A Rose by Another Name

There are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the lookout, quacks...bawling in front of their booths and yokels looking up at the tinseled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind. Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.

--William Makepeace Thackeray

Pete Rose has never heard of Thackeray, and his approach to literature, if not actively hostile, is at least belligerently ignorant. "I only read two books in my whole life," he once said, "and one was The Official Pete Rose Scrapbook. I wrote that." (He is also credited as author or co-author of Pete Rose on Hitting, Countdown to Cobb, Dear Pete and Charlie Hustle.) As Rose spoke, he stared at me with confidence approaching defiance. Truly a modern American success, he appeared to have written more books than he had read.

He was earning perhaps $1,500,000 a year. He was paying, he said, "more just in Ohio state income tax than the newspaper guys covering me make altogether." He was the owner of five--or was it seven--cars, a diamond-faced watch whose glitter would have roused hormones in a Gabor, four--or was it six--show horses and a baby lion for his youngest son to play with. He had married a beautifully proportioned former Playboy Bunny and had come to be regarded as a star of such magnitude in his home town that the Cincinnati city fathers named a street after him. Pete Rose Way ran its course beside the ball park. Who, Rose seemed to be asking with his defiant look and swaggering life, needs to read a fucking book?

That attitude may be as deplorable as the convicted wolves of Wall Street, and yet, as I found him across half a decade, Rose was by no means a deplorable person. Excessive. Compulsive. Crude. But he had significant redeeming qualities.

Indeed, Rose's fall put me in mind of Bruce Pearson, the doomed catcher in Bang the Drum Slowly, another book Pete Rose has not read. Pearson "was not a bad fellow," Mark Harris wrote, "no worse than most and probably better than some, and not a bad ballplayer neither when they give him a chance."

Professor Harris' specific perception of Rose strikes me as particularly lucid. Whatever Rose's excesses, Harris believes, he has done nothing to offend the game of baseball, as it flourishes on the sand lots. He is the exemplar of hard, intelligent play. What Rose has offended is corporate baseball, Major League Baseball, Inc. Harris loves the game of baseball. Like a few other sensitive, informed observers, he finds corporate baseball no more attractive than Union Carbide.

•

I came upon Rose, or he came upon me, near the very climax of his life. He had broken Ty Cobb's record for hits in the major leagues, an accomplishment of a driven quarter century. He struck his 4192nd hit, a floating single to left field--a "humpbacked line drive"--off a pitcher named Eric Show, said to be the pre-eminent member of the John Birch Society working in the major leagues. Beyond first base, Rose had a vision, as at Fatima. He looked up at the sky above the ball-park lights and saw his late father, Harry Francis Rose, and Cobb, both seated and looking down on him from what Rose took to be heaven. Understandably, this caused Rose to weep. His oldest son, Pete Rose, Jr., then a bat boy, somewhat reluctantly embraced him. Then the triumphant father cried and shuddered in the arms of his handsome willowy offspring. The nation was moved.

Everything, save souls, if souls exist, lately is perceived to possess market value. (Each first family since Franklin Roosevelt has profited from some sort of Presidential memoir.) Soon my phone was ringing with an offer from the marketing division of Peter Edward Rose Enterprises. Would I write a book, the official, authorized, collaborative Romance of the Rose? Oh, there had been others, to (continued on page 228)Rose(continued from page 174) be sure. But wouldn't I write the real one?

And, of course, I said I would not. The ghostwritten book is not a genre I admire. Out of surely thousands, I really care for only two ghosted baseball books: Pitching in a Pinch, by Christy Mathewson (with John Wheeler) and Veeck as in Wreck (with Ed Linn).

Abruptly, an agent, my agent, was cooing, "Don't be so quick to walk away from a million dollars." A few days later, after half a dozen phone calls, the agent had an actual offer of the million, half to Rose and half to me, or not quite half. The agent would extract 15 percent of my half million, a commission of $75,000, for six phone calls.

I said I wasn't sure about the project. It seemed synthetic, even bizarre. A book was something to be taken seriously. Who the hell was ungrammatical Pete Rose to write a book with me?

Couldn't I just agree to compose something entertaining? the agent said. That's all that was being asked for the million bucks. Later, I'd have the money to retire and write poetry, if that was what I wanted to do. "Faulkner," said this agent, who claimed to know such things, "worked in Hollywood to finance serious writing. I'd say if Faulkner did that, you can do something similar."

My misstep, the first of several, was not to cut off the siren song forthwith. For a long time, I have financed my "serious" writing by selling my serious writing. I wrote my nine books as well as I could and four appeared on best-seller lists.

"Ah," said the agent, a former high school pitcher, "but aren't you curious about what makes the great Pete Rose tick?" And, to be sure, I was. How could anyone get more major-league hits than Cobb, Musial, DiMaggio, Ruth, Willie, Mickey or the Duke? Besides, now that I thought about it, a million bucks for a book had an appeal. Among a roomful of agents, lawyers and publishers, I signed the contract numbly. Then I walked out to a press conference to celebrate "America's first million-dollar sports book."

