TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/090489/09048900.056

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.6 KB | 110 lines

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Charlie Hustle's Final Play


An unrepentant Pete Rose is banned from his beloved game

By Margaret Carlson


    When the dust settles on the deal struck between baseball
and Pete Rose, it will still be nearly impossible to explain his
banishment to the kids who love the game. Rose's bargain was the
work of lawyers; its contorted logic was utterly devoid of the
simplicity and finality that make the game so refreshing. It was
a fine-print compromise that at once allowed Baseball
Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti to announce that Rose was
banned from baseball for life for betting on his own team --
and Rose, an hour later in Cincinnati, to say Hey, it ain't so.
Worse, although the 14 others expelled from baseball over the
years never again set foot on a major league diamond, Rose
insisted he would be back, perhaps as early as next year. A
blue-collar guy from western Cincinnati who played baseball
with the enthusiasm of a seven-year-old on the field -- and
exhibited the same level of maturity off -- Rose may actually
believe it.

    Exiting with his chin stuck out was probably the only way
Rose could go. He was blessed by the gods not so much with
talent as with the insatiable drive to win. A competitor
stubborn enough to play long beyond his prime -- and until he
could break Ty Cobb's batting record -- a rookie who ran to
first base when he was given a walk, a bruiser who plowed so
hard into an opposing catcher during an All-Star game that he
separated the man's shoulder, Rose was too vain and too
arrogant to beg for mercy from a former Ivy League classics
scholar like Giamatti.

    Revelations that Rose would gamble on any game, in any
sport, at any time -- and seven volumes of evidence, including a
stack of betting slips in his handwriting -- did not seem to
shame him. Little ever has. Not a 1979 paternity suit that he
did not contest, the messy unraveling of his marriage in 1978
(which did not interfere with his 44-game hitting streak), or
striking an umpire in the chest, for which he received a 30-day
suspension in 1988. Criticism in the press about the friends in
thick gold chains and diamond pinky rings who placed wagers for a
living did not faze him. Even now, Rose gives little outward
sign that what happened has engendered self-doubt. The night
before Giamatti's announcement, he was hawking autographed
baseballs on Cable Value Network at $39.94 a throw and selling
uniforms with his old No. 14 on them, the same number he used
with his bookie.

    Star athletes whose crassness is tolerated when they are
winning -- Rose once made a scene in the Stage Deli in Manhattan
because there was no sandwich named after him (there is now) --
are often stunned when the indulgence ends. When a reporter at
the press conference asked Rose why he was accepting the most
severe punishment possible if he had not bet on baseball, Rose
was speechless. He turned to his lawyer, Reuven Katz, shiny with
sweat beside him, who could only natter on about the fine print
of clause F. Katz had fought for several days for language that
would allow Rose to stand before the microphones and speak about
his banishment as if it were a slump he would soon pull out of.

    Rose will almost surely never earn a living in baseball
again, but he is likely to continue to make a living off
baseball by merchandising his relics. In 1985, the year he
broke Cobb's record, he arranged to collect royalties on
T-shirts, beer mugs, pennants and plastic figurines of himself.
On the lucrative baseball-card show circuit, where one show
promoter has clocked him signing his short name 600 times an
hour, Rose earns as much as $20,000 an appearance. He was broke
or unsentimental enough to sell the bat from his record 4,192nd
hit. One prominent dealer says the memorabilia market is
flooded with Rose keepsakes of dubious authenticity; several
collectors, he says, claim to own the hat, spikes and shirt worn
during his record-breaking hit.

    So far, Rose has resisted the refuge of the Betty Ford
defense, so popular among addicted celebrities, that his
compulsion to gamble made him do it. But he could not resist
dragging his family into his mess. He said he had never looked
forward to a birthday as much as his new daughter's first (Aug.
22, 1990), since it would signal his first opportunity to apply
for reinstatement to baseball, thus sadly and inadvertently
revealing her place in his life relative to the game.

    Whether or not Rose is voted into the Hall of Fame when he
becomes eligible in 1992, he may have achieved the kind of
immortality that goes beyond fading type in the record books.
America may celebrate winning, but what really fascinates the
country is a fall from greatness. Bill Buckner's fielding career
is overshadowed by the memory of an easily hit ball rolling
inexplicably, eternally through his legs in the tenth inning of
the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. Rose in his 24 seasons
set records for hits (4,256), games played (3,562) and
200-plus-hit seasons (10). He was the National League's Most
Valuable Player in 1973, the World Series MVP in 1975. He won
the National League batting title three times.

    But it is Rose's unfathomable squandering of his own
ability, his willingness to surrender his history for the rush
of the bet that will make his memory endure beyond any portrait
hanging in a gallery in Cooperstown. In the end, it wasn't the
courts, or a pointy-headed commissioner out to get him, or his
bookie friends squealing on him, but just himself that took
baseball from him.