Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (9 page)

There were the things over there that Dave did and the things that he saw and smelled and heard and the way that he felt inside through all those hot uncertain terrible nights, Vietnam becoming for Dave one long dark dream now many years behind him but never fully gone away. If he learned to accept it all, accept the duties and assignments and if he learned to forgive both fate and himself, he never truly accepted nor forgave the time that he lost, coming home to see little Shane for the first time days after the boy’s first birthday. He could not get that time back, those many months, as it turned out, right near the end of his father’s life. “It’s losing out is what it is,” says Dave, in his mid-60s now. “My dad was going to set me the right way. He was going to be the manly influence I needed.”

It was mid-autumn when Dave got back to Cincinnati, so there would be no continuing his baseball career until the following spring. He had some money saved from his service time, and although Pete and Harry warned him against it, chided him to no end, Dave went out and bought himself a motorcycle. Just something to tool around on, he figured. He loved motors, loved things that
went
, he and Staaby (his great pal Greg Staab) always had. For Dave’s 12th birthday Pete had given him a Kurtis Kraft go-kart with a West Bend 580 engine inside. Best present Dave ever got, he says. “And it was Pete who gave it to me!”

Now, he figured, a motorcycle. He deserved it, deserved to treat himself to something after what he had just been through over there. Dave settled on a Honda 175 Scrambler. Popular bike. He wouldn’t take it racing or on a track or anything. He’d just use it to get around town, to get up to Scarlato’s Italian Inn where he had his first kitchen job, doing dishes as well as a little cooking here and there. Pete and Dave had known the Scarlato kids forever—Jerry was about Pete’s age, Greg a year older than Dave—and the family was thrilled when Dave took the job. You could count on him. Maybe Dave wasn’t hell-bent on a ballfield, but he showed up early for every day of work and on the job he always did a little more than what you asked of him.

Then came the night Dave wasn’t supposed to have been working at Scarlato’s Italian Inn at all. He was off that night. Only Greg called and said how he and Jerry had gotten last-minute tickets to see Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders over at the Lookout House in Covington—and that was the kind of white soul-slinging you did not want to miss—and could Dave take his shift? Sure Dave would. He would always do a favor or back you when you got into a fix. Badass as he could be with his fists, and badass he truly was, Dave was unerringly loyal, a decent guy. The thing about Dave Rose, his friends said, is that he would pick you up from the airport if you only asked.

It was late that night after work at Scarlato’s and Dave was away from the restaurant, leaving downtown, his Honda rumbling loud on the quiet, near empty streets. He merged onto the long sweep of River Road. Maybe it was 12:30, quarter to one. Dave felt the wind whoosh cold around him as he gathered some speed. And then suddenly there were the headlights and the car, swung out over the yellow line, headed straight at him it seemed and Dave swerved hard away and into a parked car, his whole right side scraped and walloped and his right kneecap shattered to bits. Blood everywhere. Right there on River Road, a few weeks back from Vietnam, Dave’s life had been reconfigured again.

For a week and half, or maybe closer to two, Dave had to stay in the hospital. Pete did not come to visit him once—that’s how ticked Pete was at Dave. Idiot for having bought the motorcycle in the first place, idiot for whipping home on it at night is what Pete said. “Guess he felt he had to make his point,” says Dave.

After the hospital Dave went into physical therapy just about every day, driving up to the medical center from the house by Sayler Park where he and Cynthia lived. He was just able to drive with that bad right leg. Dave was on his way to therapy one afternoon when he caught sight of the rescue wagon up on Braddock Street. The leaves were off the trees by then so he could see up there clearly from River Road. Dave turned the car right around, pulled a U-turn across the lanes, and got up to the house, frenzied, and when he pushed past the medics he, like them, could not open the front door yet, for his father was lying motionless on the floor. Dave ran, or really he limped fiercely on that battered leg, forgetting the pain, across Braddock over to the Staabs’ stone house, yelling about his fallen father, and this would be another in the sharp series of images in Dave’s suddenly upended life—the snarl of the machine gun and the car out on the dark road and now his father on the ground.

Dave’s leg was not close to fully healed by the time spring training of 1971 came about, his speed not nearly back. But he went down to Reds camp in Tampa anyway. When you are 22 and you’ve been away two seasons in Vietnam, and you haven’t hit much in your brief stops in the minor leagues, then it doesn’t matter whose brother you are, you are running out of time to show yourself as a ballplayer. That’s just how it was.