I said a few ordinary sentences about how I looked forward to studying what made the great Pete Rose tick, or anyway hit. Rose smiled warmly and said that he looked forward to working with me "on a book. That would be like working on a painting with Andy Warhol."

When the questioning began, a reporter shouted, "How are you guys splitting the advance?"

I was disappointed, which was naïve. This was not a press conference called to celebrate baseball writing. Mostly, it was about money.

•

Rose grew up in Anderson Ferry, on the west side of Cincinnati, among steep slopes rising from the Ohio River. His father, a bank clerk, was renowned as a Sunday semipro football player, still running with the ball on hard-scrabble fields at the age of 44. Harry Rose lived long enough to see his first-born son make the Cincinnati Reds, an accomplishment that made him cry with joy. But Harry barely survived the decade.

Pete was sitting in a barber's chair one day in December 1970 when the telephone rang. The barber answered it, turned solemn and said, "Pete. Your father died."

"My father?" Rose said. "You must mean my mother."

This story, a dreamboat for the psychological folk, came directly from Rose. Little else as revealing ever did. Rose had worked radio and television talk shows and press conferences for so long that he had developed patterned answers to questions and patterned thought processes as well. As I found him first, he was quick, rather than deep, a swift-running brook, always ababble.

Tell me about your father, Pete.

"Greatest guy I ever knew." Was he affectionate?

"He wasn't a hugger, if that's what you mean. But I knew he cared for me. Nobody never had a better father than me. Hey, Jewish people hug a lot. Why are Jewish people hugging all the time?"

Hold it, Pete. Tom Lasorda, who hugs all the time, is no more Jewish than the Polish Pope.

Pete's answers were quick and diversionary. From what I had hoped would be a discussion about the nature of affection in his family, I was sidetracked and in an interesting way. Is hugging ethnic?

That set a pattern. I had no more luck on other occasions and when I said to Rose that a book, a real book, the kind of book we wanted to do--didn't we?--was going to have to reach for depths beyond television chatter, Rose said, "Yeah, I know. That's your job."

When we met, he was resolutely set in his ways. And why shouldn't he be? His career was like no other. Here is Rose on Rose before the fall.

"Look, I'm the guy with all the hits [4256], and when I was chasing Ty Cobb [who totaled 4191], I had to do a coupla press conferences every day and every writer will tell you I handled them great. I give 'em jokes. I was available. I helped 'em all. So what am I gonna tell you sitting here? That I got a little lucky? That's how come I hit in forty-four straight games [during the season of 1978] and went five for five, ten times--that's the National League record? I played in more games, more winning games, than any major-league player that ever lived and I made the all-star team sixteen times and at five different positions. It ain't luck."

Rose ran out bases on balls and a couple of laid-back Yankee professionals came up with the nickname, Charlie Hustle. It was a wonder of a quarter century to watch hustlin' Pete Rose leap into his headfirst slide. To me, a greater wonder, and a more subtle one, was how well he knew how to play ball.

He said over and over that baseball was a simple game and that all he did in the major leagues was live by rules his semipro father preached long ago in the big green house on Braddock Avenue. "On defense, you're always moving toward the ball. And on offense, after you swing, you're moving away from the ball. That's not complicated, am I right?"

But, of course, baseball is a complicated game and an example of Rose's genius as a gamesman remains with me. One night in Cincinnati, Barry Larkin led off against the Giants with a twisting grounder along the foul line. Hurrying, first baseman Joel Youngblood misplayed the ball. Buddy Bell lifted a high pop fly that Youngblood lost in the lights. Men on first and second.

Suddenly, Larkin faked a steal of third. That is, he ran off as the pitcher threw and then ducked back. It was stratagem of more exuberance than good sense. Buddy Bell, fooled by the fake, broke for second base just before Larkin retreated. Bell had to stop far off first. Second base was occupied. Bell stood still, shriveling in embarrassment as the Giants catcher ran from behind home plate all the way to the base path and tagged him out.

"If it was me," Pronounced Rose, the great gamesman, "I wouldn't have stood still, like Buddy did. I wouldn't run back to first and the catcher would have had to throw to Youngblood. Joel messed up two plays. Now I want to make him handle the ball again. My dad woulda known that. You can bet me."

I'm not so sure.

•

The ball field, before those madding thousands, was a place of escape, eventually the only place of escape for Rose. Working between the lines, performing the exquisitely difficult tasks of major-league baseball, came to be relatively easy for him, and clear and pure. It was the rest of things--living--that Rose found so difficult.

He was not happy at schoolwork and resisted serious education. His father wanted him to be a ballplayer and he wanted to be a ballplayer and he completed only the schoolwork necessary to maintain eligibility. Although the father made a reasonable living at The Fifth Third Bank, Rose cast himself as a poor rough kid. He talked tough, he was tough, and he picked up the harsh vocabulary of the ball field. Needling, some racial, some sexual, presides in professional baseball. Rose developed a bristling exterior, a studied inelegance.

