Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (7 page)

In the clubhouse Rose organized betting pools, on big horse races or other signature sporting events. Everyone wanted in. Rose had Forward Pass in the ’68 Kentucky Derby and Stage Door Johnny in the Belmont— good calls both—and he even won a little something on the Masters and the Indy 500 that year. He went to the River Downs race track whenever there wasn’t a game to play (“A lot of us went now and then,” says ballplayer Dan Neville. “And you knew that when you went to the track, you would run into Pete.”) Sometimes Rose met his teammate Leo Cárdenas over at Jorge’s restaurant on Vine Street and they played pool with a few bucks on the line. Rose kept his cash in his right front pocket, he said, so that it was always “right where I can reach it quickly.”

There was a lightness about Pete, whether he had lined three hits in a game or none at all. “I was getting to him,” he told his teammates shortly after striking out four times against Houston pitcher Don Wilson. “You may not know it but I foul-tipped that last one.” He concocted quips that he would use throughout his career: “We were so poor growing up that I had a sister with a tag on her that said
MADE IN JAPAN
,” Rose said. When he made the position change to leftfield, slotting in next to Pinson in center, with Harper over in right, Rose came into the locker room and announced, “Well, we had to integrate the outfield sometime.”
⁴

That wisecrack was another that thawed the ice in the room, another Roseian flick at racial tension at a time when it continued to run high in America and in Cincinnati. It was the same year, 1967, that race riots erupted across the country, including in Avondale and other Cincinnati neighborhoods. The black families there—men and women and people of every age—raised a fearful hell, angry at their joblessness, their helplessness and the sense that they were being oppressed. A White House study that year declared that nine out of 10 “Negro city youths” would be arrested at some point in their lives. This was also the year that the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to forbid interracial marriage, as 16 states then did.

That first round of riots in Avondale began a day after Martin Luther King Jr. had visited the simmering city and preached again the importance of nonviolence. But the people of Avondale would not be contained. Plate glass windows were shattered at furniture stores and jewelry shops, and a liquor store got looted. Black shopkeepers taped to their storefronts signs reading
SOUL BROTHER
in hopes of being spared. White journalists covering the riots got roughed up and knocked around. Debris in the streets was set ablaze and from so many vantage points around there, from the outdoor performance stage at the Cincinnati Zoo, for example, one could hear sirens pealing and see smoke rising thickly to the sky. “I don’t remember all that much about those riots, I think we were on the road,” says Harper. (The Reds indeed were away for nine days.) “I do remember going downtown to watch a fight—you know, a boxing match— with Pete and his dad a little later that summer. I guess that might have been a problem for some people, me being there with two white men, but I will never know. No one was going to hassle you if you were with Pete.”

Rose had become by far the most beloved Red, a player from Cincinnati’s own soil and, the locals loved to believe, from their own mold. Before games, Rose stood near the dugout, or down one of the foul lines, signing autographs and giving away photos of himself and chattering with fans leaning over the railing, arms outstretched toward him. The love affair was plainly apparent at Crosley Field over the last weekend of September 1968, a couple of games against the San Francisco Giants significant only in that Rose was in a fight for the league batting title with the fine Pirates outfielder Matty Alou. Rose had come into September with a 13-point lead, but he had slumped badly, his average slipping from .347 to .330. Alou was at .329. That last week of the season Rose had been visited by ad executives promising endorsements if he were to win the batting crown.

There weren’t many in the crowd on Saturday afternoon, just over 5,500, but those who were there were there for Pete. Each time he came to bat they all stood and cheered. No Reds player had won a batting title in 30 years. Rose’s at bats went like this: a single to right in the first inning, a single to left in the second, a double to left in the fourth, a single to center in the sixth. Although Pete had gone 4 for 4, word came to Crosley that Alou was not going away. In the Pirates game against the Cubs at Wrigley Field—a ballpark, incidentally, where the fan base had little love for Rose, where earlier that season he had been pelted with garbage as he stood in the outfield—Alou was on his way to getting four hits himself. So when Rose came up in the bottom of the eighth inning with the game well decided (San Francisco led 10–4) but the batting race still unsure, the devotees at Crosley stood in appreciation again. Rose knocked a double to centerfield. 5 for 5.

