Dispatches from the Sporting Life (22 page)

The truth is that truly gifted players—Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Mel Ott, and Frank Robinson among them—have not signed the skies with their acumen as managers, an exception being Frank Chance, who won four pennants for the Cubs. Out of necessity, however, Rose had always looked for an edge as a player. He had the advantage of being an astute as well as an ebullient student of the game. A great judge of talent, according to Johnny Bench. Yes, but would he find it difficult to be patient with players of lesser ability or hustle? “I don’t expect anybody to play like me,” Rose said, unabashed, “because they can’t, they just can’t.”

On opening day in Cincinnati, on April 8, 1963, at Crosley Field, popular Don Blasingame was no longer at second base, having been displaced by a brash twenty-one-year-old interloper called Pete Rose. Rose had come up to the Reds a graduate of Macon, Georgia, in the Class A Sally League, where he had been known as “Hollywood,” “José Hustle,” or “Hotdog.” He had signed with the Reds for a $7,000 bonus and scrambled on to win the National League Rookie of the Year Award and, in succeeding seasons, playing in the outfield or at second or third base, just about every trophy on the shelf. In 1975, the year Sparky Anderson’s Big Red Machine won a mind-boggling 108 games, Rose led the last real National League dynasty in hits and doubles. Then, in one of the most exciting World Series in living memory, Boston taking the Reds to seven games, Rose hit .370 and was named MVP. Two years later, at the age of thirty-six, he surprised everybody by breaking yet another National League record, hitting safely in forty-four consecutive games. Then came the diminishing years. He was gone, first to Philadelphia for five seasons and then to Montreal, enjoying only one more vintage season, 1979, when he hit.331 for the Phillies.

On August 14, 1984, enduring the humiliation of the Expos’ bench, Rose seemed to sniff his magnificent career coming to an end, not with a bang but a whimper. “It looks like I’m not going to get Ty Cobb’s record,” he told a reporter, “unless something happens.”

The next day the fifth-place Reds, their record a dismal 51–70, announced that they had hired Rose as player-manager, and among baseball fans everywhere joy was unconfined.

“PETE COMES HOME,”
ran the
Cincinnati Enquirer’s
headline. A playing field in Cincinnati is named after Rose. There is also a Pete Rose Drive. Sparky Anderson, who managed Rose for nine years, said, “I told Pete long ago that when he goes to the Hall of Fame he should only take one uniform with him.”

A crowd of 35,038 fans, each one awarded an “I Was There” certificate, turned out to hail the prodigal’s return on August 17, 1984, and when he stepped up to the plate they remembered when he was young and they were young and there was a Big Red Machine.

Rejoining the Reds had cost Rose a big cut in pay but, he told me, he didn’t need the money. Outside of baseball he was earning $1 million a year, maybe more, largely as the representative of a Japanese firm, Mizuno Sporting Goods. He was also a partner in the Precinct, the best steakhouse in town. “You’ve got to try it,” he said. “It’s run by a friend of mine, an expert. He was at Yale. Is that where they teach restaurant management?”

At the Precinct, I drank in the upstairs bar with co-owner Jeff Ruby, a graduate of the Cornell Restaurant School. Indicating all the attractive young women milling about, I asked, “Are they groupies?”

“Don’t say that,” he said. “We’ve got a mailman, he’s only five feet four, he comes in here. He says all these girls are golddiggers, they won’t talk to him. ‘Hey,’ I said to him, a mailman, ‘what are you going to get, a better route?’ These ballplayers are young and their bodies are in good shape and they’ve got lots of money.” Some nights, Ruby went on to say, he enlisted celebrities to tend bar. “The last time Pete did it, he asked me, ‘How much did we take in
tonight?’ I told him, ‘Thirty-eight hundred bucks.’ ‘And how much,’ he asked, ‘did you take in the night Johnny Bench was here?’ ‘Four thousand,’ I said. Pete pondered that. ‘Johnny had better weather,’ he said.”

