Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (35 page)

Meanwhile, Rose has offered autographed
copies
of that banishment document (for $500) through his website, and he has also sold signed editions of the Dowd Report—even, at times, from a table in Cooperstown. Profit-driven stunts like these have been the source of heavy hand-wringing from baseball moralists (one sample headline from
The Sporting News
read in part,
PETE ROSE: DIGNITY STILL FOR SALE
), yet even Dowd can’t help but chuckle at the chutzpah. “He’s just signing that fucking thing and selling it! The fucking report that ruined his life!” Dowd says, shaking his head gently, his smile refusing to leave.

Rose, you know, is in on the joke, living in a landscape scarcely dotted by sacred cows. Filming a scene for his 2009 movie
Brüno
, Sacha Baron Cohen tried to punk Rose, bringing him in for an interview during which, due to an alleged furniture delivery snafu, they had to sit on “chairs” that were actually men on all fours. Later Brüno (portrayed by Cohen) ordered up a smorgasbord of sushi, which was wheeled in, arrayed on the prone body of a large, naked and hirsute man. Bruno started to tell Rose about the choices. “There is yellowtail just above the navel…” But Pete stopped him and said, “The only problem is that it’s all got hair with it. I don’t eat hair.”

The scene didn’t make it into the movie; the point of such skits, obviously, is to zap an unsuspecting victim, but Pete, though he didn’t reveal it until the end, had caught on early to the prank, stayed in character and played along.

He was winking then and he is winking today when he signs a baseball “I’m sorry I broke up the Beatles” and he was winking way back in September of 1969 when Dennis “Wildman” Walker hopped out of the stands and ran onto the Crosley Park field to shake Pete’s hand in the middle of a game. “Your ass is grass, man,” Rose said to Wildman. And after Wildman was taken to the jailhouse and posted bail, he came back the very next day and waited for Rose outside the ballpark. “Would you sign it for me Pete?” Wildman asked, holding out his bail form. Pete, of course, did.

Rose was winking—and, yes, taking another payday—when in 2013 he and Kiana did a TV ad for a local furniture place in Cincinnati. (“I really like this Lane sofa,” Rose says, while seated in a reclining chair.) And he was winking in ’04 when he put on a tuxedo and gelled his dyed red hair and delivered an acceptance speech, lauding the professional wrestlers around him, upon being the first celebrity inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.

Rose weighs more than he should, maybe 50 pounds too much, and he does not exercise with the regularity or the vigor that he might. He’s had some health issues here and there—a heart murmur in 2012—but Pete Rose is very much alive, and very happy to be so. “What would I have been if I wasn’t a baseball player?” he mused to a fan at his table in Vegas not long ago. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t have been a scientist, I know that.” He is in his 70s, deep into the strange and sometimes cartoonish evensong of his life, and he is out to make what he can while he can, always ready to embrace another day of doing Pete Rose.

THE HOUSE on Braddock is still there, its facade and its sloping grounds largely unchanged. The little street is crudely paved and just below it, on River Road, heavy trucks wheeze and jounce noisily along. The man operating the Anderson Ferry these days, Paul Anderson of northern Kentucky, believes he is related to the original Anderson who started it all, though he is not sure exactly how. The front porch from where LaVerne Rose cast her line and caught her fish in the flood of 1937 remains, refurbished but intact.

“Nah, we haven’t changed much about the house,” says Johnny Flemming, who was born in 1990 and says he has lived at 4404 Braddock Street all his life. “I know a lot about what happened here. My mom told me some, and other people, the neighbors.” Johnny’s a smoker, thin as an infield rake, and he has a job doing maintenance at a Radisson hotel. Part of the narrative of Johnny’s life is that he lives (along with his mother and sister) in the house where Pete Rose grew up.

“We used to have a Doberman Pinscher and he would never want to go on that stair, you know where Rose’s father fell down and died,” Johnny says. “He always had to kind of go around it, try to avoid it. It’s weird but I believe in things like that. You feel the ghosts in the house. One night the television kept changing channels by itself; we didn’t even touch it.”

