COMMENTARY : Pete Rose Had It All, But All That’s Left Is Sadness, Shame

Pete Rose thought the numbers were enough. All those hits, all those records, all those seasons in the sun--he thought they were enough to excuse him from humanity. He thought they meant he didn’t have to obey the rules, that society’s order was somehow beneath him.

It was arrogance, pure and simple, and you can denounce him for it and call him all sorts of names--he certainly has it coming--but it’s mostly just sad, really, sad because it’s stupid, sad because he was old enough to know better and too stubborn and ignorant to learn.

It is a common story now, virtually a staple in this age of telegenic overexposure and salaries gone mad. The athlete who mistakenly believes that he is bulletproof, that his exceptional skill on the field makes him exceptional off it--how many times have we seen it? We read on and on about drugs, gambling, delusion. The fallen star has become a cliche.

Of course, it only makes perfect sense that Rose has taken the plot further than just about anyone, fallen just about as far as anyone can fall. He never could stand to finish second.

Now he is going to jail, a federal prison in Kentucky, where he will bunk for five months for cheating on his taxes. “I lost my dignity,” he said Thursday at his sentencing, and he cried real tears because he knows now that he isn’t bulletproof, that the laws do indeed pertain to him, that his glistening numbers are not a lifetime exemption to the world. They always get religion too late.

It is true that you can’t do much more to a man than ruin his name, but Rose could have been hit harder. The maximum he faced was six years in the Big House, a half-million-dollar fine. But he wasn’t one of those mondo tax evaders, the ones who bubble up on Wall Street these days. He was just a singles hitter, remember.

He was just scamming, that’s all, just hustling, trying to steal away with the cash he made at the track, at card shows, selling memorabilia. It added up to $354,000, which was no pittance, but he paid it back easily enough. He had the money. He has reported a lot more than that in his life. He just figured no one would care.

He just figured the money wasn’t hurting anyone and that he was Pete Rose, by gum, and that everyone cheered when he went to card shows or sold them a bat he’d used in Montreal. He could get away with it. He could get away with anything. People had deferred to him all his life because he was Pete. You didn’t penalize an icon for the advantages of being an icon.

Sure, it was stupid. Sure, he should have known better. But he had long ago stopped living in this world. He had long ago ordered his own, skewed world. He felt free to run around on his wives, to gamble and traffic with a bad crowd, to bully women. According to an article in Gentleman’s Quarterly , he wasn’t much of a father to his oldest daughter. She was too fat.

He figured he could get away with every ugly and selfish bit of it because, as he understood life, there wasn’t a thing he couldn’t buy, a door he couldn’t open, a problem he couldn’t fix. That’s the way it was on the field, after all. He was special. He had more hits than any player in history. He was entitled to exceptions. So what if he gambled, or pocketed some extra money? The world had winked at him all his life.

The rules didn’t change on him. He just went too far, got too careless. The numbers got too big, and this time we’re not talking about the number of hits. He was throwing around too much money, leaving too many clues. We’ll probably never know if he was betting on baseball games. The evidence certainly was not favorable.

On the day when he was banned for life from baseball, he was the only one who didn’t understand that the rap was going to stick, that he could appeal and appeal and appeal and it wasn’t going to matter, that he struck a deal to save his name and signed away his future in the game. He resorted to the language of the clubhouse that day, talked about making a comeback. Incredibly, he still thought the rules didn’t apply to him.

After a few months, he hired a flack and went on the talk shows, confessed to a gambling addiction and tried to say he was sorry. And he was genuinely sorry. You could see that. For all his faults, he is somehow charming in a roguish way. Somewhere along the line, the lesson had finally sunk in. He recognized that he had abused his mandate, abused it badly. But he couldn’t revise history. You can’t do that.

So he stood in a courtroom in Cincinnati on Thursday and said that the worst part of it all was that his 5-year-old son had come home from school one day and said that his “daddy is a jailbird.” You’re made of stone if you don’t feel a twinge of compassion. Pete Rose does not deserve sympathy, but his crime was nothing other than being blind to reality, just plain dumb. More than anything else, it’s a shame.