Rose’s Admission Is Embarrassing to Many

The voice on the phone was friendly but determined. A baseball writer, and a good one, was talking. “Do you feel betrayed?” he asked as I groped about for alertness

The night before, I had seen the thrilling Broadway production of “Henry IV,” and I thought, “Betrayed? Wait a minute. That’s what Prince Hal does to his drinking buddy, Falstaff, when, after ascending the throne, he says ‘I know thee not, old man. How ill white hairs become the fool and jester.’ ”

But the reporter and I were not talking Shakespeare or British monarchs. We 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 today. Not betrayed. Embarrassed.” (And that, of course, is bad enough.)

The hard news seems to be that after years of denial, Peter Edward Rose has made a confession of sorts to betting on baseball, although he says, he never bet against himself, or any team that he was managing.

This presumably is spelled out in a book, “My Prison Without Bars,” which is being published this week. But to follow Shakespeare’s approach in “Henry IV,” perhaps it would be best for me to begin at the beginning.

Some time midway through the 1980s, Rose approached my agent through his company, Peter Edward Rose Enterprises Inc., and said he wanted me to write his story. I was not a virgin in the field of collaborative books, having composed something with Mickey Rooney in the early 1960s, which sank like a stone in a millpond.

Why does a reasonably idealistic writer get into collaborations with difficult people? Curiosity, I suppose, and bread. If you know a writer who does not need a healthy cash advance next Thursday, then you know one more writer than I.

At the time, I didn’t care much for Rose. He was talented, but his talent was not in the same league as that of Willie Mays or Joe DiMaggio. 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. As opposed to, say, his teammate, Johnny Bench, he was oppressively vulgar.

But the cash was good, although not nearly as good as the first publisher, one Larry Kirshbaum of Warner Books, announced at a news conference. That was the first significant lie, that Rose and I were splitting a million dollars. We were producing for Warner the first million-dollar sports book! The ultimate contract specified $750,000, split two ways, which, subtracting the agent’s commission and travel expenses, would leave me with about $300,000 for two or three years’ work. Beats the poverty line but, come on, people. Nobody retires on numbers like that.

When I began work, 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?”

“You know where it is. Find it for yourself.”

“I want to talk to people close to you, your mother and your wife.”

“Why the ... do you want to do that?”

“I need some help here on details.”

“You’re supposed to be a good ... writer. Do your job.”

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, Fla., bookie.

“You sure you don’t wanna bet my picks?” he said.

Cards, lotteries, casual gambling are common in clubhouses, but I had never before 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.”

That was a second significant lie, although here he was mostly lying to himself.

An investigation into Rose’s alleged gambling began under Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. Essentially, Rose was exonerated on the issue of sports betting.

When Bart Giamatti succeeded Ueberroth, he turned to his friend and lawyer, Fay Vincent, to reopen the Rose issue. From that point on, nobody -- Giamatti, Vincent, Rose (or, for that matter, myself) -- consistently covered himself with glory.

Giamatti was a scholar, a medievalist, and a spirited companion. His sort of athlete was quarterback Frank Ryan who, while leading the Cleveland Browns to an NFL championship, earned a doctorate in the abstract field of topology. Ryan and Giamatti taught together at Yale, and I knew of no finer evening mix than Frank and Bart and martinis.

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 remember saying once in an emotional discussion, “Bart, they can’t all be Ryan and Pee Wee Reese and Christy Mathewson.”

He made no answer other than to offer a pained expression.

I had better say at this point that Rose, offensive as Rose 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.

Meeting my wife, he asked, “You smoke?”

“I stopped,” Kate said.

“Marrying this guy will start you again. Guaranteed!”

The jock world with jock needling is a place that I enjoy. A good deal of my time with Rose was rough-and-tumble fun.

But Giamatti, a stout man who had not played sports or bumped around in the exuberant vulgarity of sandlot baseball, had a hard time with rough and tumble. Further, he was no champion of civil rights. As president of Yale, he had problems contending with unions and with the women’s movement.

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, a mere scribe, was working with Rose, sleeping with the enemy.