Johnny was in the seventh grade when
My Prison Without Bars
came out in 2004 and on the Thursday a few weeks later that Rose came to do a book signing at the Media Play a few miles north in Western Hills, Johnny skipped school. He woke before 5 a.m., he says, to go and get in line at the store and he brought with him five copies of the book. Johnny stood with hundreds of others for hours and when he finally got in front of Rose, sometime after the signing session officially began at noon, the kid took a deep, nervous breath and told him where he lived.

“No shit!” Rose said. And though the line was long and the people in it were antsy, Rose spent several minutes with Johnny, gripping his hand and asking about the house. “Is that sewer cap still out back?” Rose asked. Johnny told him yes it was and told him also that he’d once found in the bramble at the side of the house a tin dog tag with the name
LAVERNE ROSE
on it. Johnny said that the broken rear window had never been repaired—the same window that some folks in Cooperstown had, at the time that Rose was chasing Cobb, inquired about getting shipped to the Hall of Fame as true Americana evidence of Pete’s rascally, ballplaying youth. “That window is history!” said Johnny. And Rose said, “Aw, I broke the thing with a basketball, anyway.”

Johnny told Rose how he himself wore number 14 in Little League, to pay homage, and he told him how in fact he saw the name
ROSE
just about every day, as it remained crudely but permanently carved into the siding of the house, a remnant from decades past. Johnny wondered if maybe this was an early Pete Rose autograph of a sort, but Rose laughed and said he didn’t remember how the name got there.

“It must have been me who carved our name in the house,” says Dave Rose. “Pete wouldn’t have wasted his time on something like that.” Dave says he hardly sees Pete these days. He will call Pete’s cellphone and leave a message—Pete rarely picks up—but the message might not be returned. Occasionally Dave runs into someone at the Pit Stop Barbeque & Grill outside Indianapolis where he now cooks, who will say, “Hey, I saw your brother in town the other day!”

“It’s kind of embarrassing when someone else is telling you he’s been around and you didn’t know,” he says. “Pete might come to town to see a Pacers game when Kobe or LeBron are in town—and he came in for the Indy 500—but then he’ll leave right away. I get it. I know he’s real busy. I love him. I’m proud of him. I only wish I could see him a little more.”
³

On summer nights Dave likes to go with his girlfriend Rita to watch the Triple A Indianapolis Indians play, especially when there’s a two-for-one ticket special. They can sit by the rail along the leftfield line for $11. Dave often wears a Reds cap with Pete’s signature on it, and he’ll clap loudly at a play he likes, calling out, “That’s fundamental baseball!” He and Rita draw looks—they’re an interracial couple—and that might lead to a double take, to a ballpark fan registering Dave’s mien and his rounded chest, noting his ballcap and hearing the timbre of his voice and so coming over to ask, “Are you Pe—”

“Dave Rose,” he’ll answer putting out his hand, and he and the fan will wind up talking about Pete.

Dave can at times be hard to track down himself, for a day or even two, and his old friends in Indy, Jim Luebbert and Greg Staab, say they live with a lingering fear that they will find out that Dave has slipped off the rails once again.

Pete goes to ballgames too, Reds games, a few each season. He’ll sit in a suite or a box and if he is shown on the big screen, the crowd roars. Because of his ban Rose still can’t go anywhere at the Great American Ball Park beyond where an ordinary fan might go—no clubhouse, no dugout, no field. Still, he’s in regular contact with several Cincinnati players, including Joey Votto, the team’s star. Votto credits his relationship with Rose for helping him to maintain his intensity over the season’s grind. “He reminds me never to give away an at bat,” Votto says. “He has said things that help keep me focused.”
⁴

Right next to the stadium, the Reds have their own Hall of Fame, a cleverly curated, two-story museum that traces the team’s long, rich history. The team has been inducting members—voted in either by fans or baseball writers—since 1958 and the inductee roster now consists of 75 players, three managers and three executives. The Hall’s public FAQ sheet includes the question, “Is Pete Rose eligible for the Reds Hall of Fame?” And the answer, “No. Rose is not eligible for the Reds Hall of Fame (or for the National Baseball Hall of Fame) because he is on baseball’s ineligible list.” Naturally, the team could have set its own eligibility rules in any way it wanted, but “in the spirit of cooperation” as the museum’s curator Chris Eckes puts it, chose to follow Cooperstown’s lead.

