The voice on the phone was friendly but determined. A baseball writer, and a good one, was talking. “Do you feel betrayed?” he asked.
The reporter and I were discussing a ballplayer, an All-Star at five positions, who suffers from certain deficiencies of character.
“Not betrayed,” I said. “We weren’t that close.”
“A lot of people think you were his only credible defender.”
“Thanks. Now I know how Pete Rose makes me feel. Not betrayed. Embarrassed.”
Midway through the 1980s, Rose approached my agent through his company and said he wanted me to write his story. At the time, I didn’t care much for Rose. He was talented, but he seemed able to talk only about himself, gambling, young women on the road–a classically adolescent character. His speech was larded with obscenity and boastfulness.
When I began work on “Pete Rose: My Story,” I ran into a curious hostility. Rose seemed to think that he had finished his part of the job when he signed the contract.
“Could we go back to the old neighborhood together?” I asked.
“You know where it is. Find it for yourself.”
And so it went. He kept his distance, as though he had something to hide.
“About gambling?”
“I like the ponies. Everybody knows that.”
We were sitting in the Cincinnati Reds’ clubhouse on a March day.
“I’m glad the basketball season is running down,” I said. “Now we’ll have baseball.”
“Basketball’s great,” Rose said. “Don’t you bet the Final Four?”
He showed me his picks for that season’s NCAA tournament and then dispatched a clubhouse attendant to place his bets with a Tampa bookie.
“You sure you don’t wanna bet my picks?” he said.
Cards, lotteries and casual gambling are common in clubhouses, but I had never seen a man in uniform make a sports bet out of a dressing room.
“Should you be doing this?” I said.
“Yeah,” Rose said. “Everybody does.”
An investigation into Rose’s alleged gambling began under Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. Essentially, Rose was exonerated on sports betting.
When Bart Giamatti took over as commissioner, he turned to his friend and lawyer, Fay Vincent, to reopen the issue of Rose’s sports betting.
Giamatti was a scholar, a medievalist, and a spirited companion. Like many, Giamatti idealized sports and athletes. When he quit academia for Major League Baseball Inc., foul-mouthed, anti-intellectual Pete Rose offended him.
I had better say at this point that Rose, offensive as he could be, was in no way evil. He was fun to play tennis with. He liked to take me on in gin rummy, cheating a bit, but we were not playing for money.
The jock world with jock needling is a place I enjoy. A good deal of my time with Rose was rough-and-tumble fun. But Giamatti had a hard time with that.
After Giamatti loosed Vincent on Rose, Vincent hired John Dowd, a Washington power lawyer who had made his name as a prosecutor of racketeers. Aware of the gathering storm, I asked, “Why engage a prosecutor? Why not hire a retired judge, say, Lewis Powell?”
Justice Powell would bring a judicial temperament to the problem. Prosecutor Dowd would go for a conviction.
But now Giamatti had no time for my musings. He was commissioner of baseball. I was working with Rose, sleeping with the enemy.
The investigation proceeded brutally. Giamatti assessed club owners so Dowd would have unlimited funds. Dowd engaged private detectives, and he and his troops interviewed felons with whom Rose had associated. Giamatti even put his name to a letter Dowd actually wrote, asking for a light sentence for a felon who said Rose had bet on baseball.
Various lawyers explained to me that “you can’t prove a negative. You can’t prove you did not hit someone.” Others pointed out that Giamatti & Co. were denying Rose the rights a jaywalker has–to confront the accusing cop in a hearing.
The investigation was nasty, but wasn’t there a central issue? Had Pete Rose bet on baseball? If I asked that once, I asked it 20 times.
Rose always looked at me evenly and said in his rough speech: “I didn’t bet baseball. I got too much respect for the game.”
What now? Rose has lied, but that still does not make him evil. He had an iron discipline between the foul lines and none outside it. Is the Giamatti-Vincent-Dowd assault American justice? Does Rose now go back into Major League Baseball? Please!
Hall of Fame? Not only no, hell, no! I want Rose out of Cooperstown. I am no plump idealist, like Giamatti, but I still like my sporting leaders admirable.
