Rose Book Was a Story in Itself : Baseball: Even before he began writing the biography, the author had frustrations. In the end, he wonders if it’s fair to condemn the Cincinnati star.

Pete Rose, my friend, the felon, and I started working together four years ago after a $250,000 misunderstanding. A flash and glitz publishing company called Warner Books decided that an accurately spelled work prepared by Pete Rose and myself would be worth a million dollars. We did not argue. Exciting a bodyguard of agents, Laurence Kirshbaum, a thin-chested, nasal fellow who is president of Warner Books, said he would pay us each $50,000 a year for 10 years. Twenty payments. Fifty big ones. A cool million.

But money, as one is reminded at least monthly, has the quality economists call time utility. With two children in college, I was concerned with immediate income. Reuven Katz, Rose’s attorney, said that Pete had plenty of cash, but what did we know about Warner Books and Laurence Kirshbaum? “I’m reluctant to put my client into a 10-year relationship with an unknown,” Katz said.

So Warner would have to pay us over three years, not 10. Time utility persisted and Kirshbaum’s offer shrank. Over three years we could split $750,000. Still, agents cheered.

Warner had offered us a million, sort of, and Warner wanted to tell the press that it was publishing the FIRST MILLION-DOLLAR SPORTS BOOK ABSOLUTELY EVER SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME.

Kirshbaum and agents wrote clauses in which Rose and I agreed possibly to put some of the advance into zero coupon bonds. At a later date our haul actually might reach a million, if the companies issuing the bonds did not go bankrupt and the Ohio River didn’t rise.

Warner lured the press into an executive suite a few days later where Kirshbaum announced to nibbling, guzzling reporters that he had signed a million-dollar book. Warner then sent us a small fraction of the $750,000, which is all we ever saw. The book for Warner never worked. Books that begin with a naked hype seldom do.

This was a Rose in the full bloom and bluster of great triumph. A few months earlier, Sept. 11, 1985, he had broken Ty Cobb’s record for major league hits. As a sophomore manager he brought the Cincinnati Reds home second that season, their best finish in years. Attendance jumped 600,000. Pete Rose of Cincinnati was not only the man who broke Cobb’s record; he was the man who saved the major league franchise for the river town where professional baseball began.

He had agents and lawyers and accountants and a company. Pete Rose Enterprises, Inc., marketed lotions and chocolates and chili, and breakfast food and most of all marketed Pete Rose. He was one aggressive corporate entity.

If you wanted Rose to speak, you had to pay the company $15,000, and add in transportation by private jet. “I like,” he said, “money coming in, a young wife, a fast life. I got all three.”

As he spoke, the publisher was gone and the misled press had vanished. Pete Rose, corporate entity, was now Pete Rose, feller, dressed too casually for the Waldorf Astoria Restaurant where we sat. Sports shirt. No jacket. No tie. “Any favorite books?” I said.

“Nah. I’m not a reader. I only read two books in my whole life and one was the official Pete Rose scrapbook.” He looked suddenly serious, called me by name and said, “I’ll never lie to you.” I called him by name and said that he was lying.

Rose’s face darkened. He was not used to being contradicted. “You graduated from high school,” I said.

“Took me five years.”

“Still you must have read more than two books.”

The face softened. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Not books. Chapters. “

For a long time, it was difficult to envision a book with a self-proclaimed semiliterate. Rose said he wasn’t going to tell sex stories about ballplayers on the road and I said who asked for any. “I betcha,” Rose said, “Jim Bouton is sorry he told sex stories in ‘Ball Four.’ ”

“He’s not sorry at all. He’s proud of the book.”

“Well, I’ll bet he’s sorry he don’t get asked to old-timers’ games.”

“We are going to have to tell stories about you,” I said, uneasily. Rose went through a battering divorce and a page-one paternity suit. “I won’t set the whole book at second base.”

“The divorce,” Rose said, “is 100% my fault.” On the suit, he said, “I never admitted paternity in court.”

Rose is a quick and sometimes witty man, but his grammar and vocabulary are shaky. I decided I would write the book in my voice. Pete could enter only in conversation. That took care of form and left me to puzzle out the content.

Across a playing career without parallel, three incidents dominate. During the 1970 All-Star game at Cincinnati, Rose had crashed into young Ray Fosse, a promising catcher who was blocking the plate. It was one rugged play. “Hey,” Fosse explained when I telephoned him. “I knew what I was doing. The President of the United States was watching. Great players, Frank Robinson and Harmon Killebrew, were on my team. I wasn’t gonna give it the ole.” Pause. “I stood in there and boy, did Pete hit me a shot.”

Rose: “Nobody told me they changed it to girls’ softball between third and home.”

In 1973, Rose slid hard into Bud Harrelson, the Mets’ shortstop, during the league championship series. Rose, 190 pounds, and Harrelson, perhaps 155, then pummeled each other on the ground. The New York press said Pete beat up a smaller man.

Rose: “He called me a bad name. I don’t like the word. It’s the one that begins with a ‘c’. So I hit him. What happens? Do I gotta do time?”