Each hit had come against Gaylord Perry, the highly effective saliva-dealing righthander whom Pete loved to ride loudly from the dugout. Once Rose stood outside the batter’s box staring at Perry, then telling the umpire, “I’m not stepping in until the ball is dry!” even knowing it was no use, that sooner or later, usually sooner, Perry’s spitball was coming again. Now Pete was on second base after his fifth hit and Perry, who had a sense of humor himself, turned and called out to him. “Is that enough? Is that going to do it?” And Pete said, “Yeah, that’ll do it.”

The task though, was not quite finished; Alou was still only a point behind. The next day Bristol canceled batting practice, gave the guys the final Sunday off. Pete came out to hit anyway, enlisting a coach to pitch and a couple of kids to shag. He hit for a full half hour. Then he doubled his first time up in the game, lifting the crowd to its feet once again—this time there were close to 30,000 there—and ending the suspense. Rose .335. Alou .332. Batting champion. Bristol says that he never saw a player want anything more.

The 1960s in Cincinnati provided Rose’s major league terroir, the place and the decade that formed him as a player—this was the Beatles in Hamburg, Cassius Clay in the Golden Gloves. There were no World Series appearances in the ’60s, no MVP award, no breakout TV commercials. No eclipsing of Ty Cobb, of course, and no lifetime banishment from the game. It was, by the final measure, a quiet decade. Yet these were the years in which Rose found a way of being, a way of seeing himself in the game—a matrix for the ’70s and ’80s when by dint of his style and great achievement and then of course his disgrace, Pete Rose would become and remain the most famous baseball player in the world.

He saw what he could accomplish by his effort in those early years, and he learned that his core ethos could carry him far.
He hates to be beaten. He hates to lose.
The veteran players forgave his indiscretions (as did his wife Karolyn), and while he was reviled in some towns for his chutzpah and brass, Rose had built himself a deep equity with the fans who mattered most, in Cincinnati. He had thought that certainly he had angered the faithful after one incident in July of 1965. He was arrested in the early morning hours—4:25 a.m.— for running a red light in Newport, Ky., a place many folks went to lay bets on the horses and sports. Pete was driving back to the West Side, to Gilsey Avenue in Price Hill where he lived with his new bride Karolyn and her parents. He paid the $100 bond with the cash he had in his front pocket and the next day, represented in court, he paid $13.50 in the ticket and fees. “This is going to cost me 18,000 boos and a $500 fine for being out after curfew,” Rose said. But he was wrong. The team fined him just $250 and the fans did not boo at Crosley Field that night but rather stood and applauded as he came out to receive, as it happened, a free TV set for being the Reds’ top vote-getter for the All-Star Game. In the end, the red light incident was a suggestion to Rose that the things he did at the ballpark, his excellence there, could camouflage some of the other things he chose to do in life.

He played his first seasons in the 1960s not only alongside Robinson but also under Hutchinson, a manager with a face and demeanor straight out of casting: craggy and severe. Hutch was steeped in the knowledge and culture of the game, and he would break a clubhouse chair after losing a tough game. He was the first guy with big league sway to really believe in Pete, the man who brought him into the majors even when others wondered if it was too soon. “Pete fuckin’ Rose!” Hutch would say in delight, slapping his thigh as he watched Rose pull off another play with his hustle.

Rose and all the Reds witnessed the way that Hutch bore up in 1964 when he was being ravaged by cancer, so weak that he had trouble hanging up his jacket on the hook, so skinny he winced when he tried to sit down. Hutch would disappear from the team for a day or two to see a specialist, then return, a shade paler, clearly gaunter, but still snarling at players about needing to bust their ass, still warning that he would have to make a lineup change if he didn’t start seeing what he liked. In early August, Hutch came back after treatment to manage a doubleheader at Crosley but didn’t have enough strength to make it past the seventh inning of game one.

Hutchinson died that fall. It was two years later that Dave Bristol would say of Rose, “He doesn’t let anything get in the way of baseball. Never.” That fact would help define Rose’s career but it hadn’t been true before he started playing ball for Fred Hutchinson. It had not been true, say, when Rose was in the minor leagues, homesick in Geneva, N.Y.

Hutchinson was in the dugout, and Robinson was playing leftfield on that cloudy, mild Opening Day, April 8, 1963, when Rose made his major league debut. His parents were at the ballpark of course, Harry with his grayed hair neatly squared off and wearing a newly pressed suit, LaVerne with a scarf about her neck. In his first at bat Pete drew ball four and the crowd cheered as he bolted to first base, the same way as he had done in Macon when the derisive cries of “Hey, Hollywood” began. He came around to score the first run of the ’63 season and the first run of the 2,165 he would score in the major leagues.