When he played with Art Shamsky at Macon, Georgia, the two became fast friends. Still, Rose's nickname for Shamsky was Jewman. "Hey, Jewman. You wanna go to a movie?"

This is offensive, of course, but is it indicative of bigotry or the mores of pro ball? One of Joe DiMaggio's closest friends on the Yankees, Joe Page, sometimes greeted the star, "Hiya, Dago."

When Rose was promoted to the Reds in 1963, some older players found him grating. He replaced a well-liked veteran and, according to Rose, the only established Cincinnati players who would associate with him were Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson. Indeed, Pinson let the rookie share his hotel room one night when Rose's roommate, embarked on a sexual adventure, bolted and chained the door. The cocky rookie could damn well sleep in the hall.

Bleating, Rose knocked on Pinson's door. The veteran took him in and in the morning suggested a room-service breakfast. Rose, 22, had not heard of room service. "It was somethin', that first time, havin' a great breakfast in the room. Vada taught me how to do it. I still remember my tab. Twelve seventy-five."

Both Robinson and Pinson are black. Rose says that someone in the Reds' front office soon told him to "stop hanging out with those colored guys. It's bad for your image." Commenting, Rose said, in a nice moment, "There's so much hate in the world as it is. How can anyone be so stupid as to hate a man because of the color of his skin?" That was Baseball Rose, the indefatigable, clear-eyed professional, beyond reproach.

But Rose's focus was often, in the manner of other superstars, wholly on himself. Away from the field, discipline, limits, even good sense vanished. He smuggled money into the country. He ran about with underworld characters. He was a neglectful father. Probably, he suffered from satyriasis.

George "Sparky" Anderson, who managed Rose at Cincinnati, once said that he never had to wonder where Rose was late at night. "Our Peter always finds a nice warm place to put his peter."

The private lives of heroes and heroines fuel an industry of gossip that ranges from supermarket tabloids to pretentious full-length books. Elvis. Sinatra. Marilyn. J.F.K. Lennon. Olivier. Jackie. The best of gossip stuff is naked in its prurience. The worst is moralistic.

•

A clubhouse attendant told Rose in 1978 that the hostess at a river-front disco called Sleep Out Louie's had "the best ass in Cincinnati." On April 11, 1984, the hostess, Carol Woliung, became the second Mrs. Rose.

Before Rose's second marriage, a quiet affair at the home of his principal attorney, Reuven J. Katz, the first Mrs. Rose, Karolyn Rose, hired a divorce lawyer who tried to squeeze him. She asked for half of Rose's total worth--$3,000,000 at the time. But she and her lawyer included Rose's pension rights in their calculations. The pension was still 20 years away. Thus, Karolyn Rose was asking for $1,500,000 in cash when Rose actually possessed no more than a third of that in capital. Rough stuff is the nature of contested divorce.

It rings as a sad irony that close to his 50th birthday, Rose was reconsidering some priorities. A well-written magazine article charged that he was distant from his daughter Fawn and that the son, Pete Rose, Jr., had to go through the lawyer, Reuven Katz, for a home number. ("Yeah," Rose said. "I'm unlisted and I gotta keep changing it.")

Rose told the press that he had given Fawn a Mercedes to celebrate her graduation from a college in Kentucky, and how was that for distant? He had done more than that. He chartered a plane and flew into Kentucky from St. Louis so that he could attend the graduation. He didn't tell this to the press because "they don't care about that kind of stuff." Softness, signs of caring embarrassed him.

He spent February 1989 living with young Pete in Florida, helping the boy with batting and perhaps with life. "This is the best our relationship has been," Petey said.

A suggestion arose screamingly loud, and generally ignored by sports reporters, that at long last, Pete Rose was growing up.

Then, before Rose could begin to savor maturity, his world caught fire.

•

Marketing taints professional baseball. Give nothing away except (up to now) drinking water at the ball park. Sell everything for what the traffic tolerates. Load the soda cups with ice, boys; ice is cheaper than Coke. The most popular whipping boy here is the ballplayer who sells autographs at a baseball-card show. But jumping card shows (and ballplayers) is a cheap shot. A genuine imitation Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap--a replicap, really--sells for $15, complete with a label, from Major League Baseball, Inc., certifying that the cap is authentic. A genuine authentic imitation.

Pete Rose seems always to have wanted to make the most money possible. But he was no Marner caring to add more gold to the cottage in Raveloe. Rose liked to make money, but he loved to spend it. While still a minor-league player in Macon, Rose put his life savings into a racy mint-green Corvette. (This left barely enough to pay his first speeding ticket.)

Rose was alien to contemplation. If he had ever heard the name Johannes Brahms, he kept it secret, at least from me. Living on the surface of things, he was drawn to glitter and vulgarity. Ted Williams said, "I want to be the best hitter in the world."

Rose said, "I wanna be the world's first hundred-thousand-dollar singles hitter." One came across as an artiste. The other, though clearly a champion, smelled faintly of gruyere.