Finally, after breaking Cobb’s record, Rose glanced at the sky and began to weep. His son Petey, then the Reds’ batboy, rushed toward him and the two embraced, the father, tough Pete Rose, crying hard. “When I looked up,” Rose said, “I saw clear in the sky my dad and Ty Cobb. Ty Cobb was in the second row. Dad was in the first. With Dad in the sky and Petey in my arms, you had three generations of Rose men together that night. So that’s what it was that made me cry.”

On the divorce . . . well, it was nasty. The first Mrs. Rose, Karolyn, said she would always love Pete and someday he would stop chasing and come back. Meanwhile, she needed $6,000 a month in alimony. At least the property split seemed equitable. Karolyn got a white Rolls. Pete got to keep a black Porsche.

Rose settled the paternity suit out of court. That is, he paid. He could, he said, have made a defense but that meant describing the woman’s sexual habits and fingering some teammates. Instead, he bit the bullet. He wanted no praise for that. Neither did he feel he warranted blame.

Gambling? He liked ponies. And what was wrong with that? He could afford gambling. He never bet rent money. Bowie Kuhn had assigned baseball’s top security men to investigate his gambling in 1978. Rose was exonerated.

I have a favorite memory of a conversation I had with Rose:

“I play baseball harder than anyone you ever saw,” he told me.

“Jackie Robinson played hard as you.”

“And I’m the best hitter you ever seen.”

“That was Stan Musial in Ebbets Field.”

“I’m the best baseball public relations man you ever met.”

“Casey Stengel.”

There was no anger, no upset. “You’re entitled to your opinions. I’m just telling you what I think.”

Now life broke in, or Truth, with what Robert Frost called “all her matter of fact about the ice storm.” One of my sons, fine athlete, poet, spring-training companion, took his life.

The phone rang three days later.

Rose: “That the boy I met? You didn’t lose him. I swear to God you didn’t lose him. He’s up in the sky now, playing catch with my dad.”

Pete Rose can weep and so, I learned, can I.

Kirshbaum telephoned and asked me to lunch. When I said I couldn’t work on the book right then, that I was grieving, he hired lawyers and sued both me and Pete. “Hey,” said an agent. “You got heavy stuff. Rose did his work. He’ll cross-complain against you.”

Rose never did, would never allow it. Instead, he put a hand on my arm and told his own son, “This man lost his boy and has the strength to go on. I couldn’t do that myself.”

“You could,” I said. We settled the suit at great cost and found another publisher.

Someone else who claimed to be a fan of Peter Edward Rose was Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, who showed up one spring training a-twinkle and bearded, under a large floppy hat. Rose was managing the Reds in his hands-on way, picking up baseballs near the batting cage, chattering, dominating the morning.

“Isn’t he marvelous!” Giamatti said. We had met years before during a sports panel discussion at Yale.

“We’re doing a book.”

“I know. It’s going to be some trick for you, bottling up all that energy. But I envy you the time you spend with him.”

Giamatti possessed a wonderful gift for friendship and a glorious eloquence on many topics, including baseball. But what in the world was he doing as president of the National League?

An umpire named Dave Pallone made a ninth-inning call against the Reds in 1988 and Rose ran toward first base to argue. Pallone gesticulated and one of his fingernails nicked Rose’s face. Rose bumped Dave Pallone twice.

Sound umpiring practice dictates walking away from confrontation. Turn your back. March fifteen paces. Usually matters calm. To general surprise, Giamatti suspended Rose for 30 days.

Most baseball men believed Rose’s offense called for a penalty of three days. Rose appealed. Lawyer Katz advised him to wear a conservative suit.

Rose walked into the hearing in a suit of luminous gray. It reflected low intensity desk lamps. “If they’re gonna treat me like Capone, I’m gonna dress like Capone,” he said.

Giamatti stuck to his call. He and Rose were on a juggernaut course that ended in tragedy.

Once I saw Pete place basketball bets from a spring-training clubhouse. “Should you be doing that?” I said.

Pete gave a terse answer. “Everybody does.”

Everybody doesn’t, but I had no sense of addictive gambling. Rose had plenty of money. He talked betting, but not incessantly. He seemed to be someone who would not accept limits on behavior, but he had broken through the limits in his profession. Why not break through in other areas as well?

On Feb. 20, 1989, Rose met in New York with Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and Giamatti, still president of the National League. Rose brought lawyers. He claims he was being shaken down by Paul Janszen, one of the old, unappetizing characters he ran with late in the 1980s. Ueberroth asked if Rose gambled and Rose said yes. He had lost $2,000 on the Super Bowl.

“Baseball?”

“I do not bet baseball, sir. I got too much respect for the game.”

“That’s all I want to know,” Ueberroth said.

“There’s nothing ominous,” Ueberroth was quoted in the New York Times as saying. “And there won’t be any follow-through.” That turned out to be a baseball equivalent of Neville Chamberlain’s Munich statement that he had achieved “peace in our time.”

Ron Peters, a bookmaker from Franklin, Ohio, with a sideline cocaine business, contacted Sports Illustrated through a lawyer. Peters had been caught, convicted and needed money. He wanted to sell the magazine a story that he had booked Rose’s sports bets, including bets on baseball.

