A line can be drawn before and after Pete Rose.
Before Rose, American sports felt innocent. We thought of sports as a wholesome endeavor. A family business. The multi-billion dollar television contracts weren’t a thing when Rose started his baseball career. There was no free agency when Rose signed his first contract as an unremarkable kid out of high school in Cincinnati. The Reds were a hard scrabble hometown team not yet a Red Machine, never mind BIG. And Rose was another kid trying to make his dream come true. Money had yet to make its way into professional sports. Yes, athletes were heroes and thought of as celebrities — at least some — but players still had jobs in the offseason.
Then the money arrived and Rose was one of the players who demanded it because he was worth it. He made people want to go to ballgames. He made kids in Cincinnati dream of being a Red. He was living the American dream: the local kid who made good despite the obvious flaws in his athleticism. He had it all. And the baseball had a star. It had a player it could show the viewing public looked like them, played like them on the Little League fields in town. He played “the right way,” working like the blue collar kid he grew up as, but lived like a celebrity with fancy cars, a nice house and plenty of extracurricular activities.
But all great stories have a dark river running underground, waiting to be exposed. With Rose, his river carved out a Grand Canyon type hole that he somehow kept out of view with some flimsy plywood — not the pressure treated stuff. Rose gambled. A lot. More than I ever thought. More than he let on. Way more. He bet on everything. But his downfall was that he bet on baseball, a big no-no, and put his life into the hands of drug dealers and hardscrabble characters with broken dreams and moral compasses. Eventually, Rose was caught in an expanding web that included his “friends” off of the diamond. Major League Baseball had instated a rule against betting on the game that stated a player would be banned. They’d vanish from the field and boxes and the clubhouses. The sport’s all-time leader in hits has no place in the Hall of Fame and is now a punchline at the end of a joke.
But after Rose was caught, we had a new era of professional sports. Here is the line. The media landscape changed with ESPN and young reporters living by higher standards of ethics — in most cases — when it comes to reporting on big business. Professional sports became something more than the local team with local heroes, and the media treated it that way, for the most part. No longer were they friends with the players, holding on to secrets. Now it was about breaking news. It was about filling the pages of the paper or magazine and the nightly news segments and soon the 24-hour-news-cycle. And then we had the steroid era (but who’s to say when that era began?) and the mountains of money that came with the contracts, television, celebrity and sponsorships. American sports — and sports in general — went global and they are now ripe with sports-washing, as well as billions of dollars and near infinite space in our lives, even if we try to avoid it.
On top of that, sports betting has become legal and is supporting whole sectors of the sports media complex with its advertising dollars and partnerships. Betting on sports is everywhere. It’s right on your smartphone, asking you and everyone you know to put a few dollars down on this bet and this game. ESPN even has its own sports book. No longer do you need bookies with ledgers and logs. The data lives right there. Your credit card plugged in and your bank account linked.
All of that makes Pete Rose the figure more interesting to look at today. “Charlie Hustle” made a career out of working harder than everyone around him, hitting hundreds of baseballs, sliding into every base as if it was his last chance on the diamond, and he lived the same way too. He believed in himself to such a degree that his success on the field was tied to his personality off of it, which is littered with as many fallen hero tropes and cliches as someone can sum up.
And now it’s time we got the definitive account of who Pete Rose was and who he became, which is what journalist Keith O’Brien did.
O’Brien’s Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, And the Last Glory Days of Baseball is a biography of Rose, but it’s also a historical account of how sports changed during and after Rose’s career. It digs deep into all of Rose’s ghosts and reveals how and why Rose did what he did on and off the field as well as the behind the scenes action happening at the same time in Major League Baseball’s commissioner’s office. It’s a detailed account of the changing landscape and psyche of American that occurred in the middle of the 20th Century America and the psyche of the country. It’s also a rare glimpse into the psych of Rose, who gave O’Brien more unfettered access than he’s ever given a journalist before.
O’Brien is a former sports reporter for The Boston Globe and the best-selling author of Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History and Paradise Falls: A Deadly Secret, a Cover-Up, and the Women Who Forged the Modern Environmental Movement.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and space.
You grew up in Cincinnati and Pete Rose is playing baseball at this time and I imagine he's like the world's greatest hero to everybody in the city. Was that true for you growing up?