Even before the debacle, before the baseball investigation and the grand-jury indictment, two expensive lawyers "handled" Rose. They pushed his baseball salary ever higher. Three people from a marketing company helped him become a spokesman for candy bars, hair tonic, chili, baseball bats, a bank. Slowly, Pete Rose, not a bad feller, melded into Peter Edward Rose Enterprises, a characteristically greedy small company. The blend produced a third entity: Pete the Peddler.

As the company sold endorsements, Pete the Peddler sold shirts and uniforms and bats and balls. On the night he broke Cobb's record, he changed his uniform shirt three times. That way, he would have three shirts to sell, each worn on the record-breaking night.

None of his advisors deplored such excess. Unlike Rose, they had read more books than they had written. They knew about the goose and the golden egg.

•

Katz dominated. He was a decent country-club athlete, a graduate of Harvard Law School and, he protested, a passionate Cincinnati ball fan. He and Rose played tennis, praised and ragged each other and, from time to time, got on each other's nerves. Katz was the senior partner of a prosperous Cincinnati law firm (Katz, Teller, Brant & Hild). When introduced as Rose's lawyer, he often added, "And surrogate father."

As I came to know Rose and the lawyer, Katz cast himself as pepper pot, irritant sage. "Should you be writing this book now?" he said. "Or in five years? Who knows where Pete will be?"

"Oh?"

"When this book is done, I want you to be famous as the author of the greatest baseball biography that ever was."

"Oh?"

Rose resisted my efforts to make him think or feel in ways he had not felt before. Whenever I probed, he cringed. He didn't know why I wasn't happy with the stuff he was feedin' newspaper fellers. I was supposed to be a good writer, wasn't that right? Wasn't that why we got big bucks? Well, if I really was a good writer, why couldn't I take the same stuff and write it better than all those newspaper guys? "That's your job."

Would he introduce me to his mother?

"Introduce yourself. She knows about you."

How about touring the old neighborhood together?

"You know where it is. You find it."

I insisted on a talk, out of his presence, with Carol Woliung, once "the greatest ass in Cincinnati," now the second Mrs. Rose. We met of an afternoon and soon Carol was saying that she knew Pete was unfaithful and that she knew I knew. Why had I not told her? This hurt her very much.

Carol spoke of loneliness and ambivalent sexual feelings toward Pete. Not knowing what to say, I had enough sense to say nothing, merely sigh. She kept pressing for a response, fixing her lovely large eyes on me so that I could see her pain.

After a while, I said, "If you're as unhappy as you say, you can walk."

"Pete would kill me."

"Walk to a marriage counselor, Carol. That's what I meant. Maybe that's what the two of you ought to do."

Carol began to cry and hugged her baby son. Tears ran out of the lovely eyes. Whimpering, she said to the little boy, "Tyler, Tyler. I don't know what I'd do without you."

I had to leave, I said, and Carol lent me the family's number-five car, a red Chevrolet Blazer. I drove to Riverfront Stadium, playing with the radar detector and hoping that I had not made a difficult marriage worse.

"What Carol tell ya?" Pete said, in the most challenging tone he ever threw into my face.

"We had a talk."

"What she tell ya?"

"Good talk. She lent me your Blazer. I gave the keys to the clubhouse boy."

Rose dialed his home. Glaring at me, he said to Carol, "Why the fuck did you lend him the car?"

•

Rose was hardly secretive. He went to lengths in 1987 to introduce me to a dark-haired Cuban refugee, a tall, attractive woman, successful in advertising, whom Pete dated when he could get away. He spoke also of how he enjoyed gambling. That same spring, he sent someone from his clubhouse office in Tampa to place bets on a college-basketball tournament. He explained what he was doing and why he liked the particular teams he did. Maybe I'd like to bet along with him.

Control, not secrecy, was at issue. Rose wanted to control my access, control what I knew about his life. That way, he felt, he could control the contents of the book without subjecting himself to reading all those pages. (To this day, I don't know if he suffers from a clinical reading disorder or is merely handicapped by his short attention span.)

But I intended to control the book myself. To me, this wasn't Pete Rose's fifth or 15th book, it was my tenth.

Katz wanted so ardently to control my book that he slipped in a clause, somewhere in the sheafs of contracts, providing himself with a right to review the manuscript. Rose wouldn't read it, Katz claimed, and it was his duty as attorney to protect his client.

Only after a counterproductive war of attrition did he let control revert to where it belonged in the first place: to the writer doing the work and to the publisher paying the freight.

•

My question was one of voice. Whose voice should tell the story? That becomes a literary issue and this was not a literary place.

The first publisher said that the Rose book was so important he would edit it himself. The man had a business degree. He had never edited a book; but now he would. That was how important my Rose book was to him and his company.

When I suggested that I was having a problem with voice, the publisher looked uncomfortable. "You see," I said, "Pete is intelligent, but in a gamesman's way. He is gin-rummy intelligent. His vocabulary is limited and his grammar is shaky and I'm trying to resolve...." The publisher left me for a convention of booksellers, where he posed beaming in front of a large mock-up of the jacket for the book I had barely begun.

