Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (13 page)

Rose, though, maintained defiantly that he had done nothing wrong, that he had not been targeting Harrelson nor trying to rouse his struggling team for the rest of the series. He had not come in late, he insisted, and he had just bounced up from his slide as usual and, what’s more, he had not appreciated being cursed at. “I’m not a dirty player,” Rose said. “If I were dirty I would have leveled him.”

At the next game, after Harrelson had arrived at Shea Stadium wearing a Superman shirt with the “S” insignia x-ed out, and players on both teams had laughed off the suggestion by M. Donald Grant, a minority owner of the Mets, that Rose and Harrelson shake hands in a public truce at home plate, the bleachers were full of signs:
ROSES DIE, BUDS BLOOM
, along with less poetic messages. Boos and rancor followed Rose each time he came to the plate in the tense Game 4, a game knotted at 1–1 into the 12th inning when Rose stepped in with one out and no one on base. He fouled a few off and let a couple of balls go by and then, on the sixth pitch from the righthander Harry Parker, Rose pulled one into a soaring arc over the rightfield fence. Home run.

He circled the bases pumping his fist high, and now the boos were mixed with moans, a strange elephantine sound coming from the stands at Shea. The Reds won by that 2–1 score. After a regular season in which he hit all of five home runs, Rose now had two in four playoff games, each one keeping the Reds alive. Not that that was enough. “I would have given a week’s salary to go 4 for 4 in the game today,” Rose said, meaning as a way to fire back at the New York crowd.

The battle with Harrelson was to many an almost vaudevillian blip. Rose and Harrelson cracked jokes about it in the off-season. Playing a tennis exhibition against Bobby Riggs in Dayton a few months after the game, Rose was chased around the court by a woman in a raincoat (actually Riggs himself) wielding an umbrella and introduced as “Bud Harrelson’s mama.” Years later in retirement, during one of the card shows they did together, Rose signed a photo of the fight to Harrelson, “Bud, Thanks for making me famous, Pete Rose #4256.”

Neither did the New York baseball writers hold a grudge on their home team’s behalf. In early 1974 the writers brought in Rose for a dinner and bestowed upon him their annual “Good Guy Award,” not in irony but in recognition of how accommodating he could be to them (whatever the score of the game) and handing him as a gift a gold Swiss-made clock with his name engraved on the front. The clock would sit upon Rose’s mantle back home.

The Harrelson rhubarb heightened the perception of Rose yet another level—adored or despised but never ignored. Many opposing fans viewed the brawl as further proof of Rose’s excessiveness. They threw things at him again in 1974: golf balls in San Francisco, vegetables in L.A. The Giants’ fans said they were just having harmless fun (and had missed him on purpose). They loved Rose really, they said. The Dodgers’ fans claimed they were peeved because Rose had flipped them off from the outfield. Pete, all guiltlessness once again, said that no, he was just reminding George Foster in centerfield that there was one out in the inning and that raising his middle finger “is how I always do it.” (Pete loved to flip the bird, casually or with a little emphasis—a half grin, teeth out on his a lower lip: “Screw you and up yours” at once, delivered, invariably, with a liveliness in his eyes.)

For the team from Cincinnati, the fact that people would throw things onto the baseball field like that just didn’t make sense. “It makes me ashamed that I belong to this country,” Sparky had said starchily in the aftermath of the Mets’ fans’ deluge. “[I can’t] imagine a thing like this happening in the United States of America.” The Reds were all clean-shaven and wore their socks the same height. If a player slouched too much in the dugout there was a chance the phone would ring and it would be Bob Howsam, or someone calling on Howsam’s behalf, telling the player to show some respect and sit up straight.

There were those in that summer of 1974 who wondered whether maybe this kind of unrest at baseball stadiums wasn’t so strange after all. How maybe with the way things had been going lately in America, the Vietnam riots still near to mind and the kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst wielding a carbine on behalf of the raging, down-with-capitalism Symbionese Liberation Army, and the way the Presidency itself was falling apart in the grip of Watergate, and the rise too of pornographic films into the mainstream, maybe all this explained why there was something like a loss of civility and why baseball fans in San Francisco or Los Angeles thought it was O.K. (partly in jest, partly in genuine distaste) to call out loud enough that not only the player himself but also the children in the stands could hear, “Rose, Rose, fuck Rose.”

