Re: Obituaries - Gone but not forgotten.
Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2024 6:43 pm
Apparently the case of JD chucked in ASIB reflected the two bottle of JD he was downing in his heyday.
Thought you guys might like Boswell's realistic eulogy to Charlie Hustle, in the Post:10stone5 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 01, 2024 1:54 amRIP Pete
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2 ... m-boswell/
"Before the 1979 season, Pete Rose signed a $3.225 million free agent contract with Philadelphia, a benchmark at the time. Rose called the four-year deal “so much money that a show horse couldn’t jump over it.”
Why sign with a franchise that, going back to 1886, had never won a title? “If I get the Phillies to win the World Series, I can do anything,” Rose said.
First, Rose believed he had to change the team’s culture. He knew what “all in” meant. Did the Phillies?
Larry Bowa, a scrawny, scrappy shortstop, was always the first Phillie through the clubhouse door to start spring training — a badge of pride. In Las Vegas, Rose and Bowa were together bragging about who would be in Clearwater first. Bowa even went to Florida early to make sure he would win.
At midnight, just hours before the Clearwater gates would open, Bowa got a call from Rose, who was still in Vegas. “You win. You’ll be there before me,” Rose said as slot machines jangled in the background.
When Bowa entered the clubhouse at 7:40 a.m., 20 minutes earlier than ever, Rose was already dressed in his new Phillies uniform, standing at Bowa’s locker.
“Jesus, it ain’t fair,” Bowa wailed.
Rose’s all-night flight from Vegas to Tampa landed, as Pete put it, “about two minutes late at 5:23 a.m. I figured I’d wander out to the park. … Didn’t have nothin’ else to do.”
“If what Pete Rose is giving is 100 percent, then my 100 percent must be coming up short,” said Mike Schmidt, the team’s future Hall of Fame third baseman.
That year, Rose hit .331. The next, Philly won it all.
Rose already had won World Series titles in 1975 and 1976 as one of the central characters — with Joe Morgan and Tony Perez — of the Big Red Machine teams in Cincinnati. That additional ring won in Philadelphia helped Rose move from an MLB star to a national icon.
His 44-game hitting streak in 1978, the only such run to come near Joe DiMaggio’s 56 straight, gave him an even greater certainty that he was different, special and, increasingly, untouchable.
“The Reds have covered up scrapes for Pete his whole career [in Cincinnati from 1962 to 1978],” Orioles general manager Hank Peters once told me. “He’s always been in some little jam … but people never seem to hold it against him.”
That bad-boy insouciance was Rose’s unfortunate super power. He was Charlie Hustle on the field, Pete the hustler in cheesy business ventures off it.
At the White House, on a visit to see President Jimmy Carter, Rose smuggled in a “Hustle Makes It Happen” T-shirt and a bottle of “Pete” chocolate drink as well as a $9.95 Pete Rose watch for the first daughter, Amy. Before Carter could say two sentences, Pete had handed him the watch.
“We thought we’d frisked Pete at the door,” an aide told me, mentioning the T-shirt and chocolate drink. “But he had the watch in his side pocket.”
No doubt you sense that some little thing — oh, such as a lifetime banishment from baseball, such as a disgraced defiant old age signing $29 autographs for 40 hours per week at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas — is missing in the ambivalent tone of this postmortem.
That’s because the life of Pete Rose defies the excellent advice to “speak no ill of the dead.” With Pete, you have to get to all of it. At least, so close to his death at 83 on Monday, let’s begin with a couple of smiles and end with some balance.
Rose was a driven, combative, funny, appealing, competitive champion athlete. Gradually, he became an increasingly damaged, gambling-addicted and corrupted character.
Just mentioning Rose’s name makes me glad to remember the first 15 years I knew him on the baseball beat when there was hardly a player with whom I would rather talk — and talk and talk. Rose was probably the biggest baseball fan — and the most knowledgeable, whether on stats, tall tales, theories of the game or Who Was This Guy Really — of any star.
My first two years on the beat, when I was on the road, only one player recognized me on sight.
“Yeah, I know. Jeez, don’t say it again — ‘TomBoswellWashingtonPost,’” said Rose, making it all one word. When I mentioned Pete’s generosity to a rookie writer to Reds manager Sparky Anderson, he said: “Pete knows the groundskeepers’ names, too. He’s comfortable with little people.”