I continued to agonize about voice, trying various chords, until the publisher wearied of nuance and fired me. The next publisher, William Rosen at Macmillan, asked if I thought Rose's memory in baseball was comparable to Nabokov's in literature. I felt more relieved than I had any right to feel.

•

The voice, the dominant voice, would be mine. Rose could appear talking, a recollection here, a vignette there, an insight into a ball game or a ballplayer somewhere else--but with no more literacy than he truly possessed. I was casting the book as an extended dialog and I was happy about that. Rose and I were producing an honest collaboration. I was three chapters shy of the finale when major-league baseball hired a gumshoe to investigate my partner.

•

Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, the commissioner of baseball who presided over the Rose gambling investigation, is remembered for eloquence and for romantic passion. In 1977, in the Yale Magazine and Journal, Giamatti wrote of baseball:

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

He was fascinated not only by baseball but by power. "The notion that absolute power corrupts absolutely [is] a sentimental axiom of a time grown blurred," Giamatti wrote in 1984, while employed as president of Yale. "[Power] can no more corrupt than light or wind can corrupt.... Power itself can never spoil or be spoiled." That essay is less renowned than the earlier one, but it's just as relevant to Rose. There is a ring of absolutism in these Giamatti sentences. The thoughts might please a czar.

Giamatti moved from Yale with dreams of leading professional baseball into a golden age. What he admired, he adored. Elizabeth I, that queen of power, was a special favorite. Giamatti wrote of Elizabeth's "gorgeous, glittering self." He seemed to see baseball as a glittering panoply, the best and brightest, purest, truest institution in all America.

"With some of these guys," says wise old Dave Anderson, the Pulitzer Prizewinning sports columnist at The New York Times, "I want to remind them, Hey, it's a business, not a religion."

Giamatti focused on the spiritual and hired business helpers, including his successor, the lawyer and present commissioner, Fay Vincent, for bookkeeping and other earthly chores. "Above all," Giamatti wrote of his adored Elizabeth, "she learned that power lies in seeming."

What, then, would be the power of A. Bartlett Giamatti, essayist, polymath, commissioner of baseball? It would be absolute. As absolute as he could make his power seem to be.

The Rose mess leaked into the commissioner's office, under a side door, sewage from a ruptured pipe. The Rose mess smelled to heaven and threatened Giamatti's golden age. Suddenly, two extraordinary formidables were arrayed against each other. Neither can be said to have survived.

As Rose became the most durable major-league batter of all time, he moved away from normal social patterns. Driven by the hawkers around him and by needs rooted somewhere in a battering childhood, he pressed his income higher, ever higher. Indeed, he earned enough to please a banker.

His success on the playing field matched the grandest dreams of boyhood, that boyhood with the bank-clerk father demanding, ever demanding. Run faster. Throw harder. Swing quicker. A father who drafted little Pete to be his water boy but never hugged him. Grown up, Pete Rose always had so much to prove to his father in the coffin.

Following his divorce in 1980, Rose moved away from old friends. The cut and thrust of challenging conversation came to annoy him.

"Whatever happened, Pete, between you and Karolyn?"

"Hunnert percent my fault."

"Are you friendly now?"

"I talk to her. She hassles me. I don't want to be hassled, so I don't talk to her."

Nor did he like talking to anyone who hassled him. Soon his hours away from the ball field were peopled by characters like Katz--employees or advisors--and sycophants. An unappealing demimonde coalesced. A headwaiter from the dining room at a Florida dog track, a gambling man. A serious bettor who ran a pizza house, where Rose memorabilia was for sale. A vacuous weight lifter who trafficked in steroids and cocaine. It is easy to postulate, as did one psychologist in The Sporting News, that Rose had a neurotic need to risk. Beyond that, he seemed to love flirting with the edges of the underworld. (So did Bill Veeck and John F. Kennedy.)

In February 1989, Rose was called from the Reds' new training camp in Plant City, Florida, to meet with Peter Ueberroth, the departing commissioner, and Giamatti, already named as successor. This was an administrative hearing, not a trial, the sort that any boss might call to check out a questionable employee. Rose took along a lawyer, a decision not lost on Giamatti.

Ueberroth ran the hearing. He asked questions about gambling and Rose said, finally, "I lost two thousand dollars on the last Super Bowl. I figured it wrong."

Ueberroth said he didn't care about that. Had Rose bet on major-league baseball?

"No, sir. I got too much respect for the game."

The hearing adjourned. Ueberroth told a reporter from The New York Times, "There's nothing ominous. There won't be any follow-through." A few weeks later, Gentleman's Quarterly published an article portraying Rose as a parent who essentially neglected his children.

Amid this gamy climate, Giamatti learned late in March that Sports Illustrated was investigating serious charges. Ronald Peters, a bookmaker out of Franklin, Ohio, who was facing a jail sentence for dealing cocaine, offered to sell the magazine a story in which he would charge that Rose had bet on ball games and that he had booked the bets. The story was offered through Peters' lawyer.