Old teammates, Bench and Rose remained friendly rivals. The more thoughtful Bench retired in 1983 at the age of thirty-five. “If you have to hang in there beyond your time for the applause, if your happiness is in the hands of others, you’re in trouble. After you quit, though, there’s a long time between Monday and Friday.”

I asked him about Rose.

“Once his objective was three thousand hits. Then it was Musial’s record. He knows all his own stats. In the early days, remember, he wasn’t making money. He wanted to become the first singles hitter to drive that Rolls. Now Cobb’s record is basically everything to him. Okay. But nobody wants to see him embarrass himself out there or for the pursuit to become blinding. There’s so much respect for him.”

Rose, who lived out in Indian Hill, a choice suburb, was outside hosing down his Rolls-Royce when I arrived for a late breakfast with him and his new young wife, a former cheerleader for the Philadelphia Eagles. Carol was expecting a baby within a week. All the same, she had cooked us enormous steaks, with eggs and home fries. Pete showed me around the house, which sat on a five-acre lot. There was a TV satellite dish and a large kidney-shaped swimming pool in the backyard. Inside, there were twelve rooms. Marble floors. Three giant TV screens, one on each floor. A sauna. A Roman-size bath. A trophy room with the lineup card for Rose’s
first World Series game; the bats he had used in his all-stars games encased in glass; embarrassingly bad oil portraits of Rose standing at the plate in his prime; and a plaque listing his stats during his forty-four-game hitting streak. There was also a mahogany bar in his sunken living room. “And I don’t even drink,” Rose said.

Rose didn’t see himself as a desperately needed attraction for a team that was going nowhere. An aging star without a vehicle. “There is no dynasty-type team in our division,” he said. “It’s up for grabs.”

Nor did he see himself as a man so absorbed in the game that he had possibly sacrificed his family to it: his first wife, of sixteen years, Karolyn, and their two children, Fawn, nineteen, and Petey, fourteen.

He led me through his ritual interview. “Sure I’m divorced—so are 60 percent of American men. So why focus on me?” Yes, Koufax had been the hardest thrower he had ever faced, but Marichal was the best pitcher. Cobb’s record, he assured me once more, was not an obsession. Captain Ahab, if I had interviewed him, would have said he didn’t give a tinker’s damn about white whales—it was the amount of oil he brought home that counted. “If I’m hitting, I’ll play. If I’m not hitting good, I won’t play. Hey, I don’t need the money. I’ll play as long as I’m useful.”

Accompanying me outside after lunch, Rose looked back at his big house in the hills. “They say you can’t live good hitting singles.” Then we got into one of his Porsches and drove back into town together. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do in summer than play baseball,” he said.

March 1985

P
.G. Wodehouse observed some years ago that it is difficult to write anything without offending a special-interest group. Even being irreverent about porcupines can be risky. “Just try it,” he wrote, “and see how quickly you find your letter-box full of communications beginning: ‘Sir, with reference to your recent tasteless and uncalled-for comments on the porcupine….’” So in compiling this list of complaints about women (not, mark you, that women are to be compared to anything so benign as the porcupine, which raises its quills only when menaced), I do not anticipate that it will endear me to the sisterhood.

My deep concern about the threatening proclivities of some of the new women (especially those who wish to become prizefighters, hockey goalies, or baseball umpires) was heightened on a trip to New York a few years back. At the time, I was startled to see a billboard, sailing over Broadway maybe ten storeys high, that showed a gorgeous woman posing in men’s underwear. This was too much. A calculated affront. Me, I wouldn’t wear women’s
underwear in public; what in the hell did they want with mine?

Before outraged feminists address rude, unsigned letters to me, let me make my position clear. I find it astonishing that American women weren’t enfranchised at the same time as their dim husbands and that they had to chain themselves to fences and endure forced feedings, among other indignities, in order to win the right to vote. After all, if I am bound to help with the shopping and the washing up, it seems only fair that women should be obliged to share in the embarrassment of having thrust Bush and the Quayle into office, possibly to be followed by the slippery Bill Clinton.

