Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (8 page)

Karolyn and Fawn didn’t sit with Rose’s parents at the Reds games, and not at the 1970 All-Star Game either.
¹
Harry was there of course, the one of the 51,838 fans at Riverfront who mattered most to Pete. At 58 Harry was vital and involved, still riding Pete to hustle every play. That ethos, he reminded his son, didn’t change whether you were in Class D or the big leagues, whether you were hitting .330 or .130. If Pete didn’t see Harry at the ballpark for a couple of games in a row he’d pay a visit to the Fifth Third Bank to find out what was wrong. “You haven’t visited your mother,” Harry would tell Pete sharply. And so that same day Pete would swing by Braddock, eat some dumplings at the kitchen table with LaVerne, and in so doing ensure that for the next Reds game, Harry would be at the park again pulling for his son.

Late that fall, after the 1970 season and the Reds’ run to the World Series had come to an end, Harry sometimes went along with Pete when he and other Reds (Bench, Maloney, Bobby Tolan, Jimmy Stewart) played charity basketball games at high schools around Cincinnati. In early December the squad went over to Colerain High, up there by Groesbeck, to tip off against a faculty team. Before the game, during the shootaround while many of what would be an overflow crowd of more than 2,000 were filing in, Harry challenged Pete to a race: there was a 40-yard sprint setup with tape on the polished wood floor. He was always telling Pete he needed to get faster. So Pete took the bait and the pair of them lit out, father and son. The crowd hooted to see that it was Harry who crossed the finish line first—never mind that Pete was 29 years old, exactly half Harry’s age, and a big league outfielder in his prime. Harry won the race with a few steps to spare.

He was trim and brisk and he seemed invincible, right up until the day that he died. A week after his victorious sprint in the Colerain gym, Harry was at work at the Fifth Third—he had been at the bank for close to 40 years by then and at the moment was working as a cashier—when he complained that he suddenly felt ill. Harry knew right away that something serious was at hand. He took a taxi home to Braddock Street, and no one could remember him ever taking a taxi home from work, or leaving work in the middle of the day for that matter. He died on the stairs just inside the front door of the house, collapsed. A heart attack it was believed at first, and then later a blood clot. Out of nowhere it seemed. Harry’s epitaph could have read:
NEVER SICK A DAY IN HIS LIFE
…
AND NOW THIS
.

Pete was in the barbershop when the telephone rang and moments later the barber told him his father was dead. Pete couldn’t fathom it. “You mean my mother?” he said at first. He wept “for three days,” he says, and those around him had never seen him so broken. Not before or since. One obituary called Harry—or rather, in the local parlance, “Pete Rose the First”—the most famous semipro athlete in Cincinnati history and added that “The Pete Rose who plays for the Cincinnati Reds is a 100 percent replica of his father.”

And although he would of course regain his wink and his swagger, and although he would keep Harry’s hustle about him all his life, Pete Rose would never again feel the demand for accountability the way he had felt it from Harry. He would never again feel that there was anyone else, not a wife or child, not his mother or siblings, not the agents or the associates serving him, who could see through him or tell him what to do.
You haven’t visited your mother
, Harry had said, and so Pete did. With Harry gone, Pete did not care who he might disappoint.

“When my father died that’s when the family fell apart, and Pete went his way,” his sister Caryl would say 43 years later. “Not all at once, not immediately, but that is what did it. Pete and I had a special relationship as kids, but it was my dad who kept us all together.” As Caryl spoke, she was at home, in a house in Indiana that Pete bought for her in the 1970s. She said she had not talked with him, however, not even briefly, for more than a dozen years.

What they all believe, Caryl and her brother Dave and the folks who have known him best, is that had Harry still been alive, Pete would not have drifted and fallen as he has, that he would have found it in himself to stop doing what he was doing, to stay away from the trouble he courted, to admit to and rectify his mistakes, to stand up and conduct himself in the way that his father had. Harry would have been 77 in 1989.

When everything went wrong, when Pete got himself banished from the game and then later sentenced to prison; when he was sneering in his lying denials, when he made the women around him feel small, at those times people like Greg Staab from Braddock Street would share a look with Dave and they would ask one another resignedly and rhetorically, “Now what would Harry Francis have to say about that?”