Pete Rose in the 1970s and 80s would've been akin to Tom Brady in the 2000s and 2010s. He was a local hero and icon and a national hero and a lightning rod. And for anybody who grew up in Cincinnati in the 1970s and 80s, as I did, Pete Rose was part of the backdrop of your childhood. I'm too young to remember the Big Red Machine years — 1975 and 1976 in the back-to-back World Series titles — but I am 11 when Pete is traded back to the Reds in 1984, and I'm in the wheelhouse of my childhood love for baseball when Pete breaks Ty Cobb’s hit record and then ultimately gets himself in trouble for gambling. I remember all of those things with crystal clarity as a fan and as a resident of Cincinnati. So what I wanted to do with the book was go back to that time and place and look at Pete's story through the prism of history with granular reporting on a ground level and tell that story and let people make up their own minds about him.
Let's be clear, Pete remains one of our most controversial sports icons of the past a 100 years, but, because of those controversies, he really never got the sort of biographical treatment that our icons typically get. So that's what I wanted to do here. Whether you like him or you don't like him, whether you support him or you don't support him, this isn't about that. This is a book about a controversial character who, for better or for worse, shaped our cultural consciousness.
He never seems to leave it. He's always kind of lurking, especially now that sports gambling is allowed. Everyone I know is gambling on their phones. Imagine if Pete had that kind of access. The thing that I found really interesting is that you give Pete a really fair shake. He's not entirely a likable character from the outside, but he is a guy that you should want to root for, in theory. He’s essentially an undrafted Hall of Famer. That doesn't happen right now in baseball.
That's true. Back then, 1960, when Pete is signed to play for the minor league affiliate in Geneva, New York for the Cincinnati Reds, there were no analytics. There was very little scouting reports on many of the guys who were being drafted. But you're right, Pete was incredibly ordinary as an athlete. I write in the book that he is, I think, maybe our most extraordinary ordinary athlete. He has no obvious talents, he has no obvious physique for the game throughout his childhood in Cincinnati. On his little league teams, on his legion ball teams, on his high school team, he's never the best player. He's often not even among the best players. Many players who attended his high school, Western Hills High School in Cincinnati, were scouted and recruited and given Major League contracts straight out of high school. In fact, when the scouts do show up in the late 1950s and inquire about this undersized second baseman, his high school coach tells him, “don't bother.”
Pete Rose is too small. And as the coach says, he's only good at one thing: “he's only good at bunting.” So the idea that this guy would get a minor league contract, then actually do something with that and have success in the minor leagues, and then jump the line, passing over guys who were in front of him, and join the Reds Major League roster within three years and then go on to become one of our most iconic hitters, it is an impossible story, and it is really one reason why he was so celebrated at the time. People loved that story. Fans loved that story. In particular, I should say, white fans loved that story. This is a time where baseball is becoming more and more diverse, and there is some resistance to that among fans. People are upset. White fans are upset that the all-star teams are increasingly black and Latino. It's sort of in the undercurrent of the times, and who's there as an antidote to that diversity, this ordinary white guy from the west side of Cincinnati who is sort of proving his worth by hustling. It's all part of the Pete Rose story.
The main thing that I think about is he's not even the best player on any of his teams. He hits the ball fine, but it is not remarkable and is against modern baseball too. I don't think Pete Rose would get through in analytics today. He just kind of hits it and rarely gets extra base hits. He’s not really doing any of the things that analytics wants out of you. I've never looked up as win shares, but I wonder what it is. I wonder if Baseball Reference has done that.
Baseball reference has done it, his all-time WAR (wins above replacement, 8+ is MVP level and 5+ is all-star). His WAR is in the 70s, so he's not a top 10 elite, major league player. Many of his teammates from those Big Red Machine years, including Joe Morgan, are far higher than him in the WAR category.
And I do think you're right. I mean, his propensity to hit singles and get on base, while desirable at that time, would not really fit in our new era of analytics. I mean, that said, people that I spoke to — and I'm talking about his teammates, I'm talking about guys he played against and competed against, played in World Series against — said that they loved having Pete Rose on their team and they hated facing him. No pitcher wanted to face Pete Rose with the game on the line because he did have the ability to make things happen in that sort of intangible way that stars often can.
The thing that I found really fascinating is within Pete's story you write about the changing landscape of baseball and we mentioned this in diversity, but also in the way the game is starting to be played, the new stadiums, the money that's coming into it. Baseball was not a lucrative sport. We think of Joe DiMaggio and players like him as famous, but they weren't rich by any standard until the Rose-era. So how does Pete change that? How do you see his place in that, especially in Cincinnati, a place it's never really been a big spending franchise?
