, but not rapt. The 4 horse won. The 3 horse rallied down the stretch to place. The 6 horse showed. Rose had missed a heavy return—thousands of dollars—by about a length.

Rose didn’t say anything or show emotion, but rather went on signing and keeping up his banter. After a few minutes he said to me quietly, “That back end always gets you. That 6 horse, he just slipped out.”

Rose didn’t try to hide his gambling. Not from me—a working journalist with a notebook—not from the workers in the store, not from the customers crowding near him. He bet on the horses throughout the afternoon (on five races in all) and he did so the way another person might unwrap and chew a stick of gum. There was no hesitancy, no shame, no fuss. This was simply something he did, that anyone might do. Much later, at the end of our time together that day, although I had not asked, Rose said to me suddenly: “That’s all the betting I do, you know. The horses, maybe a little something else here or there. No more betting on other sports or baseball though. I’m done with that.”

Whatever the object of the wagering may be, the lure of it, the habit, remains strong. When in 2011 Hit King Inc. moved Rose from Field of Dreams to The Art of Music, his daily walk from the parking lot to the store led him directly past a sports book. About a month into the new gig, Kiana Kim called Friedland and complained. Pete was bringing home less money than he had been, she said, and he had told her it was because he kept putting down a little something extra when he passed the window. Rose does not tend to hold on to his cash for long.

This is why when Hit King Inc. pays Rose it first puts money into an account to cover Rose’s monthly expenses: the apartment in Las Vegas, his car lease (he’s always got nice wheels), the L.A. house he stays in with Kim, a little something for his son Tyler, who is often around The Art of Music store in Vegas. Rose takes what might be described as an allowance out of what is left. “He has people who depend on him and this way all his bills are taken care of first,” says Friedland. “Pete understands that that’s how it needs to be. If he suddenly had a million dollars in his bank account it would be gone by the end of the month. That’s just how he is.”

Rose has also had government bills to pay, namely hefty liens from unpaid back taxes over the years—a reported sum of nearly $1 million for taxes between 1997 and 2002 alone. Says Friedland, “I think Pete would be very happy if he still owes money to the IRS when he dies.”

Doesn’t it all make sense? Didn’t Rose’s way have to lead to Las Vegas, where people act how they want to act and say what they want to say, their peccadillos overlooked and their sins, of course, forgiven? It is a city disarmed and transparent—everything out on the table, anything goes— even as it harbors the consequential secrets of so many lives. Las Vegas may be steeped in fabricated glitz, with its fake Venice and its fake Eiffel Tower, but it is also brutally honest. You win, you lose, you go home. Vegas has a ruthlessness not unlike that of the American Dream itself, and it has a duality not unlike Rose’s: through all his openness, something hidden— something, finally, else. There is always the other side of Pete that Dave Rose and Pete Jr. have lived with all their lives, and that some in the clubhouse recognized.
Nobody will ever know him completely. Can’t know him.

It cuts both ways, as Las Vegas does. Rose may be given to lies, to stretching a story, to saying one thing one day and another the next, but there remains an unassailability in the way he lives his life, stripped bare, busting his ass to first base or on his latest autograph shift no matter who is hooting at him. Take me as I am. Pay me.

Pete Rose will never be a man to whom cardinal virtues can be ascribed, and yet in the impression he leaves and in the essence of what he projects, he may be one of the few honest people that you will ever meet.

AN EXECUTIVE at HBO Sports put it this way in the summer of 2013: “Rose is an asshole. You work with him and at the last minute he’s always asking for more money, or saying that some guy of his has to be flown in first-class. Rose always needs something extra.” (Partly because of his demands—often arrogantly issued—and partly because of access issues, HBO canceled its plans for the Rose documentary it had begun working on in 2012.)

Rose is known to haggle doggedly over his appearance fee (he can get up to $25,000 for a full night’s event) but he is also known for delivering far beyond what was agreed upon. He’ll stay longer, shake more hands, swap more stories, sign a few extra items, never act as if he is being imposed upon. With a few standing exceptions—he won’t sign something that disparages Major League Baseball or Bud Selig, and he has refused a female collector’s repeated requests to write above his signature “Thanks for the greatest night of my life”—Rose, for a price, will write just about anything next to his name. In 2005, at a collector’s request, he began writing on baseballs, “I’m sorry I bet on baseball, Pete Rose.” (In other words, as the wags had it, he finally had the balls to say he was sorry.) That spawned other inscriptions, Pete all the while japing his sin. “I’m sorry I shot JFK,” he’ll sign. Or “I’m sorry I screwed up the economy.” He will write that he was the first man on the moon.

In 2012 Rose began shopping around his original version of the five-page document that banished him from the game. He and his people had a price in mind of about half a million dollars, and he first offered it to private collectors. “But what if baseball reinstates you someday?” asked Green Diamond Gallery owner Bob Crotty. “What will that do to the value?” And Pete said, “I’ll put it in my will that you get the reinstatement letter too.” Eventually the document went on the block through Goldin Auctions, drawing a high bid of about $250,000—not meeting the reserve price. No sale.