The magazine declined to buy the story, but its editors didn't discount the information. Two young reporters, Craig Neff and Jill Lieber, were asked to investigate further. They spoke with people who they thought would help them: Players Rose had traded, the former Mrs. Rose. Rose damned these "vultures" of the press. Word got around.

Ueberroth was history; Giamatti had taken over. His office moved quickly--before Sports Illustrated could break its first damaging Rose story--to demonstrate that the new commissioner was in absolute control of his new-won empire.

He hired tall, beefy-faced John Dowd to run baseball's own sweeping examination of Rose. Dowd, a "power lawyer" out of Washington, D.C., had built a reputation in Government service as a prosecutor of thugs and racketeers. This was no sweetheart session; this was real.

"The careful cultivator of power," Giamatti had written, ostensibly about Elizabeth, "always stores more than enough, keeps much in reserve, never wastes, uses the power of others so as to conserve one's own." Giamatti used Dowd (and paid him lavishly. Some say Dowd's final fee was $500,000).

Now all the forces rode toward combat. Rose and his votaries. Dowd and his investigators. Against Giamatti, that firstclass medieval mind, what chance did modern functionaries have?

Rose cooperated with Dowd. He turned over years of telephone and banking records. His lawyers argued that this cooperation demonstrated innocence, but that is not persuasive. Under the bylaws of Major League Baseball, Inc., a manager must cooperate with any investigation ordered by the commissioner or face expulsion.

Dowd brought in 16 assistants and kept interrogating, until he had filled seven large black-bound volumes. Although his assignment was to investigate Rose's gambling, he gathered crumbs about his philandering as well. He worked in the style well practiced by Federal prosecutors. Cajole. Threaten. Deal. He interrogated people without Rose's being present and without allowing his attorneys to be present, either. Obviously, this denied Rose the right to confront accusers and the chance to subject them to cross-examination.

Dowd (and, more important, Giamatti) did not regard either right as significant. This was not, per se, a criminal proceeding. He was merely preparing an "administrative" report.

Dowd wheeled and dealed with felons, as criminal prosecutors say they have to do. Ronald Peters faced sentencing and prison. Talk to me, Dowd told Peters, and we'll talk to the judge. He can make the sentence lighter. At Dowd's urging, Giamatti wrote to a judge in praise of Peters. (Elizabeth might have been less hasty.) Thus motivated by the commissioner of baseball, Peters warbled.

Yes, Rose bet baseball, Peters said. Proof? Well, he'd taped Rose making baseball bets. The, uh, tape was in a shoe box that, uh, his ex-wife had. In an affidavit, Mrs. Peters said no tape existed. "It's the product of my ex-husband's fantasy."

Dowd asked another felon, who had been Rose's intimate, to state his case while looped into a polygraph machine. Thus wired, Paul Janszen also said that Rose bet baseball. But the expert who analyzed the readings, William Robertson, reported to Dowd that Janszen was lying. Neither that fact nor the absence of Peters' tape was noted by Dowd.

Dowd did obtain "gambling slips," records supposedly kept by Rose. They indicated baseball betting. But the experts Dowd hired and those engaged by Rose disagree about the authenticity of these papers.

Finally, curious telephone logs exist, much telephoning from Rose's office or hotel suites--when the team traveled--just before ball games began. Calls to make bets, Dowd insisted. But none traced to Rose's home. The phone calls, Rose's lawyers postulate, were made by Janszen, as part of a scheme to blackmail a fortune away from the star.

A quick professional reaction to Dowd's work was provided by Samuel Dash, formerly chief counsel to the Senate committee that investigated Watergate. "If John Dowd turned in a report like that to me," Dash said, "I'd fire him." Giamatti and his successor, Fay Vincent, elected not to hear Dash.

Pete Rose may have bet on baseball. His lawyers are slick and his denial skill is most ornate. But it is impossible to prove a negative, that Rose did not bet on baseball. Dowd's case against him would not persuade me to convict, were I the jury.

•

With the Dowd report in hand, Giamatti scheduled a hearing. Here, Rose and his attorneys could at last present their defense.

Would Rose's accusers be present? Katz asked. He wanted to prepare crossexamination.

Giamatti said no. He lacked the power to subpoena them. However, Big John Dowd would be there. Dowd would answer relevant questions.

Katz asked for a hearing with someone else, not Giamatti, presiding.

Giamatti said that would not be practicable. He had a responsibility to preserve and protect the authority of the commissioner of baseball.

Katz challenged Giamatti's authority and impartiality in an Ohio court and obtained a stay. Lawyers for Major League Baseball, Inc., argued that the matter belonged in Federal court. Whenever the Cincinnati Reds played ball at home, they pleaded, manager Rose in Ohio and commissioner Giamatti in New York were transacting interstate business.