That is, I think, the important subtext to the story: that baseball and America change in the time that Pete is a professional athlete. Between 1960 and 1989, that's 30 seasons of professional baseball, every single thing changes. You hit on many of those changes a moment ago. The sport goes from becoming an unpolished national pastime filled with lots of colorful and shady characters who could never exist in the game today, who are making not that much money, who were working off-season jobs, selling insurance, or working as hosts at hotels to a multi-billion dollar sport with a billion dollar television contract with five games televised nationally a week, owners raking in millions of dollars and players doing the same thing. All of these things change.
I think what's notable about it is that all of these things happen, all of these cultural shifts, but Pete stays the same. He believes in the 1960s and early 1970s that he can do anything, and that belief is really what propels him to such success on the field. He believes he will succeed every time he comes to the plate. This is not a man prone to doubts. But that same belief that he can do anything — he can act how he wants, he can say what he wants, he can do what he wants — is what's going to get him in trouble, because what was maybe acceptable in the shadows in 1973 is not acceptable in the shadows in 1989. And Pete's going to pay a price for that.
Pete does somewhat change in a way though he becomes wealthy and that does change a lot of things about him.
You're right about that.
He's not afraid to push for his pay, even if the way the mechanisms to push forward are very different than they are today and also not nearly as efficient. But he definitely pushes for his wealth and spends it. I think that is part of his personality, though.By making all that money he believes he can do anything. And so he believes he's worth this and then he believes he can spend it. He can make more of it. That is the fascinating thing to me because we think of him as a hard scrabble guy, but he is actually like, I want money and I want a Corvette. He is like every other capitalist in America.
Well, where he grew up on the West side was a working class neighborhood in the 1940s and 50s. It still is today. There has been no gentrification in Pete's neighborhood. In fact, if anything, the opposite has happened. The homes built into that hillside in Anderson Ferry, the far-flung west side neighborhood of Cincinnati, are almost falling down into the river today. And so for whatever reason, Pete really latched on to money as a sign of status and as a sign that he had made it. Even when he is a rookie, he's going off and buying the best car he can afford because he wants that and he's somebody and the money and status are incredibly important.
He was unusual. He was constantly pushing for more money press. He did it in a way that most other athletes don’t do today, telling people on the record in interviews what he thought he was worth
You actually sat down with Pete, right? How many times did you talk to him?
I had seven hours of recorded interviews with Pete. I interviewed him on the phone for about a month and then ultimately flew to Las Vegas, where I spent three days with him doing lengthy interviews in person. So a significant chunk of time.
Why do you think he let you talk to him out of everybody?
Well, Pete has never spoken to an author that he didn't have control over, didn't have the final say, so I don't know. My pitch to him initially made through friends was that this is a time for reckoning and that I know he had written these memoirs before, but they're pretty thin on details, and a lot of memoirs are fairly self-serving, and my pitch was he ids 80 years old and it's time to reckon with the past. I believed that if he did reckon with it, that people, at a minimum, would understand what happened better. Secondly, and I think probably more important, was I'm from Cincinnati. I was born on the west side. I was born in an apartment less than two miles from Pete's house. I understand Cincinnati. It is easy to classify with the generalizations, but hard to know, and I know the city. I understand what it means to be a West-Sider. And, I think, that mattered.
I think it also matters in the book. You understand how to paint the city and explain a city that a lot of people haven't been to but have heard of. I think some of the most important parts of the book are explanations of Cincinnati. So when you're reporting about Cincinnati, it is your home, and so sometimes it is easier to say mean things about your home, at the same time you love this place. It is a place that is part of you. And so did you almost find it a little bit refreshing to be able to do both at the same time?
It's funny like a lot of people, I couldn't wait to leave my hometown. I couldn't wait to get over the walls and run for the hills. But when you get older and you look back at your childhood, you start to appreciate it in different ways. I've written about lots of things, but it was easing back into a warm bath to write about Cincinnati because, again, I understand the city. I know what it's like to play on a hard scrabble Little League team in Cincinnati filled with other white kids. I did that. And just to write about my home in that way, it was comfortable.
In the end, I think this book is far bigger than Cincinnati. I think this is a universal story, frankly. I think this is a Greek tragedy that just happened to play out in and around an American ball field. But, for me, on a personal level, in some ways it was almost like writing a postcard to my own past.
