Pete Rose Living a Ward Cleaver Existence
He began the day with an appearance on a TV show at the Westin Hotel, sharing top billing with Bagel Man and Jason Basil, “America’s youngest inventor.”
Bagel Man was dressed in a flaming red cape, blue tights and a plastic batting helmet, which he wore backwards on his head. He toured the Westin lobby pushing a cart crammed with fat pieces of baked dough, and enough cream cheese to keep New York happy for a decade.
Pete Rose sidestepped Bagel Man and bounded on to the stage to the polite applause of some 200 people in the Westin’s atrium lobby.
Later, Rose would say, “The only standing ovation I got over there today was the people up there (on the second-floor balcony) that had to be standing.”
Rose once lived in a world of standing O’s. But life’s different now.
Even in Cincinnati, Rose wanders the indefinite middle ground between fallen idol and permanent legend. You still love him. You just don’t like him as much.
He has a blot beside his name now that makes Roger Maris’ asterisk appear trivial, and there’s not much he can do about it but live his new life and make amends the best way he knows how.
Rose is not exactly in exile; he’s not quite the returning hero, either. What he is right here, right now, is sharing a talk show with a kid inventor and Bagel Man. It’s a start.
He has weekly chats with the chairman of the University of Cincinnati’s psychiatry department, with whom he discusses his gambling addiction. He has Barbara Pinzka, a local public relations whiz, who guides him through the minefields of bad publicity that linger from Aug. 24. He has a new, suburban-dad lifestyle that, from the looks of things, is wearing well on him.
For months after his banishment from baseball, the public Rose was a puppet on a string. Wires connected Pete’s jaws to the fingers of Pinzka and Reuven Katz, his lawyer. What they thought, Pete mostly said.
You’d see Pete on Donahue or Barbara Walters, and you’d hardly recognize the guy. His words sounded glossy, buffed, Simonized. Pete was in there somewhere, if only his handlers would let him out.
It’s changed now. Pete is back to being Pete. A little bawdy, a little easier with his opinions, a lot more comfortable with being Pete Rose. It’s nice to have him back.
Most days, this is Pete Rose’s life: He leaves home in a golf cart at 8:45 a.m., and drives son Tyler the 10 minutes to a pre-school in the Plant City, Fla., development where the Roses are spending the winter. From there, Rose putters over to the driving range, where he hits golf balls until 11:30. He has lunch, he plays 18 holes, he goes home.
He could be Ward Cleaver, he could be an extra in the next “Cocoon” sequel. He could be just about anybody but the problem gambler he now freely admits to being. Which, of course, is precisely the point.
“The only time I think about gambling is when I talk to my doctor,” Rose says. Quite an improvement for a guy who used to bust up his TVs making tackles during “Monday Night Football.”
We go to lunch. Rose talks about his chances of election to the Hall of Fame, two years from now. He says, “I never think about something I’m not in control of.”
Truth is, he thinks about it a lot. He cares desperately about the Hall vote.
“Boston,” says Barbara Pinzka. “Nobody (will vote for Rose) in Boston. They just said they wouldn’t vote for you, flat out.”
“For bettin’ on a couple of football games? Please,” says Rose.
Pinzka: “I think it really has to do with the ’75 Series. And (former commissioner Bart) Giamatti was really, really popular up there.”
Rose: “I didn’t have anything to do with (the death of) Giamatti. He smoked five packs of cigarettes a day. I guarantee you, Giamatti didn’t go through the stress I went through in ’89.”
And so forth. Through a newspaper clipping service, Pinzka monitors the prevailing sentiments of Hall of Fame voters. She will lobby for their votes, if needed.
“To think I wouldn’t go to the Hall of Fame for what I did in ‘89” says Rose. “I bet on football and some basketball. I don’t think you can keep a guy out of the Hall of Fame for that.”
But Rose, of course, frets little over things he can’t control.
He misses the ball now. He misses the small talk, the baseball talk. Mostly, he misses the old Pete Rose, the one whose greatness contained no blot. That guy’s gone forever.
“February?” he says. “Mentally? It’ll be a little easier than it would have been, I guess. All my coaches are gone. I was planning on going to breakfast with the coaches. Now they’re all gone except Doggie (Tony Perez))”
He’ll play golf, he says. He’ll go to games. His nose will be clean. Anyone who can lead the world in hits can re-start his life. Right?
Rose pulls some bills from his wallet for a tip. The first to emerge is a $2 bill. Ohhh, Pete.
“I didn’t get it at the track,” Rose says. “I swear.”
He puts the $2 back in his wallet, says he’ll give it to the parking attendant. Not, he swears, to a little man behind a betting window.
Rose leaves the waitress a $5 bill instead. It’s a start.