A Federal judge in Columbus agreed to hear the case, and the battle was done. No Federal judge has been willing to limit the power of a commissioner in the 70 years since organized baseball assumed the outline of its present structure. Giamatti had won.

In New York a few days later, he read an announcement for network television. Rose was banned for life. He could apply for reinstatement in one year. Giamatti looked wan. He had been smoking too much. A reporter asked if he personally thought Rose had bet on baseball games. Giamatti said, yes, in his personal opinion, Rose had bet on ball games.

One of Rose's lawyers said Giamatti's statement violated the spirit of the agreement--which made no finding on baseball betting--and broke a tradition of English common law. A king, a royal presence such as a baseball commissioner, may not have any personal opinions. A king may only reign.

A week later, Giamatti died on the magic island of Martha's Vineyard and his innermost secrets were silenced.

•

The publisher insisted on a book in the stalls before Thanksgiving. But Katz and Rose appeared to have lost interest. The press pounded Rose and ridiculed his case.

Against this backdrop, I argued that it was more important than it had ever been for Rose to be forthright. A span of five months had passed from the onset of Sports Illustrated's, investigation in March to Giamatti's banishing him. During that time, Rose continued to manage the Reds, which left him exposed to daily scrutiny. He and his people held discussions on media strategy. They decided that Rose would be as available as he had been in his triumphant days, but he would answer only "baseball questions." Gambling, the furor that attracted the reporters, was off limits. Talking gambling could only lead Rose toward the sewers, where he had already spent too much time.

The press flocked about him. Day after day, reporters asked, Did he bet baseball? Again and again, Rose's answer was the same. "No comment."

The effect was devastating. Had Pete Rose broken the primal ordinance of Major League Baseball, Inc.? Had Pete Rose bet on Major-league ball games?

"No comment."

Another client of the Katz law firm, Johnny Bench, spoke for millions when he burst out, "If Pete hasn't bet on baseball, why the hell doesn't he come right out and say it?"

William Rosen, the publisher of Macmillan books, asked if I thought Rose had bet on baseball. I wanted to believe he had not. Did I have enough to write a chapter toward that point? I did not. Rose was being evasive, I reported. Katz, once the soul of cooperation, clearly was ducking me.

Rosen flared. Unless Rose and Katz made themselves available to me, as they had agreed to do before the trouble, Macmillan would cancel their contract and sue for the return of the money, plus damages. It was only after I recounted Rosen's threat to Katz that the lawyer made available his defense team. Rose then held still for a three-hour session, during which a young editor named Rick Wolff and I threw every question at him we could imagine. Rose's answers:

Let me give you more stuff that is just plain wrong.

There are stories that I sold one of my World Series rings to pay off gambling debts.

There is a story that I gave a World Series ring to a bookie to settle a gambling debt.

There is a story that I had to get a second mortgage on my house here to pay gambling debts.

Every one of those stories is simply wrong. I helped a guy who I liked, Joe Cambra, to have a copy made of one of my series rings. Cambra is a gambler. I gave him permission to order a ring which he paid for himself: three thousand, one hundred and fifty dollars. Isn't that a little different than paying off a bookie with a ring?

A writer in spring training said, "We understand you've taken out a second mortgage on your house to pay gambling debts."

I called Reuven Katz and I said, "Do I have a second mortgage on my house?" Reuven said I did. When I won't be seeing him for a long period of time, Reuven has me sign a lot of stuff. Reuven said, "Remember those papers you signed last time? I told you one of them was for a second mortgage."

I didn't remember. "Where's the money?" I said.

Reuven Katz said, "The money is in escrow--it's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Pete. I wanted it there in case all of a sudden you wanted to pay cash for some fancy new car. Right now, we're thinking about taking the money out and giving it back, because you're not going to buy any car."

We explained this as clearly as we could. And what happens? There are more stories that I took out a second mortgage to pay a bookie.

I've made my mistakes and I've accepted a pretty good hit for them. I've lost a job I loved that paid me half a million dollars a year.

Ballplayers are all the time making mistakes, and heavy ones with things like drugs.

To be honest with you, I don't think all in all that I've damaged baseball.

That's my own personal opinion.

What has damaged baseball, I believe, is the media's one-sided coverage.

The media say I should have been more careful. I say the media should be more careful.

Apart from baseball, a grand jury was looking into the charge that Rose had evaded his Federal income tax for several years. Rose said he was told by his team of attorneys not to discuss the grand jury and directed me to the criminal lawyer, Roger Makley of Dayton, who seemed to be running this aspect of the defense.

"Nobody is ever absolutely certain of anything with the IRS," Makley said in his office in Dayton. "They are trying to see if Pete concealed huge gambling winnings. The truth is, Pete lost his ass gambling. They are putting the screws to Pete. They are trying to get out of him anything he knows about gambling in Cincinnati. A fishing expedition with news leaks."

When Katz noticed this passage while reviewing the manuscript with Wolff, Rosen and myself, he begged me to excise it. Would I please not publish anything that might trigger a criminal indictment of Pete Rose?