Not that any of it changed the way that he played. Riling the opposition was part of the self-imposed assignment. A man had a constitutional right to boo all he wants at a ball game, and Rose would be the first to say that. Anyway, said Bench, “As we see it Pete has never been booed. For a player, you haven’t been booed unless you’ve been booed at home. And that was just not happening to Pete Rose.”

AND SO: 1975, World Series Game 7, Red Sox with that 3–0 lead, sixth inning and one out now, Rose still on first base. Bench up against Bill Lee. Eleven more Reds outs and Boston wins it all.

Just don’t hit a ground ball Johnny
, Rose thought, taking his lead.
Not a ground ball.

Rose knew the possibility was high; Lee induced ground balls for a living and a strong righthanded pull hitter like Bench could be especially vulnerable. Lee’s fastball had a natural sink to it, tailing to the left, and Boston had already turned two double plays in the game.
Not this time though,
Rose thought.
Not now
. “There are some things that you just can’t allow to happen,” Rose would later say, “and a double play at that point was one of them.”

If you were to draw a textbook diagram of a double play, or to set it up on an instructional field to teach young men the basics of how to turn it—make sure that they get down the classic, sure-thing 6-4-3 double play first—it would look like this: A ground ball hit hard but not too hard, arriving on a big, true hop to the shortstop’s glove side, just the way the ground ball that Bench did in fact hit off Lee reached Boston’s Rick Burleson. He fielded the ball at about shoulder height, maybe eight feet from the second base bag. Then Burleson tossed it underhand (“a nice easy flip” as the TV broadcaster described it) to Denny Doyle at second. Doyle was then in his sixth season as a highly dependable infielder known for this very thing—for being a reliable and fluid middle-man on the double play. Doyle caught the ball chest high, put his left foot on the bag and turned to make his throw to first base, knowing there was no need to rush. A good throw to Yastrzemski at first base gets Bench by four strides and the Red Sox go into the dugout with a 3–0 lead and three innings to play. Denny Doyle turns this play 19 times in 20, maybe more.

Only here at this moment came Rose, thicker still than he’d been when he collided with Fosse or Harrelson, charging into second base and already much nearer the bag than Doyle (or anyone) would have expected. Rose went into a hard slide, feetfirst, disrupting Doyle who hopped up to safety just as he let the ball go. The throw sailed high over Yastrzemski’s head and into the Boston dugout. The inning was still alive and Bench went to second base. Then Perez stepped in and hit Lee’s second pitch, a blooperball, half the way to Kathmandu.

The Boston lead was just 3–2 now and the Reds, roused in the following innings by Rose’s exhortations from third base or in the dugout, would win the game 4–3 and with it the World Series. Rose singled in the tying run in the seventh and walked ahead of Morgan’s game-winning hit in the ninth and wound up hitting .370 over the seven games—yet those Reds cognoscenti will never forget that it was a first-to-second base hustle-and-slide on a routine ground ball, a simple effort play that anyone could push to make but few do, which made the difference. Rose was named MVP of the Reds first Series win in 35 years. “This is the happiest moment of my life,” he said amid the locker room spray. His voice was hoarse from all the yelling he’d done on the field.

Rose’s slide into Doyle was cited when Rose was named
Sports Illustrated
’s 1975 Sportsman of the Year, as was the central event of the Reds ’75 season: Rose’s immediate willingness in early May to switch positions from leftfield, where he had been a two-time All-Star and an MVP, to third base in order to get the power-hitting outfielder George Foster into the lineup. Sparky asked Rose to do it and Rose, who had not played the infield for nine years and had hardly played third base ever at all, said, “When do you want me to start?” In the very next game there he was, having paused only to slip on a protective cup: Pete Rose, third baseman. The move seemed so implausible (Bob Howsam, away from the team, thought the out-of-town box score in his morning paper was a mistake) that it did not easily sink in around the league. “What are you doing over here?” the Phillies’ Greg Luzinski asked Rose in surprise when the Reds played in Philadelphia 10 days later.

The way that Rose embraced the switch—coming out early each day to practice at his new position, not complaining, not letting the move affect him at the plate—was a fine example, baseball men agreed, of how a good teammate should be. The Reds were at .500 when Rose made the move; after that they won 96 games and lost only 42, with Foster knocking in 78 runs in 134 games. The next spring Rose received the Roberto Clemente Award given annually to the player who, in part, best exemplifies the spirit of sportsmanship.