The Reds cut Dave on Easter Sunday, and although he surely could have gone over to St. Louis’s spring training camp or one of the other teams down there and said he was Dave Rose and still had plenty left in him, and thus gotten a look-see or more, he did not. He might have kept that thing flickering a little longer, given himself a little more baseball and a chance. But Dave was not up for any of that, not up for the challenge nor the effort it would require. He couldn’t have cared less about playing baseball in that moment. He didn’t care about much of anything at all, save for finding himself an easier way to get through his every day.

Through the life that followed he would look back on that time and think about what might have been: through his marriages and divorces, through his five children, through the kitchen jobs and learning to be a damn good cook, through living up north of Cincinnati in Blue Ash and in Florida and then back in Cincinnati again, and through the times when his life went paycheck to paycheck and by Tuesday each week the money spent on cocaine and crack. And didn’t it then just have to be Greg Scarlato, the kid who went to see Wayne Cochran that awful autumn night in 1970, who gave Dave a job at Popeye’s in Cincinnati when Dave really needed it, and Scarlato again who helped put Dave through rehab, those eight months Dave spent away in Rockford, Ill., trying to get himself straight, trying to, as he says, “get my heart in the right place”? Through all of that and through all the chances he had to rise up, to actually manage one of Pete’s restaurants, say, or to make a marriage stick for good, he would through all his unsettled nights look back on this time.
What did he deserve in life? What did he deserve to have?
Dave will say out loud that the past is long behind him, although it is with him every day, with him in the gnawing sense of what might have been had those years of Vietnam and the year after it gone differently.

The loyalty remains—in the stands at the ballpark Dave over the years would unleash himself upon hecklers heckling Pete, pound a guy again and again until security took him away—and in that loyalty his dignity. In his early 60s he came to live near Indianapolis, staying for a while with Greg Staab on a flat street in Speedway. They race dirt sprint cars on weekends. Staab and Jim Luebbert have been there for Dave too, old West Siders dragging him back onto the path, trying with some success to keep him away from the bad influences, finding him work. Dave cooks a few days a week at Staab’s restaurant over in Brownsburg, the Pit Stop Barbeque & Grill. He makes a tilapia almondine that has customers coming back for more.

Dave had brought his bat and glove with him to Vietnam, part of the luggage he processed in and out at Fort Dix, and once in a while he and a few of the other soldiers threw around a baseball or played pepper. There was a television set at the base and on the day after the 1970 All-Star Game Dave got summoned over so that he could watch highlights of the game and of the final play at home plate. Just as this was the year that would reorder Dave’s life, in event after event, so too would Pete be changed. He would be changed most deeply by the death of Harry, of course, yet he would also be changed—or rather the understanding of Pete Rose, his aura and reach, would change and grow and sharpen—with a single episode in that All-Star Game. The play attached itself to him then, almost perfectly scripted for the man, a glimpse of Pete Rose that seared him into the minds of many millions of Americans, never to be wiped away.

HE IS looking in off the second base bag, feinting forward and back, checking to make sure that the Angels’ Sandy Alomar, playing second base for the American League All-Stars, doesn’t slide over to try to pick him off. The crowd rocks loud, swirling with energy—Harry Rose, Richard Nixon and 50,000 others lean forward in their seats. Two outs in the inning and Pete Rose is fixing to get a good jump.

He was midway through that year of years, back-to-back batting titles just behind him and his average up over .320 again, piling up base hits as the roaring catalyst for a team 10 games clear into first place. Those 1970 Reds had plenty of hitters: Bench, Perez, Lee May, Bernie Carbo, Bobby Tolan. First thing Sparky Anderson had done when he’d taken over as manager before the season was to name Pete Rose captain—why not make it official, give Rose the credit he deserves, Sparky figured. Pete ran the game on the field anyway. And it was Rose who, the same day Sparky had gotten the job, had called and asked, “What can I do to help? What can I do to help us win?” Anderson gave Rose the assignment of bringing out the lineup card to the umpires before every game, wanting Charlie Hustle to represent the Reds.