Sports Illustrated heard out Peters’ lawyer, and declined to purchase the story. Instead, the magazine would follow up leads on its own.

Word spread through spring training that Sports Illustrated had damaging charges against Rose and panic erupted in the offices of the baseball commissioner. Would Sports Illustrated break a story that Rose, color him hero, was a compulsive gambler, who might just possibly have bet baseball?

Absolutely not. On the recommendation of Fay Vincent, the commissioner’s office engaged a well-connected Washington lawyer named John Dowd, a former federal prosecutor renowned for his zeal. The announcement of baseball’s investigation was issued on March 20; Sports Illustrated’s story appeared a day later, but it had been defused. Tough John Dowd was in place, preserving the integrity of the game.

Reuven Katz thought Pete and I should talk to the new publisher about delaying our book.

“They’ll sue us then,” I said.

The armies of Giamatti-Dowd were being arrayed against the forces of Katz-Rose. “But how are you supposed to write the history of World War II,” Katz said, “with World War II still going on?”

“You’re going to help me,” I said. “You and Pete.”

“The commissioner insists that everything stay confidential,” Katz said. “We’re not going to help you.”

“Confidential?” I said. “Follow the New York Times and CBS for leaks.”

I don’t know whether Rose bet baseball, but I know this. Giamatti and Dowd played dirty pool with Pete.

Dowd’s hearing was set up as an “administrative procedure.” Rose was not allowed to confront his accusers. His lawyers were not permitted to cross-examine them. In its post-Watergate panic, the commissioner’s office was leaping back into the 1920s, when Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was able to throw out eight Chicago White Sox for throwing World Series games, although the players were acquitted by a jury. The 1920s was a Jurassic age for baseball rights.

In the 1980s, Rose turned over years of telephone records and bank statements to Dowd. Rose says he did that because he was innocent of betting baseball. Dowd dug and dealt. When Ron Peters, burned by Sports Illustrated, shut up, Dowd offered him a deal. If Peters told his story to Dowd, Giamatti would write the judge who was about to sentence Peters on felony charges. Peters took the deal. Giamatti wrote Judge Carl D. Rubin that Peters’ statement--Rose bet baseball--was “candid, forthright and truthful.”

After that, Rose would not testify. He never would. Giamatti, he and Katz said, prejudged the case.

After I studied the Dowd report, I thought not of Landis so much as former senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Consider page 233. “The testimony of Peters (and others) has been voluntary and forthright. None of them had anything to gain for this voluntary act of cooperation.”

Peters had nothing to gain? Dowd cut a deal. If Peters talked, Dowd would write a letter to the judge who would be sentencing Peters for felony charges of drug dealing and tax evasion. Dowd would write the judge that Peters was “candid, forthright and truthful.” Probably the sentence would be lightened.

Rose was banned from baseball on Aug. 24. Our book appeared toward Thanksgiving to a somewhat hostile press. The best thing about its reception was that nobody sent me a letter bomb.

Katz and Rose, now clearly desperate, wanted to manage the news, and sent the publisher a list of writers to whom they would speak. “You can’t do that, fellers,” I said. “Editors make the assignments. You’ll just antagonize them more if you try to manipulate.”

A lot I knew. Rose was available for an exclusive New York area interview with a Times sports columnist named Ira Berkow. Rose liked to tell a friend that he could really handle Berkow and with him the New York Times. “I say, ‘Ira, you’re one writer who really knows baseball.’ The stupid s.o.b. believes me.” I laughed and repeated the story more than I should have.

Berkow refused the exclusive interview. But he broke the release date and wrote in the New York Times, “there are voluminous taped phone calls between Rose and his gambling-associate-turned-chief-accuser, Paul Janszen . . . Kahn, who writes that he was going to get at the truth, never brings this matter up.” No tapes, voluminous or otherwise, exist. Tapes? That’s Richard (Library) Nixon; not Peter (Fifth Race) Rose.

How long had Berkow and the New York Times covered Rose on the supposition that tapes proved he bet baseball?

How long, oh Lord, how long?

That was one aspect of the post-Watergate press. Wrongheaded stuff. Other aspects were miserable. Giamatti dies. Rose goes to jail. Baseball exposed its all-time hit leader to the kindly IRS folk who run your audits.

Talking to Don Fehr, head of the Major League Players Assn., I say: “If Pete Rose were a player,” I begin.

Fehr: “Giamatti’s outta there. He isn’t neutral. We get an arbitrator. We put Dowd on the stand. We do our job.”

“Baseball says no,” I say. “This new feller, Vincent, whoever he is, says no.”

“You’re talking strike.”

Rose goes to jail. Dowd investigates Steinbrenner. What of Laurence Kirshbaum and Warner Books?

Kirshbaum recently agreed to meet a national need and commission a sequel to “Gone With the Wind.” The announced money dwarfs the offer to Rose and myself. I imagine corporate conversation.

“In this version, guys, the Confederacy wins.”

I mean, who among us is right to judge Pete Rose?