Even without being inducted, Rose is well represented among the exhibits at the Reds Hall of Fame in Cincinnati, most appealingly in a bronze life-size statue of him cavorting on the field with seven other members of the Big Red Machine. In 2007 the team unveiled a special exhibit there to honor Rose—displaying game-used jerseys from as far back as Western Hills High, along with baseball cards, photographs, significant bats and balls from his career and so on. The Reds invited Rose to the exhibit’s opening and, after agitating unsuccessfully to get paid (“Which part of ‘We are celebrating and appreciating your career,’ did you not understand?” a Reds executive said to him in denying the fee), Pete finally accepted. He asked for a guest pass for Steve Wolter, the memorabilia collector, and for Arnie Metz, the old Reds maintenance guy who used to go with Pete to the track.

Pete Jr. drove over to that exhibit opening too—this was in March, before the minor league baseball season had really begun—and he brought PJ, who was not yet three, and the Roses made their way together through the museum, stopping at a permanent exhibit that has become a visitor favorite: a wall made up of 4,256 baseballs, one for each Rose hit. The wall borders an open stairwell that looks out through large windows to where left-centerfield used to be in Riverfront Stadium before it was torn down in 2002. The area there has been planted thick with roses, all of them red save for a single white rose bush marking the spot where Rose’s 4,192nd hit fell to earth. In the airy stairwell an endless loop of the radio call of the hit, the broadcast by Reds greats Marty Brennaman and Joe Nuxhall, plays overhead. A museum employee will tell visitors that they are welcome to stand in the stairwell—just as Pete, Petey and PJ did that day—and to look out at the Rose Garden and listen to the radio call for as long as they might like.

Chapter 25

The Sand Lot Kid

S
INCE THE spring of 1964 a bronze sculpture has stood prominently on the southern side of Main Street in Cooperstown, just at the entrance to the parking lot for Doubleday Field. The sculpture, set on a thick bronze base and mounted upon a marble block, is a slightly larger-than-life figure of a barefoot boy wearing overalls and a brimmed farmer’s hat. He is standing in a hitter’s stance, gripping a knobless bat, the barrel just above his right shoulder, and he’s staring ahead. The man who sculpted it, Victor Salvatore, worked from a studio in nearby Springfield Center, N.Y., and he died at the age of 80 in ’65. The name of the sculpture is
The Sand Lot Kid
.

This is one of the true landmarks in the village, ideal as a meeting and gathering place. Throughout busy days on Main Street, passersby slow down to stroll around the sculpture, looking at it from all sides. Others sit on the edge of the marble block, setting down their drinks on the bronze base. A kid might put a foot up on the statue to tie his shoe, and mothers have been seen changing diapers there. The tops of
The Sand Lot Kid
’s feet have been worn shiny from people rubbing them for luck.

Postcards of the sculpture sell in many Cooperstown shops, and the Kid, slightly shaded by sidewalk trees, is among the most photographed images in town. He seems to evoke a long-ago but not so distant time, when the ballfield behind him was grazed by cows and kids would race down to the Glimmerglass and hurl themselves into the water after a hot day of chores. When the maquette for the piece was first received by the Hall of Fame in 1944 (it was envisioned as a tribute to commissioner Landis, who had recently died) an acquisition committee described the sculpture as serving to “symbolize the interest of boys throughout the country in the national game.”

We don’t know who the Sand Lot Kid is, of course, whether he is gentle or ornery, a farmer’s son or a drunk’s, whether he is lazy or industrious, whether he is pagan, indifferent or devout. Perhaps the skin on his hip beneath his trousers has been shredded by a basepath slide. Perhaps he’s late for supper. Perhaps he has a girlfriend in the lot watching him hit. All we know about the boy, true in 1944, in 1964, in 2014, is that he is in his stance forever, his bat in hand and awaiting the pitch, and each person who looks at
The Sand Lot Kid
can make of him what they will.