It is a Greek tragedy, but Greek tragedies — all great stories — have a great setting and a great place. It is another character. Hamlet is not Hamlet without Denmark and the rest of the stuff going on in it. It’s all important. And I think Cincinnati is the place where this happens and I don't know if this could have happened. Pete Rose isn't going to happen at the Los Angeles Dodgers. His story, the way it fits, the way it works, how he pulls himself up, that's not Los Angeles. It's definitely not going to happen here in Boston. I mean, maybe it might, but he's not a Yankee, right?
Yeah, you're right. Again, part of the challenge of writing the book was just sort of staying out of the way. I mean, I think this is to your point, this just has all the makings of an amazing story, a compelling story. And part of that absolutely is where he ends up. He's from the west side of Cincinnati, he grows up going to Reds games, the Reds are not good in those years — they're always bad or mediocre — and here he comes, making the team and ultimately leading them to their greatest years. You're right. It doesn't work narratively if he's with the Dodgers or the Yankees or any other team, frankly.
What were some of the hardest parts to sort nail down and figure out? You do such a good job of figuring out where and how he's gambling and what he's gambling on, and you have the sources, but they hadn't talked really before and they hadn't released these files. So what was some of the hardest stuff to sort of pinpoint and figure out?
Obviously the access helped. While Pete was still talking to me, I pushed to find out as much as I could about where and how and why he gambled and with whom. Then I did multiple interviews with three different men who placed his bets on baseball, which were crucial to the narrative. Just as crucial, though, was thousands of pages of federal court documents.
One thing that I think has been overlooked in the telling of Pete story is sort of how he unravels. He's part of this crew, a crew of west siders mostly, who are part of his inner circle, but a lot of these guys by the mid to late 1980s are engaging in all sorts of shady behavior. They're selling steroids. They're selling cocaine. In fact, the gambling that Pete gets in trouble for is really the least of it.
Part of how Pete gets caught is that one by one, the FBI begins to pick off these guys who were part of his inner circle. I knew from the outset that I wanted to tell that story and for that, the federal court files were immensely helpful. Some of these cases did go to trial and then went to appeals. There are transcripts of entire trials, and Pete is often not at the center of these cases. Usually he's not. He's just off center, though. The fact that these guys are getting picked off one by one, they begin to turn on each other, and that ultimately leads to one of them to say, '“well, I have some other information I could share with you about Pete Rose.” And, to me, that was sort of the missing piece and really what I focused on finding and doing from the start.
The eventual downfall comes fast. It's building up, building up, and then the day it all, it's kind of like one day it's done. And Giamatti is actually pretty nice and forgiving for the most part. It seems like he's very wishy-washy on how what do, he does know there are implications in this that this could take baseball down as a whole thing too, because we've had gambling issues, we have cocaine issues, never mind the steroid issue that's coming or is there underneath the surface. But either way, baseball misses Pete Rose after he’s banished. Baseball suffers a huge loss. It's missing something, and I don't really know what it was missing after Pete. It takes steroids and home runs to save it. But even that was short-lived, so I've always kind of wondered if it was Pete that killed a lot of it.
I make the argument in the preface of the book, and this was one way of framing it for myself early on, that I think Pete is really a fault line, not just in baseball, but in sports. I think this scandal does divide the era of the heroes from the era of the cheaters. Up until 1989, we as fans really like to see our prominent athletes as true heroes. We didn't want to know about the darkness off stage, and the sports writers didn't give it to us. These guys were friends often with the players. They were protecting them and not telling us everything they knew. And I think that begins to change a little bit in the 1980s. And with Pete, it absolutely shatters that line. I think you can make an argument that everything after that is different. We look at players differently. And I do think he's a fault line, not just in baseball, but in sports.
He becomes a tabloid sensation and then we treat athletes like tabloid sensations. But for a lot of them in the past, their personal lives were left to the side. Even Pete gets away with being a horrible husband and father. I mean, that's the thing that comes across in the book, maybe the most and the most heart wrenching, is not loving your child the way that they really deserved, because Pete really loves himself. But is Pete a great baseball player without loving himself? I don't think so.
I think every great athlete succeeds in part because they love themselves and prioritize themselves to a certain point. I think that's absolutely true with Pete. I mean, multiple women who I interviewed — including ex-wives and mistresses — said that Pete loved a few things in life. Carolyn Rose, his first wife, famously said that he loved baseball, he loved the kids, he loved his cars and then her. I think, honestly, there were probably even a couple other things in front of her at times in the 1970s, including gambling and including other women.
The gambling is almost the same thing as playing baseball, right? You think you're always going to win. The thing that makes Pete such a great baseball player is that he thinks he's going to win every time or believes he can win every time. And the worst person to be a gambler is somebody that has that much self-belief and no self-doubt.