Rose’s going 0 for 3 that day didn’t bother him much, nor did the ground ball that he muffed for an error in the eighth inning. He was in the major leagues. He had been in on three double plays at second base and the Reds had beaten the Pirates 5–2 before 29,000 noisy Cincinnatians on Opening Day. In the locker room after the game, as the players dressed quickly ahead of a trip to Philadelphia, Rose opened up a box of chocolates he had gotten as a gift from someone, a congratulations for making the team, and with his mouth already full, he leaned over to Harper and said, offering up the box, “Hey, Tommy! Ya want one?”

Chapter 6

Cincinnati, 1970

H
E IS leading off second base now, the most popular player from the hometown team, in a brand new stadium that is filled through to the final rows of the highest deck even now, 3½ hours after this game began. Midnight is just a few minutes away. The President of the United States is still in his front row seat, beside the commissioner of baseball, and it is the bottom of the 12th inning of the 1970 All-Star Game, the 41st in major league history and the score is tied at 4–4 with the Angels lefthander Clyde Wright on the pitcher’s mound and the Cubs’ Jim Hickman in the batter’s box. Pete Rose, having started a rally with a two-out single, is bouncing off second base in his shirtsleeves on the clear midsummer’s night, looking into home plate alert and covetous. The National League had won seven straight All-Star games and if Rose could come around to score, that would make eight.

For months the city of Cincinnati had been grooming and primping for the game, a gift bestowed upon it by Major League Baseball in honor of the new Riverfront Stadium, the round-as-a-ring Astroturfed replacement for Crosley Field. The park had opened just two weeks earlier and in the 11 games there (the Reds, on their way to a pennant, had won seven of them) plenty of the dirt around the bags at second and third had already wound up on the chest of Rose’s uniform. He had hit a triple his final time up at Crosley Field and then gotten the first Reds hit at Riverfront, a single to rightfield. In between those games he had made a wager with his teammate Tony “Big Dog” Perez as to who could christen the locker room john at Riverfront. They put $150 on the line and Perez arrived so early to the stadium on game day—more than eight hours before the first pitch—that the place was empty, cool and cavernous. Perez went right into the locker room, stepped into a toilet stall and sat down; he was feeling good about his wager, until he heard a voice ring out suddenly from the neighboring stall, “Hey Doggie, good morning!” Pete Rose was already there.

So that was one bet that he won.

Officially Riverfront Stadium had room for 51,500 fans, some 22,000 more than had wedged into a sold-out Crosley Field, and all of the seats— and then some, the aisles too—were filled for this All-Star Game. Perez and catcher Johnny Bench had made the National League’s starting lineup (Rose was selected as a reserve) and Cincinnati pitchers Jim Merritt and Wayne Simpson were on the staff. The players’ wives all sat together, some with kids at their sides, and stood whenever a Red came to bat. Karolyn Rose had her seat right next to Pituka Perez, as usual. They were together a lot in those years, at the stadium or out for a meal or at each other’s homes helping to look after the kids.

All the wives, and indeed just about everyone in Cincinnati it seemed, knew Karolyn. She and Pete, now in the seventh year of what would be a 17-year marriage, were in full blossom. Karolyn, all busty and loud about town—cantankerous sometimes, and effervescent—served as a kind of team den mother and leader. If you came to play for the Reds the first thing you did was have your wife call Karolyn Rose. She would tell you where to get a reliable babysitter. She’d recommend a family doctor, set you up with a dentist, tell you the best places to get a deal on a couch. Pituka. Bonnie Harper. Randee Shamsky: They all looked to Karolyn to show them how to maneuver their way around Cincinnati. She was a West Sider too.

“It was just what you did,” Karolyn says. “You welcomed people in.” She chewed gum and threw her arms around you in greeting, told you exactly what she thought of the shoes you had on and used four-letter words no matter who was in the room, all of that being part of her charm. You’d have said after being around Karolyn that she was much taller than 5' 2" but she was not.

She may have been Mrs. Pete Rose—anyone married to that man in that city had to be that—but Karolyn was herself an engine, from the start and through to the end. They had met at River Downs, at that same racetrack where Pete had gone so often as a child, with his father, or with Dud Zimmer and his son Don from the West Side. (Don Zimmer was about 10 years older than Pete, and went into the Dodgers’ organization right out of Western Hills High.) Pete would see Dud, or Mr. Zimmer as the kids all called him, pick a horse just based on a name—
well, Top Hat looks pretty good
—but also see him go through the racing form and break down the splits and the latest workouts and talk about the condition of the track and then place what seemed to be an educated bet. Pete loved that kind of analyzing, the details of it, and he loved the idea that by some diligence with the particulars a bettor could gain an edge. As much as Mr. Zimmer lost, he won sometimes as well and on those occasions he might take the boys out for something to eat, Pete seeing the pleasure and reward of having new cash.