I said that maybe we shouldn't be publishing the book right now, with the grand jury still out. Rosen said that question had been settled. Macmillan was publishing the book right now. Katz said to me, very quietly, "You're worried about a book. I'm worried about somebody's survival."

Was this simply a lawyer writing melodrama? (Katz played in student Shakespeare years ago.) Or, if I followed him correctly, was Katz making a soft-voiced plea for the life of the man he called his surrogate son? I responded emotionally and directed that the passage on Internal Revenue be deleted.

Wolff shook his head in frustration.

Six months later, Rose pleaded guilty to tax evasion without my help.

•

I called the work Head First. That was how Rose slid into base, and that was also the way Rose lived. Macmillan changed the title. Instead of Head First, a book written by me with oral supplements from Rose, we now had something called My Story, by Pete Rose and Roger Kahn. Neither was that a representation of the book nor was it grammatical. (How can two people write a singular autobiographical tale?)

Someone--I never found out who--provided misleading jacket copy. "That day has finally come. To demolish the case against him." More poor grammar. Nor could the baseball case against Rose be demolished. It consisted of three charges: bad associations, incessant gambling, betting on baseball. Rose pleaded guilty to the first two counts.

I made no pretense at demolishing anything. I merely interposed reasonable doubt on charge number three.

Rosen defended the title, the misleading by-line and the jacket copy as--in his phrase--"normal publishing hype." He had orders for 230,000 books, he said.

I proposed a press conference to help the book and more or less reopen the case of major-league baseball vs. Pete Rose. Let one tough lawyer summarize the case for the defense. Bring in the esteemed Samuel Dash to pick apart John Dowd. Present the expert witnesses who believed the betting sheets were forgeries. Let Rose deny, as he still was, that he had bet on baseball. Let him express remorse for his heedless ways.

Rose's people ignored the suggestion. Instead, Katz, a newly hired publicity woman and Rose submitted to Macmillan a list of sportswriters with whom Rose would speak. The man was banned from baseball, but he and his advisors still wanted to call the shots.

Rose quickly became an object of nationwide ridicule. A cartoon in The Sporting News depicted him trying to sell an autographed ball from a yard in Federal prison. The ball was iron and fastened to his leg.

In another context, the critic Richard Schickel wrote of a fictional character: "He finally recognized that awful congruity between what he has been and what the modern world has become." Without great effort, you can list negative attributes Rose shared with the era of his glory: greed, acquisitiveness, superficiality, flippancy. Was ever a ballplayer more a man of his time?

The boiling Rose mess scalded everyone it touched. But there are no villains stirring the pot. Some charge that the press protected Rose for years, then overreacted the other way. When it turned on Rose, excess and distortion did carry many days. But that is the nature of the press, living with deadlines. It is history, not daily or weekly journalism, that gives us balance.

The editors of Sports Illustrated, who decided to investigate a felon's tip, really had no choice. With a story that Rose bet on baseball up for sale, somebody was going to do something with it. Although errors appeared in the magazine's coverage, in sum, the people at Sports Illustrated acted responsibly.

Katz's role is more complicated. In the view of another attorney connected with the case, he let himself get too close to Rose. I don't subscribe to one reporter's view that Katz cynically put up with Rose because the publicity attracted business for the law firm. They genuinely cared for each other, Reuven and Pete.

The case--the two cases, really--turned out in combination to be beyond the depth of both lawyer and client. The two were, of course, Baseball vs. Rose and Internal Revenue vs. Rose. Rose and Katz lost both.

Was Katz protecting himself, his own role in a lawyer-client situation, as well as protecting Rose? Of course Katz was protecting himself. But that isn't villainy.

The publishers, Rosen and Wolff, wanted most to sell books. Neither is a literary fellow. They decided that a highly hyped presentation would work, poetry be damned. Had Rose promoted the book--had he not been cowed by the tax grand jury--Macmillan might have made $5,000,000 on the project. Rosen and Wolff would have gotten raises.

As for myself, I felt drawn, if not quite quartered. Katz and Rose were ducking. The publisher demanded the book. Just as Giamatti stayed deaf to Samuel Dash, the publisher stayed deaf to my insistence that the time was wrong, the grand jury was still out. Vital sections were deleted without my consent. Inserts appeared, ill-written and poorly punctuated. When I refused to give the name of the daughter Rose apparently fathered out of wedlock, Rosen complained with a note on the proofs that read, in its entirety, "What kind of shit is this?" That may say more about contemporary book publishing than about the Rose affair.

As for Rose, as I knew him, he was hyperactive, self-absorbed, brilliantly disciplined on the field, wildly undisciplined beyond. During the last summer that we were close, 1989, his harsh edges were beginning to soften. He is not a violent man, in no way hateful, and I suppose he will spend the rest of his days wondering what went wrong. No more a dashing warrior, he has become the poor old rouged tumbler, sad, even pathetic, at Vanity Fair.

"Performing the difficult tasks of baseball came easy for him. It was living that Rose found so difficult."