THE PETE ROSE DECISION : END OF THE ROAD : Faithful Are Hurt, Angry in Bar on Pete Rose Way

The three women worked an entire morning at giant Procter & Gamble with Pete Rose’s voice blaring from seemingly every office.

“People had it on big TVs, little TVs,” Donna Balsley said.

“On the radio, turned up full blast,” Donna Kidd said.

“It was echoing through the hallways,” Tracy Chalfant said. “Like it was stereo or something.”

But then, in Rose’s Thursday response to his lifetime suspension from baseball, he kept repeating himself.

“I did not bet on baseball.”

According to the women, with every similar comment, office by office, the TV sets and radios were turned down. And then clicked off. Slowly, with some embarrassment, people went back to work.

Later the three administrative assistants, like much of Cincinnati, gathered to mourn the fact that Cincinnati had finally grown tired of its hero.

“The more everybody in our offices heard Pete talk, the more we finally said, ‘OK, something is wrong here,’ ” said Balsley. “With every denial, it got stranger and stranger. A little more of him chipped away.

“We still love him. But c’mon.”

They nursed their beers inside Flanagan’s Landing tavern, a riverside bar serving bratwurst, beer, and old sitcoms on the corner television. Outside a picture window, running for several blocks east to west, is Pete Rose Way.

While talking about Rose, the women tried not to look out. A couple of men at a nearby table didn’t care. One even pointed.

“Heck, not very many of my friends call it Pete Rose Way anyway,” said Mark Helling, 31. “It’s still Second Street. Like, ‘Hey, let’s check out the bars on Second Street.’

“To do anything on Pete Rose Way, it sounds funny.”

Many in this usually carefree river town tried to shrug off the burden of betrayal Thursday. Many reacted to the news of the Cincinnati Reds’ manager’s banishment with relief, then hurt. There was little anger. They wasted that emotion long ago.

“The majority of people here had already come to grips with what might happen to Pete,” said Dan Hurley, 43, local historian. “When it finally started to hurt the team, everybody wondered why, if he was innocent, he just wouldn’t step down until it was resolved. He was clearly putting his own interests ahead of the team’s.

“So when it finally happened, most of us were just glad to get it over with.”

After the announcement of Rose’s suspension, the Reds’ first chore was to find a new manager. They did it by 4:30 p.m., less than eight hours after the announcement of a suspension settlement between baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti and Rose. After an emotional, if erroneous, speech by Red owner Marge Schott, they announced the interim appointment of Rose’s longtime dugout coach and friend, Tommy Helms.

“This isn’t the happiest day I’ve known,” Schott told a crowded news conference, her voice shaking. “‘As you know, I’m the one who really got Pete Rose to come back to Cincinnati in the first place.”

Rose, however, had already been the Reds’ manager for several months when Schott became the majority owner in the winter of 1984.

Schott continued:

“For five years, it was the Pete and Marge Show. And we really had some fun.

“But what counts is the integrity of baseball. While this outcome is a sad one, it was something the commissioner had to do to protect this sport.”

After a couple of more sentences, Schott turned toward a thin, unsmiling man along the wall. Her voice became cheery.

“I guess you noticed this guy who came in with me--he is going to take over,” she said, turning to him. “Everybody welcome Tommy Helms . . . and will you win the next 10? OK?”

Helms did not find it amusing.

“This is a very, very sad day for me,” he said. “As much as I’ve wanted a big league managing job, this is no way to get it.”

Said General Manager Murray Cook:

“Anything can happen in this game . . . but I think it would be safe to say (Helms) would probably be around until the end of the year. But we are making a list of candidates right now. Tommy is certainly going to be on that list, but there will be others.”

Cook said he wanted his manager to have control and stability. He acknowledged that Rose’s off-the-field problems might have hurt the Reds on the field.

“Baseball is so much a game of routine and habit, and when you miss that, when things get in the way, it hurts,” Cook said. “We were winning the first two months, but the problems were there. And pretty soon it all caught up with us.”

Said Helms, who spoke with Rose early Thursday: “I’ll be my own manager. . . . I won’t get advice from Pete. But what has happened probably won’t even sink in until I get to the ballpark and get the uniform on. Then it will hit me.”

The rest of Cincinnati was more prepared for the news. City Councilman John Mirlisena, chairman of the Public Works Committee that decides street names, was ready with an answer about changing the name of Pete Rose Way.

“There has been conversation about that, but I will not recommend that, and I will not accept recommendations for that,” he said from his city hall office.

“Between the white lines, Pete Rose deserves that sign. He might have a gambling problem, he might need help like all kinds of addicts.

“But I still believe in him. It’s not like he was a drug pusher or anything.”

Said Hurley: “There has been an effort to distinguish Pete’s playing career from his personal life. But deep down, I don’t think most of us can do it. Most of us still wonder, how can he look people in the eye and keep denying this thing?

“I think Cincinnati is seeing that Pete has a sickness. Like (Thursday’s) demonstration at his press conference. What a sickening indication of how blind he is. What a desperate grabbing for straws.”

Back at Flanagan’s Landing, Jim Unkrich was shaking has head.

“He’s up there talking like he will be reinstated--who is going to reinstate him?” said Unkrich, 30, an auto technician. “What’s he done, rehabilitate himself? I think we all get a little mad because he acts like it will all go away in a year.

“We’ve had to live with it on TV since February, every night. And we know it won’t go away.”

So at least some of Cincinnati has decided it’s time to move on to something else.

“To be honest, you know what the big thing around here now is?” asked Balsley, one of the Procter & Gamble workers.

She pulled out a cigarette lighter.

Smoking is big?

“No, look at the insignia.”

It was the helmet design of the Cincinnati Bengals. One of the roads intersecting Pete Rose Way is Bengal Way.

“We’re on to other things now,” Balsley said. “We can’t wait for the football season. It can’t be as long as this baseball season. We’ll be glad to worry about Pete Rose again. But later.”