It isn’t easy mustering sympathy for Pete Rose. He was a compulsive gambler who bet on the team he managed, the Cincinnati Reds, then lied about it for years (he was also a compulsive liar). He had a sexual relationship with a teenage girl, and barely acknowledged the child he had with another woman out of wedlock. He was a self-pitying sore loser who abandoned friends once they were no longer useful to him, including the worshipful errand-runners who enabled his gambling habit. This is the Rose who emerges in Keith O’Brien’s new book, “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball.” A mixture of disillusioned fan’s notes (the author grew up in Cincinnati, rooting for Rose during his prime playing days with the Reds in the 1960s and ’70s), investigative reportage and baseball history, the book paints a picture of an unchecked man-child with no desire to curb his appetites.
But that would make for a pretty boring story in itself, and O’Brien, who has previously written about the Love Canal environmental disaster (in “Paradise Falls”) and pioneering female aviators (in “Fly Girls”), is not a boring writer or thinker. Without overtly trumpeting his themes, O’Brien has crafted a sort of American tragedy about an undersized athlete raised to win at all costs, coddled by his blue-collar community, an overly accommodating press corps and fans won over by his all-out style of play. Rose was known for running to first base when he drew a walk and diving into the other bases headfirst (except in the 1970 All-Star Game, when he scored the winning run by plowing into catcher Ray Fosse, delivering a devastating shoulder injury in the process). Rose’s father was a Cincinnati semipro football legend who preached constant effort, and the son often seemed to be playing on the gridiron, not the diamond.
He could not admit defeat; this proved to be his fatal flaw when he stubbornly refused to acknowledge that he had bet on baseball. The league banned him for his sins in 1989; his dishonesty and lack of repentance made the decision a lot easier. By the time he confessed, the damage to his career and legacy was more than done.
Working with newly released F.B.I. files, “previously unutilized federal court documents” and more than 150 hours of interviews (including 27 hours with Rose, who cooperated with the author until he decided he didn’t want to), O’Brien tells a tale that runs on parallel tracks. One is Rose’s baseball career: his skill with a bat, which led him to break Ty Cobb’s career hit record in 1985; his pivotal role in Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, which won the World Series in 1975 and 1976; and the nonstop way he played, which earned him the nickname Charlie Hustle. The moniker was conceived in derision, by the Yankee greats Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, amused by Rose’s rah-rah play during a 1963 spring training game. Rose would come to wear it with pride.
The other Rose story involves bookies, gamblers, low-level gangsters, hangers-on, cocaine and steroid addicts, and what Rose’s Hall of Fame teammate Johnny Bench referred to as “bad guys” in an off-the-record 1975 conversation with the broadcaster Curt Gowdy. For much of the book such characters pop in and out of the action, seeding the path as Rose closes in on the hit record and baseball immortality. Then the bad guys take over the action. Rose’s unpaid debts pile up, and he refuses to pay some of them. A pair of Rose devotees, Tommy Gioiosa and Paul Janszen (both of whom spoke extensively with O’Brien), run his errands — placing his bets, helping him juggle women and eventually encountering their own reckoning with law enforcement. Janszen grows tired of Rose’s neglect and cooperates with an investigation that makes clear that Rose bet on the Reds. As the two tracks converge, O’Brien deftly builds suspense and narrative friction.
There are heroes here as well. One is Bart Giamatti, the Renaissance literature scholar and university president at Yale who became commissioner of Major League Baseball and gave Rose every opportunity to come clean, but came down hard when it was time to exile him from the game. (Giamatti, the father of the Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti, died of a heart attack just eight days after Rose’s banishment.) A baseball romantic who usually had a literary allusion at the ready, the Giamatti of these pages also possesses an iron will and, unlike Rose, a zest for the truth. “I will be told that I am an idealist,” Giamatti said upon issuing his ruling. “I hope so.”
By book’s end the hit king has become an autograph machine, scrawling his name on anything to keep the cash flowing in. For a little extra money he’ll add an inscription: “I’m sorry I bet on baseball.” O’Brien writes: “He signs the same inscription night after night and day after day, at show after show and in town after town. He signs it and he signs it until he cannot sign it anymore.” One thinks of Robert De Niro’s gone-to-seed Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull,” rehearsing patter for his nightclub act, far from his boxing glory.
The phrase “the Last Glory Days of Baseball” in the subtitle feels more like marketing spin than actual content of the book; the author is too cleareyed to engage in easy nostalgia. But that doesn’t mean he is dispassionate. As O’Brien writes: “I have felt just about every emotion about Pete Rose: pride, disgust, frustration, pity and confusion. Only one thing hasn’t changed over the years: my fascination with his story.” This fascination, not the emotion, guides “Charlie Hustle.” O’Brien gives us a Willy Loman with spikes, chugging toward a cliff and blinded to his fate.
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