One afternoon in the spring of 1963, early in the baseball season, Pete was at the track when he gazed from the grandstand through his bin-oculars and came upon a woman who caught his eye, standing jauntily by the rail. Voluptuous would be an accurate way to describe her, and Karolyn didn’t waste her time with loose-fitting clothes. She was on a date at the racetrack—then as now that was the way a guy and a girl from the West Side or northern Kentucky might spend some getting-to-know-you time. The grounds were pretty at River Downs, the hedges in the grassy infield cut into a neat RD on one side of the scoreboard and on the other side a heart-shaped pond with squat pine trees planted around it. From the grandstand you could see past the American flag flapping in the infield to the river and beyond to the thickly settled hills of the West Side. Down at the paddock you could just about touch the horses as they passed and then the guy would get in line at the betting window behind the older, rumpled men smoking thin cigars, and buy the girl a $2 win ticket on the chestnut colt with the white diamond on his nose, or which-ever horse she’d picked out.

Even on an ordinary day in a sparsely filled little track like River Downs, a sweet low murmur hums through the crowd when a race goes off, building sporadically to the sharp surge of noisy excitement—the varied, random shouts and curses, the exhortations and the pleas—as the field rounds the far turn and heads down the stretch for home. As Pete tells it, he was already up a few bucks the day he met Karolyn.

A kid named Tommie North made the introduction. “Don’t you play football on one of the tavern teams,” Karolyn asked after hearing Pete’s name. It’s possible she had his father in mind. “Are you shittin’ me?” he said. “I play for the Cincinnati Reds.”

And that was how it started. Back home on Gilsey Avenue, Karolyn asked her brother Fred if he knew about a guy named Pete Rose. “Yeah I know him,” said Fred. “He’s a hot dog. But he can play.” Pete called her a couple days later at her job at the American Book Company (Karolyn was coy: “Pete? Pete who?”) and on their first date he let her borrow his car to drive over to Crosley for the game. Later, out for dinner up in Clifton, Karolyn pulled out her pack of cigarettes. “You smoke Salems?” she asked, offering him one. And Pete, lying to impress, said, “Nah, I smoke Camels.” He took one of the cigarettes anyway, though, and on the first drag his grin disappeared and he came up coughing and spitting and sneezing like his right lung would fly out of his throat, his left lung out his nose, until finally sputtering, “Christ, these are a little strong, ain’t they?”

Karolyn fell out—“To this day I think that is the hardest I have laughed in my life,” she says—but Pete shook his head. “I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t know how you take these damn things.” It was clear that Pete didn’t smoke Salems or Camels or any cigarettes at all, that he never had and never would.

They were married eight months later, after the season, and even before the wedding day Karolyn knew what she was getting into. That summer, while the Reds were on the road in California, she had called the hotel room. “Is Pete around,” Karolyn asked when his roommate, the pitcher Jim Coates, picked up the phone. There was a pause and then some stuttering, “Uh, um, I’m not sure,” said Coates. “Hold on and I’ll check.”

“So I’m thinking, what does that mean,
‘I’ll check’?
” says Karolyn. “It’s two guys in a hotel room, what was he going to do, look under the bed?”

“Nope, I checked, and he’s not around,” Coates said.

“A few minutes later Pete calls back,” Karolyn says. “And he’s annoyed. He says, ‘Aw, Karolyn I knew it was you. Why you calling out here? You messed me up with some girl I had over.’ ”

So that was Pete, out there in the open with it, an unabashed slave to his indulgences. He was always trying to make some girl. Over the years friends would ask Karolyn in disbelief how she could stand it, but for the longest time she didn’t seem to really care, at least not enough to fight it. Each year at the start of the season, Karolyn would give Pete a coin to take on road trips. “It’s for the pay phone,” she said. “If you find someone you like much better than me, just call and let me know. I won’t come pick you up at the airport.”

