There are not very many sports figures in which the public image perfectly matches who the person really is. Most of that is because most public figures — and especially athletes — protect that image as if it’s a newborn. Often press types are told by these people that they really don’t care what anyone thinks about them, but the opposite is the actual reality.
Pete Rose, however, is not one of those guys. Aside from hiding the truth about his gambling on baseball, what you see is what you get from Pete. He’s one of those guys where reading between the lines is totally unnecessary because he’ll tell you exactly what he means. Forget sports figures… that’s rare trait in any person in any walk of life.
Pedro Martinez, John Chaney, Allen Iverson and Charles Barkley are a few of the folks who passed through the city who just didn’t give a damn about what anyone thought about them. If you asked any of them a question, you got a real answer. In fact, once I asked John Chaney something (I forget what it was, but it might have been about Aaron McKie, Eddie Jones, Johnny Miller or Mik Kilgore) and not only did he tell me it was a stupid question, but he told me why it was a stupid question.
Who takes the time to do that? That John Chaney is a real sweetheart when it comes to things like that. No, that was not the sarcasm font.
Anyway, in December of 2008 I spent an afternoon chatting and hanging out with Pete Rose in Las Vegas as he signed autographs and posed for photos with some slack-jawed yokels. Needless to say, it was a blast and that was before Pete broke out the prison stories from when he did time for tax evasion.
A few times I had to pinch myself because the ex-con telling me the stories about his time in the slam was Pete Rose.
“When I was in there it was the only Level 6 [federal prison] in the entire system in the U.S.,” Rose said about his jail term. “I had to work in the main prison. I had to go every day and the people in Marion were in the cage 23 out of 24 hours a day. We were the only camp who didn’t have cable TV, because then every [bleeper] in there would have had to have it in every cell.
“I worked in the welding department. My job was to have the [bleeping] hot chocolate made by 8:15 a.m. every day. That was my [bleeping] job. And every time the warden was coming back [to the welding department] they had me back as far back as I could go because I was a high-profile guy. They’d also say, ‘The old man is on the way back,’ and every time he came back I was in my little kitchen sweeping the floor. He said, ‘Pete, you know something, this is the cleanest damn floor in this entire prison. Because every time I come back there you’re sweeping this damn kitchen.’ I said, ‘Hey, I gotta keep it clean!’
“A couple years ago we we’re selling Pete Rose cookies with a company out of St. Louis. The only place you could get these cookies is in prison. They can’t sell them in a supermarket. A couple years ago I went to North Carolina for a convention of all the commissaries and all the wardens came. That warden came and got my autograph.
“I should have signed the broom for him.”
Beat that one.
This is not a deleted scene from that day in Las Vegas:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZapdwATUqY&w=425&h=344]
We all have our favorite stories that regardless of how much information we’ve accumulated on the topic, we hunger for more. For me some of those subjects are Watergate, the invasion of Normandy, Len Bias, punk rock from Washington, D.C. in the 1980s, and Pete Rose. Sure, there a few others but that’s what comes to mind quickly.
Needless to say I will definitely watch the documentary by a bunch of guys from Cincinnati called, “4,192: The Making of the Hit King.” Interestingly, the film is taking the approach of concentrating solely on Rose’s playing career—a cute little tidbit that has gotten lost in that whole “banned for life” stuff. Other than some blind apologists, not many serious looks at Rose have taken this approach.
According to a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer on the documentary produced by Terry Lukemire and Barking Fish Entertainment, Rose participated with the filmmakers though they did not reveal what or if he was compensated.
“We want to give a new generation a chance to know about Rose,” Lukemire said.
How does one do that about a guy that everyone already knows everything? Easy… by concentrating on the part everyone has chosen to forget. Rose played baseball for 24 years in the Majors, and he is going on his 21st year of banishment. Chances are there is a lot we don’t remember.