The investigation proceeded brutally. Giamatti assessed major league club owners so that Dowd would have unlimited funds. Dowd engaged private detectives, and he and his troops interviewed numbers of felons, with whom Rose had associated himself. 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.

Rose was accumulating lawyers in a way I associate with a misstep I once made on a Caribbean isle. Burrs, everywhere burrs. It hurt to walk. 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 public hearing. “Star Chamber.” I heard that phrase a bit.

The deal with Warner Books had soured and I was now contracted to Macmillan, once a splendid publisher but, it would develop, on the way to bankruptcy. 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 dint bet baseball. I got too much respect for the game.”

An editor named Rick Wolff and I flew to Cincinnati for a session without any limits, and we grilled Pete for something like four hours.

“I dint bet baseball. I got too much respect for the game.”

Suddenly I got reports that Internal Revenue was investigating Rose. His people told me to take my questions to Dayton and a criminal lawyer named Roger Makley.

“Absolutely false,” Makley said. “IRS is investigating bookmakers around Cincinnati and they know, and you do too, that Pete is friends with every bookie in town.” (In a few months, as you may remember, Rose was serving hard time for tax evasion.)

I wrote what I knew and what Makley had said and this prompted a lawyer named Reuven Katz (“I’m not just Pete’s lawyer, I’m his surrogate dad”) to fly to New York. “This investigation has been terrible for Pete,” Katz said. “Please take the references to IRS out of the book.”

I said I thought not.

“Understand,” Katz said, “that Pete is in terrible emotional shape. Ask yourself if you want to contribute to his suicide.”

I killed the IRS material.

I felt at length that, as Dowd sang his prosecutorial brief, I was aboard to compose a brief for the defense. And so I did.

Some press response was wretched. I shake off bad reviews, but one Ira Berkow wrote in the New York Times said that I was such a bad reporter I had failed to interrogate Rose on the tape recordings of his calls to bookies. No tapes exist. Pete ain’t Nixon.

When I wrote Max Frankel, the editor of the Times, to protest, he sent an apology. But he then let Berkow write the retraction, which was as nasty as the charge. I have since stopped asking newspapermen or women (also doctors and lawyers) to say sorry.

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, and I don’t even want him managing my grandson’s Little League team. I am no plump idealist, like Giamatti, but I still like my sporting leaders admirable. Orel Hershiser comes to mind.

I am not going to read the new Pete Rose book. I am too busy working on my backhand. But I’ll be first in line at Barnes & Noble for something else. The new confessional O.J. Simpson memoir.

Roger Kahn, author of “The Boys of Summer” and other baseball books, also wrote, with Pete Rose, Rose’s 1989 autobiography, “Pete Rose: My Story.”

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Pete Rose timeline

KEY DATES IN ROSE’S CAREER

1941 -- Peter Edward Rose born April 14 in Cincinnati.

1960 -- Signs with the Cincinnati Reds on July 8 as an amateur free agent.

1963 -- Makes major league debut on April 9. Named rookie of the year after playing in 157 games, batting .273 and scoring 101 runs.

1965 -- Hits .312, the first of 15 seasons in which he would hit .300 or better. Named to the first of 17 All-Star teams.

1970 -- At Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, the National League records its eighth consecutive All-Star game victory, 5-4. Rose crashes into Cleveland catcher Ray Fosse to score the controversial winning run on Jim Hickman’s single. Fosse, who never had the ball, hurts his right shoulder and is taken to the hospital.

1973 -- Named National League most valuable player; bats .338 and scores 115 runs.

1978 -- On July 31, singles off Phil Niekro to extend his consecutive games hitting streak to 44 games, right, tying Willie Keeler’s 81-year-old National League record, achieved when foul balls didn’t count as strikes.

1978 -- The Braves trounce the Reds, 16-4, on Aug. 1 and stop Rose’s record hitting streak at 44 games. Rose’s streak is the second-longest in history. He goes 70 for 182 during the streak, an average of .385.

1978 -- Signs as a free agent with the Philadelphia Phillies on Dec. 5.