It is the shrillness of some of the more militant feminists that confounds me, but I can remember at least one occasion when I found one of their leaders to be absolutely engaging.

Once, scheduled to appear on a TV talk show in Washington, D.C., I discovered that one of the other guests was a celebrated American feminist. As we waited together in the lounge, she crossed her long, elegant legs. Far from immune to the whisper of silky things, I nevertheless averted my eyes, pretending to be absorbed in my copy of
Organic Gardening,
lest I be accused of appraising her as a sex object. If she wanted to debate Marx’s theory of surplus value while we waited, okay, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of looking her up and down, confirming her prejudices. Imagine my surprise, then, when minutes before she was to go on camera, this champion of women’s lib opened her Gucci handbag, plucked out a brush and a compact,
and proceeded to backcomb her hair and touch up her eyeshadow.

My prejudices against women, such as they are, range from trivial to larger grievances.

It seems to me that every time I get in line at the supermarket checkout, there is a woman immediately ahead of me, her bill coming to $94.87. She doesn’t, as most men would, fork over $100, take the change
without counting it,
and repair immediately to the nearest bar. No, no. Instead, she will dig elbow-deep into a voluminous handbag filled with things that go clunk, within the depths of which is a wallet, within which is a change purse to be slowly unzippered and overturned, spilling onto the counter and the floor pennies that have to be toted up three times before they total eighty-seven. Meanwhile, I manfully resist tipping my yogurt over her lacquered helmet of hair, which smells like model-airplane glue. In defence of such an offender, my wife has argued that the woman is possibly oppressed, obliged to account to an overbearing husband for every penny spent. If that’s the case, she ought to dump a yogurt over
his
head,
but meanwhile, would she please keep the checkout line moving?

I seldom go to parties anymore, but when I do, I am often cornered by mature women who tell me how they have had to sacrifice a brilliant career in order to make a home for an unfaithful husband and ungrateful children. Nonsense. More often than not, it is clear that the only alternative career available to
them is to serve behind the counter at McDonald’s or possibly do something even less useful, such as become a sociologist or a professor of English Lit 101. Mind you, I would not go as far as Marike de Klerk, the wife of South Africa’s prime minister, who recently told a church audience, “We are not important. We are here to serve, to heal wounds and to give love…. If the woman inspires the man to be good, he is good. We want [men] … to look after us.”

Obviously, women do have legitimate complaints. I am a staunch supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. I am prochoice, though troubled by some of its implications. But I am not prepared to fight for the right of women to drive steamrollers, serve with impunity on submarines, interview inarticulate naked athletes in stinky locker rooms, box, play hockey with the guys, or umpire baseball games.

Item: Last year,
Maclean’s,
the Canadian magazine, published the following report.

Since then, also in Canada, the very pretty nineteen-year-old Manon Rhéaume made hockey history, becoming the first woman ever to play in an official game for a Canadian major junior team. Ms. Rhéaume entered the nets of the Trois-Rivières Draveurs in a home game against the Granby Bisons at 12:28 of the second period, welcomed by a standing ovation from more than two thousand fans at the Trois-Rivières Colisée. She allowed three goals on thirteen shots before being obliged to leave the ice in the third period, after being struck in the mask by a puck. And then she needed three stitches to close a gash over her right eye.

And now along comes an ill-written, foulmouthed memoir of sorts,
You’ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League: My Life as an Umpire,
by Pam Postema and Gene Wojciechowski. “It’s hard enough to make your way as a young umpire through minor-league baseball,” the blurb writer has it. “It’s harder still when you’ve been kissed by a player at home plate, had a bra pulled out of your shirt by The Chicken, found messages in your underwear from amorous managers….”