Rose and Bench were in on some things together: part owners of a Lincoln–Mercury dealer up near Dayton and of a 40-lane bowling alley in Fairfield, Ohio. There were endorsements too, so Rose had money coming in even apart from his $105,000 salary, a little extra to spend on his cars and a bigger wad to gamble. Everybody knew about Pete and the ponies of course—his voracious visits to the track, not just in Cincinnati but also when the Reds were on the road, were not something Pete was inclined to hide—and many people around him knew that he’d been betting with bookies for years. It was the trail of bad paper that got baseball interested. The major leagues’ new security director Henry Fitzgibbon said he was getting info on Pete from around Cincinnati, often about bookies being rankled when Rose didn’t pay up fast enough or even at all. (“He thought because he was Pete Rose it was O.K. that he didn’t pay,” former Reds pitcher Jim O’Toole says.) The one thing you do not want if you are a baseball security boss is one of your players owing bookmakers even a cent.

Fitzgibbon met with Rose again and again through the early ’70s. He would warn Pete about hanging around with the wrong type of guys, remind him what had happened to Tigers pitcher Denny McLain when he started messing with real money and got too close to bookmakers, so close that they had a stake in him. McLain had been suspended the first half of the 1970 season and Fitzgibbon had handled the case.

But Fitz never found enough to go on when it came to Rose, and Pete was all friendly and effusive in his denials. “No big deal,” he’d say. “Just going to the track.” And Pete’s gambling certainly never bothered folks from the West Side much—who doesn’t like a little action after all?

Rose had come out with an autobiography by then, had already had enough of a life at age 28 in Ohio that the benign and hero-building book,
The Pete Rose Story,
made sense to a Manhattan publishing house that printed in Cleveland. Rose dedicated his book in part to his father and also to the media and the fans. “What I’d really like to do, other than please you with this book, is hit .300 for ten straight years,” he wrote in Chapter One (the text credits “editors in New York” for assembling Rose’s notes and thoughts into coherency). “If you hit .300 for 10 straight years you get a chance at the Baseball Hall of Fame. I’d sure like that.…Any player out there today who doesn’t want to end up in the Baseball Hall of Fame should turn in his uniform and quit.”

The All-Star Game was on televisions in some 16.7 million households, watched by 56 million fans (better than 25% of the country), and by the 12th inning it had been a hell of a game already. If anyone thought the players didn’t want to win it, that notion disappeared while watching the bottom of the ninth inning when the National Leaguers, down 4–1, could have packed it in—freed themselves to get home early or go out for a bite downtown. Instead there was a sharp intensity in the dugout as that inning began. The NL had its winning streak on the line, “and we were not about to let that go,” says Bench. The Giants’ Dick Dietz hit a home run off Catfish Hunter to start the comeback, and there was no quit after that. Six batters into the inning Roberto Clemente’s sacrifice fly sent home Joe Morgan with the run that tied the game at 4–4. Extra innings. “I remember scoring that run like it was yesterday,” says Morgan, who was an Astro then. “The place was whooping it up.”

“That whole game felt like the World Series,” says Billy Grabarkewitz, a Dodger who came into the game at third base. “We played hard—there was a real rivalry between leagues. That was the biggest game I’d ever played in and a lot of the young guys felt the same way.” Tom Seaver, ace of the reigning champion Mets, had talked to the media before the game about what performing well in an All-Star Game could do for a player, how it could lift his confidence and build his ego.

Not that Rose needed a reminder of any of that. The day before the game, after he and Bench and the other Reds had put on suits and ties and met the press, Pete and Karolyn had played host again, this time to a couple of players from the Cleveland Indians, the veteran pitcher Sam McDowell and the 23-year-old catcher Ray Fosse. They had all gotten to talking at the Monday workout where Rose was bounding around on his new home field. (“Hey Harp, what took ya so long?” he shouted out when he saw Tommy Harper, then with Milwaukee and making his first trip to the All-Star Game.)

That night Rose, McDowell, Fosse and their wives went out for steak downtown and afterward drove back to the Roses’. It must have been around 11 o’clock when they got to the house. Pete welcomed everyone in but then, barely through the front door, announced that he was going up to get to bed on time like he always did. Greenies or not—and certainly, as his teammates recall, Rose was among the many players who sometimes swallowed those clubhouse amphetamines for a boost—he cherished and honored his sleep. It was the key, he felt, to good health and maximum effort. “Got a big ball game tomorrow,” he said to Fosse and McDowell, coming over to shake their hands. “But stay as long as you like and make yourself at home. Karolyn will fix you a drink or anything you want.” And like that Rose went upstairs for the night.