JULY 14. That was the date of the 1970 All-Star Game. In the Cincinnati newspapers that season (much as in the seasons just past) the word
Reds
sometimes referred to the hometown, first-place baseball team and other times referred to the communists in Vietnam. A headline
REDS ROUTED
or more typically
REDS SHOWING RESILIENCE
could be (and often was) misread. This was two months after the madness at Kent State, where student protesters had been shot to death on a campus four hours north of Cincinnati; and it was three months before President Nixon announced that he would be bringing 40,000 more troops out of the jungle and home for Christmas. David Rose was still over there in uniform. He’d been there about a year.

Pete had gone to Vietnam, too, although not by way of the draft like his brother. His was a three-week ambassadorship, in the off-season of 1967, a goodwill tour taken with a few ballplayers, including his idol Joe DiMaggio. The players went around talking to the troops about base-ball and the soldiers all asked DiMaggio about Marilyn Monroe—and DiMaggio’s face would darken and he would glare them into silence— and all the while as the ballplayers went from camp to camp through the searing hot jungle Pete would lighten spirits with the clubhouse banter he had brought along.

And although it was harrowing at times for Pete, the high-speed helicopter rides just above the treetops (“so they can’t get us with gunfire,” the pilot said) and the sounds of the distant or not-so distant explosions, and the smell of smoke and fire and most sobering and thudding of all, the sight one hot-moist dawn of body bags—19 of them Pete counted— being unloaded at a camp for transport home, disturbing as all of that was, this was not close to being a soldier’s experience. The ballplayers always knew they would be going home soon.

For Pete the trip was indelible most of all for his traveling with DiMaggio, talking hitting and baserunning with him. DiMaggio was a player, Rose long knew, who did not have quit in him. Later and through the years Pete would tell of helping Joe to bathe—that is, in the way bathing went over there, Pete pouring buckets of water through a kind of rawhide sieve over DiMaggio’s head while DiMaggio soaped himself behind a partition out-of-doors. “I’m the only guy who ever gave DiMaggio a shower,” Rose would say even decades later. “At least I
hope
I’m the only guy.” At some point well into his banishment years Pete would in the telling reprise his old Tommy Harper joke, and crack on a radio station that it was the great DiMaggio who looked like a dick with a man hanging off of him, and people would wonder why Pete had to be so crude like that, about DiMaggio.

When his time in Vietnam ended, Pete came home and had Christmas on Braddock Street and got ready for spring training, which was not at all the experience that Dave would have, beginning in the summer of 1969 and running through the fall of ’70. Sixteen months in all. And for what he went through and also what he missed, it is clear how very much Dave at the time, and all the more in hindsight, would have rather been at that All-Star Game in Cincinnati watching Pete step to the plate and seeing U.S. flags flapping in open splendor, than where he in fact was, 8,000 miles and an ocean away, wearing combat gear under the blistering morning sun, the flags inside the camp tents there a grim source of pride. Dave was a door gunner in Vietnam.

HE WAS bigger earlier than Pete, more strapping and more athletic. “The fastest white guy in Cincinnati,” is how Dave was known. He played football at Western Hills and like Pete before him Dave made highlights, his produced even playing on a god-awful team.
DAVE ROSE
’
S RUNS BRIGHTEN DARK SEASON
, read the yearbook spread after West Hi had gone winless in 1966, and there were photos of Dave as he “rambled around left end for a ten yard gain” or “broke through Elder’s line of defense to score” or brought back a kickoff 60 yards for a touchdown. Pete’s little brother big on game day. Dave made all-city as a halfback and he might have gone somewhere serious to play college ball—Oklahoma liked the looks of him, VMI wrote to him—if the thought of spending four more years in school had held any appeal to him at all. No. Dave would play baseball like his brother. He batted over .300 for Western Hills and tracked down balls in the outfield and had all kinds of home run power. West Hi won the state championship Dave’s senior year (he batted .430 down the stretch of the season) and afterward the Reds signed him to a minor league deal. He went off to Wytheville, Va., in the Appalachian Rookie League.
ANOTHER ROSE MAY BLOOM
read the headline in
The Cincinnati Post
and a photo went out over UPI of Dave in a golf shirt flexing his biceps while Pete squeezed it and Harry, “the proud father of the two boys,” stood between them.