Rose was still at third base in 1976 when Cincinnati reached the World Series again—this time against the Yankees. The Yanks offense started at the top with their most consistent hitter and fastest runner, Mickey Rivers. Anderson reminded Rose before the Series of the obvious, that he needed to play in close when Rivers came up, discourage the bunt, but Rose was way ahead of him. In the first Yankee at bat of Game 1, Rose stood so near to Rivers, a lefthanded batter who might have slashed a hard line drive down the third base line, that some Reds in the dugout couldn’t bear to watch for fear that Rose might get maimed on the spot. (“He could have shaken Rivers’s hand out there!” said Sparky.) Rose looked daggers in at Rivers and called out to him as he stepped into the box and Rivers did not like what Rose was doing. He did not bunt in that first at bat and he did not hit. He struck out. Normally a serene and easygoing player,
¹
Rivers did not appear at all at ease against the Reds. He went 0 for 4 in the first game and over the course of the Reds’ four-game sweep—Pete bearing in on him all the while—Rivers hit .167. “You can thank Rose for that,” said Sparky.

IN THE off-season, Rose gave rousing speeches to groups across Ohio, bringing in $2,000 a pop. He was the very model of a modern Cincinnatian—beaming, bustling, bareknuckled—and his work ethic resonated far from the diamond. That’s why he was so coveted as a speaker. “Whatever business you were in you could point to Pete and tell your people, ‘That is the way to do it. That is the kind of effort to give,’ ” says Bob Crotty, who was a vice president at the very successful uniform rental company Van Dyne Crotty. “Pete translated to any kind of business.” The Cincinnati mayors—Sterne, Luken, Springer—all at one time or another said similar things about Pete and the model he served and how inspiring he could be.

Rose prospered and knew what he liked. Through the mid 1970s he and Karolyn drove fancy cars: a new and limited ink-black version of a 1934 Model A Ford with the license plate 14-PR; a Porsche; a Maserati; a Lincoln Mark IV; a Rolls-Royce with the license plate
PETE
. You better believe Karolyn drove that Rolls over to Kmart or McDonald’s or to pick up the kids from school. You put a West Side girl in a car like that and she wants to be seen. Karolyn got herself a sports talk show on Cincinnati radio for a while and being on air did little to curb the mouth or the flair. When Muhammad Ali called in as a guest she referred to him as Cassius Clay. (He sighed and scolded—he knew Pete and Karolyn a little bit—but did not hang up.) Another day she said the local hockey team’s game would start at “puck-off time.” She spoke bluntly and crudely and though there was far more style than substance in what she did, Karolyn described her radio persona like this: “Howard Cosell. Woman.”

Pete was all over the airwaves, too. He did ads with a perky blonde for a hair spray, Vitalis Dry Control, which made sense: a national hairdressers’ association had named Rose’s Prince Valiant ’do one of the 10 best heads of hair in America. He appeared in ads for Jockey underwear and Swanson pizza and in another series of spots Pete held up a blue bottle of cheap aftershave and reminded people, in song sometimes, that there was something about an Aqua Velva man. Rose was recruited by the commissioner’s office to do a public service spot for baseball. “Hi, I’m Pete Rose,” he began, and over a clip of him rounding third and diving into home he talked about his love for baseball and the game’s appeal as a family attraction and then the camera cut to images of Karolyn, Fawn and little Petey cheering in the stands.

Petey was a conspicuous part of the ballpark scene then, and had been as soon as he could walk. “Me and Daddy won MVP,” Petey, then four years old, said parading around in his Reds jersey after Rose got the award in 1973. The kid was given to razzing batting practice pitchers for their lack of control and Rose, in his clubhouse locker, kept in a peach basket Petey’s miniature spikes and tiny shower shoes.

Fawn tended more toward another of her dad’s passions—horses (she didn’t bet them, she rode them), and she wished her father could watch her ride more often. “Why can’t my dad have a summer vacation like other dads do?” she asked Sparky Anderson. “Because I need him,” the manager replied. Sometimes the kids went to Pete Rose’s Restaurant over on Westbourne Drive. The place was always busy. You could get a nice stack of pancakes for a decent price and the waitresses wore jerseys with the number 14 on the back.