1980 -- Helps lead the Phillies to their only World Series championship, playing in 162 games and batting .282.

1981 -- On Aug. 10, breaks Stan Musial’s National League hits record of 3,630.

1984 -- Signs as a free agent with the Montreal Expos on Jan. 20. On Aug. 15, he’s traded to the Reds, who make him player-manager.

1985 -- Surpasses Ty Cobb on Sept. 11, left, as all-time major league hits leader. He finishes his career with 4,256 hits.

1986 -- On Aug. 17, makes his last appearance as a major league player, striking out as a pinch-hitter against Goose Gossage. Continues to manage the Reds.

KEY DATES IN ROSE’S ALLEGED BETTING ACTIVITIES

Feb. 20, 1989 -- Rose, the Cincinnati Reds’ manager, is summoned to the commissioner’s office to answer questions about his gambling habits.

1989 -- Reports link Rose to gambling.

March 20, 1989 -- Commissioner’s office announces Rose is under investigation for unnamed “serious allegations.”

March 21, 1989 -- Sports Illustrated reports on allegations tying Rose to baseball betting.

March 30, 1989 -- The Cincinnati Enquirer, quoting former baseball security chief Henry Fitzgibbon, says baseball investigated gambling allegations against Rose in the late 1970s.

May 9, 1989 -- Investigation by baseball lawyer John Dowd concludes that Rose bet on baseball between 1985 and 1987.

Aug. 24, 1989 -- Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti announces that Rose is permanently banned from baseball for gambling. Rose signed a document the previous day saying he was not admitting any guilt and may apply for reinstatement after one year. Giamatti, answering questions, says he has concluded that Rose “bet on baseball.”

Sept. 1, 1989 -- Giamatti dies of a heart attack. His replacement, Fay Vincent, right, says he has no intention of changing Rose’s ban.

April 20, 1990 -- Rose pleads guilty to two counts of filing false income taxes by failing to report income.

Aug. 10, 1990 -- Rose reports to federal prison in Marion, Ill., to serve a five-month sentence.

Jan. 7, 1991 -- Rose is released from prison.

Feb. 4, 1991 -- Hall of Fame board of directors bans Rose from the ballot.

September 1997 -- Rose applies for reinstatement, but Commissioner Bud Selig doesn’t rule on it, saying he hasn’t seen a reason to alter the ban.

July 13, 1999 -- Rose is not invited to a ceremony before the All-Star game honoring 100 players, including himself, on a ballot to pick baseball’s All-Century team.

Oct. 24, 1999 -- At a ceremony honoring baseball’s All-Century team before Game 2 of the World Series in Atlanta, Selig, left, allows Rose to appear in the ballpark. Rose receives the longest ovation of any player. Coming off the field, NBC’s Jim Gray repeatedly asks Rose if he wants to apologize to fans for betting on baseball, but Rose tries to change the subject. Gray’s contentious interview draws criticism from players and fans.

Sept. 22, 2002 -- At the closing ceremony at Cinergy Field, former Red pitcher Tom Browning spray-paints a red No. 14 on the pitcher’s mound as the stadium erupts in chants of “Pete! Pete!”

Sept. 23, 2002 -- Rose organizes his own celebrity softball game to bid farewell to Cinergy Field, where he made so much history. More than 40,000 fans show up.

Oct. 22, 2002 -- During a promotion of baseball’s “most memorable moments” before Game 4 of the World Series, Rose receives a 70-second standing ovation and chants of “Hall of Fame!” from the crowd at Pacific Bell Park.

Nov. 25, 2002 -- According to Rose, he admits to Selig that he bet on baseball.

Jan. 5, 2004 -- In an upcoming autobiography, Rose admits publicly that he bet on baseball while manager of the Reds. He admits placing bets with Ronald Peters through Thomas Gioiosa and Paul Janszen.

December 2005 -- Date by which the commissioner of baseball must reinstate Rose if Rose is to be eligible for the Hall of Fame.

Sources: Philadelphia Inquirer; Associated Press