“Dave can make it if he gets it up
here
,” said Harry, tapping upon his brow. This was now spring training of 1968 and both Rose boys were in Tampa. “He’s got to realize the opportunity he has.”

That Dave wouldn’t hit all that much at Sarasota in 1968 wasn’t a lot to go on—he had raw skill as a ballplayer, no question—but what was clear even then, more than a year before he left to fight in the war, was that Dave was never going to hustle like Pete did, would never put himself through that kind of ordeal. The more talented Rose? Well, even the scouts said that was true. But Dave never wanted it the way that Pete did.

Some folks in baseball would wonder why the boys were so different that way, why one left his innards on the field and the other hit the morning alarm and went back to sleep.
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Really it was not so confounding to those who knew them, the explanation (as if a single one could suffice) boiling down to this: that although Dave was born to the same mother and the same father and although he was raised in the same house and went to the same school and played the same sports as Pete did, it will always be true that just as no man steps into the same river twice no two children are born into same family. By the time Dave came along for the Roses, Pete was already there. When the boys crossed the Ohio as kids, Dave, easily the better natural swimmer, meandered across doing the sidestroke, relaxed. This after seeing Pete thrash across in a clumsy but manic crawl, reaching the opposite bank ahead of the rest.

Dave says he was devastated, left literally shaking, when his draft notice came, and who wouldn’t have been? He was together with Cynthia, his high school sweetheart, his first wife who would soon give birth to their boy Shane. At Western Hills High, Cynthia had sung in the choir and played in the band, been on the school paper and done good works in the Sunshine Society. Dave always thought she looked just fine in her glasses and he liked how her thick locks fell to her shoulders. He himself wore his dark hair the way that Pete did, doglegs over the ears, though he let the hair grow fuller on the top and the sides. Dave had the same square-looking skull, high forehead and worthy chin that the other Rose men had.

His extracurriculars were about sports, playing on the teams, of course, and also joining for a while the Maroon W club devoted to character and sportsmanship. The club took on spirit jobs, selling programs at basketball games, posting event times on the school marquee. (“Pete never did nothin’ like that,” Dave says.) He also served some months as a lunchroom monitor, the appointment his punishment for fighting in school. Dave was broad and rippling through the shoulders and arms, bore impressive fists and had a temper that just went off, giving him a ferocious and renowned strength. His principal asset as a lunchroom monitor, the way he so effectively kept the peace, was that the other kids knew if you made a crack or acted out in some way as to make Dave’s life more difficult, he was likely to kick your mother-loving ass.

Dave and Pete used to wrestle sometimes as brothers do, and Pete having those seven years on him would get the better. But that rough-housing ended for good when Dave got back from Vietnam, and there was now a certain look about him, a smoldering inside. “I’m never going to fuck with that guy again,” Pete said of his little brother then, “and I wouldn’t recommend that you do either.”

In Vietnam Dave learned to hold strong and steady against the kick-back when he fired that machine gun—the Pig, they called it—and he learned to bear without effect the racket of the gunfire and the chopper blades, and the force of the wind. They would chopper in ahead of, or just behind the ground troops, and Dave would cover those men as they got down and unloaded. At times Dave got the order to cut loose and strafe an enemy camp. You could never be sure how many, if any, of the enemy you might have taken down, a welcome ignorance because truly you did not want to know.

In some ways he liked working the air better than being on the ground, trudging ahead with that anti-mortar unit, digging in and stacking sand-bags at the mouths of those huge culvert pipes, checking the radar and bracing for incoming. It got pretty close one time near Bien Hoa, much closer than anybody liked. Dave was the one who extended his tour to those 16 months, his thinking being that when he came home he could be free of obligation, not have to worry about getting called up and spared from having to put in weekends of duty when he was back playing pro ball. When he finally left for good, October 1970, when the wheels went up off that airbase at Bien Hoa, the 248 men in the plane jumped out of their seats, relieved and giddy to be going home.