The other thing that I think is a breakthrough here is Pete has given conflicting statements over the years about whether he was addicted to gambling. For the most part, he says, “no, I didn't have a problem. I wasn't addicted.” But then, at times in his books, he writes that he was. When he faces a federal charge in 1990 for tax evasion, he also says that he was addicted to gambling. So it's all over the place. But in multiple interviews that I did with people who had a front row seat to Pete Rose, in the 1980s in particular, all of them said that Pete was addicted and that they were worried. One of his closest friends told me that by 1987, in his estimation, Pete Rose was like a 747 spiraling down out of the sky. He was out of control.
And it's not just in the interviews that this came through. In part of my reporting, I unearthed a betting notebook that was first unearthed, I should say, by ESPN several years ago. This notebook was kept by a man named Mike Bertini, who was one of Pete's close friends who did place his bets on baseball. One thing I did was interview Bertini and Bertini confirmed that the notebook was real. When you look at that notebook, if you know anything about gambling, it is a blinding red light screaming problems. Pete, at times in this notebook, according to Lin's notes, is placing 8, 10, 12 bets a day and that is simply not how you win at gambling. The smart gamblers are betting on one or two games, one or two things, the things that they know are going to hit. And Pete was just betting on simply everything.
Yeah, I mean, it is somebody that just has so much self-belief in themselves. You have to believe that you're going to win to do that. I think you have…
To be addicted too.
Is there anything that you found that didn't make it into the book?
I mean, I'm a ruthless editor of my own stuff, even before I submit it. With this book, the question in my edits was always, how does this move the story forward? How does this connect to Pete and either his rise or his fall? If it doesn't connect, if it's too tangential, then I'm going to cut it. So yeah, there were a ton of cuts.
The challenge was always figuring out what to include and what not to include. There were tons of anecdotes along the way, little stories that people told, players told that didn't make it just because they weren't relevant.
The one that comes to mind when you ask the question does involve a former Boston player. Some of your readers will remember Bernie Carbo.
Bernie Carbo is the reason why Carlton Fisk ever has a chance to hit his memorable, epic home run to win game six of the 1975 World Series. In the eighth inning, the Red Sox are trailing in the game, an Carbo comes up with a chance to tie the game with a home run. Carbo was struggling with his own problems with addiction and already on the down slope as a player, and nobody thought Carbo would do anything in this moment. And he hits this impossible home run to tie the game to send it to extra innings, which is how Carlton Fisk ultimately walks off later that night. I interviewed Carbo — I interviewed as many people as I could on every single roster of every single team that Pete ever played on or played against in a big moment — and, of course, he recounted for me the story of the ‘75 World Series, which is awesome. But then he told me a story that didn't actually make it into the book.
By the 1980s, Carbo was out of baseball. He goes into rehab. He nearly dies. And Carbo’s written about this in his own memoir, so I'm not saying anything out of school here. He gets out of rehab in the early 1990s down in Florida, at a time when Pete Rose is also rebuilding his life. Rose has been banished from baseball. Rose has served a five month stint in federal prison for tax evasion, and he moves to Boca Raton, Florida. He has a radio show down there and at some point, shortly after Carbo is released, he is going around to former ballplayers in Florida at spring training, and he's having them sign baseballs. In Carbo’s telling of the story, he shows up with just a sack of old baseballs. These aren't white pearls brand new. They're old and battered and dirty because that's what Carbo has and he's asking famous players to sign them. Some guys, in Carbo’s recollection, want no part of him. Who the hell is Bernie Carbo anyway? By 1991, he's nobody. So some guys are resistant, some guys have no interest, and Carbo finds Rose, and he asks Rose to sign some balls for him. Carbo told me that Rose refused to sign Carbo’s old, battered baseballs. Rose sent an assistant to go get two boxes of brand new baseballs, two dozen brand new baseballs. Rose sat there and he signed them for Carbo. Carbo at this point said he was feeling bad that Rose had done this for him, and Carbo was just going to turn around and sell these baseballs to try to make some money to get back on his feet again. So Carbo said he told Rose, “I just want you to know, I'm going to sell these.” Rose said he didn't care. Again, Pete Rose has made a lot of terrible choices in his life, a lot of immoral choices, I don't defend those, the book doesn't defend those, but when you talk to Bernie Carbo about Pete Rose, he loves him and would walk through a wall of fire for Pete because of a simple interaction that happened once, almost 33 years ago.