She knew that she could always reach him at his hotel room, at least. Pete wouldn’t be out drinking or running around exploring the nightlife or the sights. He liked to get dinner and stay in, put on the TV if there was one and just fill the time until he could go back to the ballpark. If he had a girl over he had a girl over, was how Karolyn looked at it, allowing herself a mental shrug. It was later, deeper into the 1970s, when Pete had the long affair with the woman from Florida, and they had a child together (the paternity suit made the newspapers) that things began to fray for Karolyn. Really fray. And when Pete got serious with another woman, Carol Woliung, and Carol could be seen out and around right there in Cincinnati or Philadelphia, driving Pete’s car—“My car!” Karolyn yelled the time in ’79 that she accosted Carol at a red light and socked her in the nose with a well-placed fist—and flaunting fine new jewelry at the racetrack or the ballpark, well, then Karolyn truly had enough, had to take the kids and get away. No one alive, save for Pete himself, could have blamed her.

But for many years before that Karolyn seemed easy with it all, and easy too with the life she would lead—her needs a deep afterthought to Pete’s, and Pete’s needs being first and foremost and almost completely about baseball. At their wedding, after they’d said their vows at St. William church (a photo of the two of them, freshly hitched in front of the church doors, ran on the front page of
The Cincinnati Post
), she had to go over to the Cheviot Fieldhouse and carry on at the reception line herself, the guests complimenting her on her bridal headpiece and asking, “Where’s Pete?” It was the night the Cincinnati baseball writers were giving out their year-end awards downtown, and they were honoring Pete as Rookie of the Year. He still wore his wedding tuxedo, carnation in the buttonhole and all, when he accepted. “I’m going for doubles this year. I’m not a singles man now that I’m married,” Pete cracked. By the time he made it to his wedding reception, he was more than two hours late.

The whole event seemed surreal anyway, this West Sider and his gal mixing with big league stars. Close to 1,200 people had turned out and for Pete’s sisters and little brother Dave and for many others from the neighborhood, there just wasn’t much sense of scale. Karolyn had an uncle called Freck, an outgoing guy who had agreed to tend bar at the reception. Many of the guests, hearing the name—“Hey, Freck, how about another”—believed that it was in fact Ford Frick behind the bar. Meaning, that is, Ford Frick the commissioner of Major League Baseball, the man who had served 17 years as National League president, who had cut the ribbon at the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939. Sure, that made sense: commissioner Frick serving up drinks at 22-year-old Pete Rose’s wedding. For a river rat now suddenly standing for a few hours on an elevated plane, and looking around to see the great Frank Robinson talking to Cincinnati manager Fred Hutchinson, and seeing clutches of Reds ballplayers—O’Toole, Harper, Edwards, Coates—mingling about, well the notion that Ford Frick might have accepted the task of pouring Cokes and fixing whiskey sours seemed reasonable enough. Each time old Uncle Freck got asked for an autograph that day he was happy to oblige, signing on a cocktail napkin, “Nice to meet you, Ford Frick.”

Pete and Karolyn lived for a few years with her parents (the Engel-hardts, Fred and Pearl) on the third floor of the house on Gilsey Ave., and then they moved over to the Hilltop Gardens apartment complex on Harrison Ave., and all along Pete, even as his salary grew, was still the kid with the roots. He would go back around to Western Hills High some-times, play catch with the guys on the baseball team, or stop in with the football coaches to see if they were still showing the highlight film of all the tackles he broke that time against Elder—and they
were
; the coaches showed that Pete Rose run for many years.

Dan Neville lived at the Hilltop Gardens too in those years and he recalls one weekend morning wondering where his son had gotten off to. The boy was about five years old. Outside in the parking lot Dan ran into Karolyn. “Have you seen David?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure. He’s upstairs with Pete,” she said.

When Neville got up to the Roses’ apartment the two of them were watching Saturday morning cartoons.

PETE AND Karolyn went down to Braddock Street only rarely, on Thanksgiving night and on Christmas Day, or sometimes to bring Fawn around to see Pete’s folks. The girl was getting bigger now and had a feistiness to her. When Fawn was three, Pete brought her on set to shoot a TV commercial for mustard. A yellow-slathered hot dog had been prepared for filming but Fawn kept trying to eat it before her cue. An assistant kept moving the hot dog out of her reach, until Fawn bellowed out: “You take the wiener away from me one more time, and I’m going home!”

“You had better let her have a bite,” Karolyn told the crew. “When she says something she means it.” Telling the story later Pete added, “Fawn thinks she’s a boy. She wears boys’ pants and a baseball uniform. She tells everybody she’s Pete Rose Jr.”