Rose was the rare star for whom the common touch came naturally. He was also a unifying force on every one of his teams, in part because he had been shunned by veteran White players when he was young and bumptious, while Black and Latin players befriended him. Rose never forgot that bond.
In the same tangled composition of Rose feelings that so many fans feel, there is also sadness to think of all the furious humiliation he suffered for the last 35 years. From the moment he accepted his ban in 1989 until a confess-all book in 2004 — written for a buck — Rose continued his big lie: “I never bet on baseball.”
Despite those 15 long years, with Rose’s fans bashing and beseeching baseball to reinstate him — based in large part on his “I’m innocent” scam — Pete thought confessing in the end would fix it all and he would be back in the game and in Cooperstown.
As recently as last month, he was still signing autographs (for $79) that said, “I’m sorry I gambled on baseball.” But he still thought he got a raw deal.
Finally, in the same irreconcilable ball of emotion, I’m mad — at Rose himself — for the damage he did to baseball, and to people in it, to appease his vanity.
During the Rose scandal, commissioner Bart Giamatti told me he had been rereading the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, a French aphoristic philosopher. “Read the one on self-love,” he suggested. “Maybe I see a way to handle Rose.”
The passage: “Self-love even goes over to the side of those who are at war with it. … It cares for nothing but its own existence, and, provided that it does exist, will readily become its own enemy.”
As long as Rose did not have to concede he bet on baseball, then his self-love continued to exist — undamaged in his own mind and, he believed, essentially undamaged in the minds of fans. He might accept any punishment to keep it that way. Giamatti got Rose to agree to his own lifetime banishment in a statement that did not say he had bet on baseball.
Then, at the news conference, after Rose spoke, Giamatti said that he believed the evidence was sufficient to conclude Rose had bet on baseball. The commissioner’s opinion might as well be baseball’s opinion. In a blink, MLB had its much-needed and justified Rose ban. And Giamatti had provided, from the game itself, the ban’s true cause.
A week after that 1989 news conference, Giamatti died of a heart attack. Maybe it was too many cigars or family genetics. But months of stress from the Rose affair didn’t do Giamatti any good. To his last day, Rose never used the words “sorry” and “Giamatti” in the same sentence.
As long as Giamatti’s revered memory has weight in the game, Rose won’t be in the Hall. That’s the reality.
Like every baseball writer, I’ve been asked many times whether I think Rose should be in the Hall. I often say Pete Rose would be welcome at my home, but that doesn’t mean he should be welcome in Cooperstown.
I’ve felt so conflicted on the subject that I once spent a day standing in the Hall of Fame where a hypothetical Rose plaque might be, asking fans what they thought and why. That was long ago. But I heard a lot of “Great player, but he doesn’t belong here.”
One aspect of Pete and the Hall has changed in recent years. The more baseball crawls into bed with legalized sports gambling and the more that players get tainted with the issue, the clearer the rationale for letting the Rose ban remain permanent as a warning.
MLB’s position — gambling in, Pete still out — seems hypocritical. Nothing says America like baseball, hypocrisy and apple pie. But there’s an overriding rubric here. Baseball has many rules. But only one of them is The Rule. It’s above the entrance to every clubhouse. If you bet on the game, you’re gone.
When faith in the integrity of the game is broken, the business model of the sport is demolished. When your gambling habit might — just might — influence how you play, or in the case of a manager like Rose, might influence the decisions you make, you’ve put a gun to the game’s head.
After that — and the 15 years of denial — “I love baseball” and even “I’m sorry” don’t work.
Now, Rose will never show up in Cooperstown at an autograph session again during Hall of Fame ceremonies, like an aged ghost, to drum up support.
Rose could never let go of his disgrace. Somehow, he thought a plaque would be a form of absolution. Sadly, that obsession prevented many baseball fans from remembering the best of Pete — the 24 seasons as a player when the game gave him his perfect stage.
Arthur Conan Doyle once had his character Sherlock Holmes quote Flaubert: “The man is nothing. The work is everything.” If Pete Rose is lucky, perhaps the future will choose to view him through that prism."
