EDITOR’S NOTE: On this day in 1985, Pete Rose broke one of baseball’s seemingly untouchable records, collecting his 4,192nd major-league hit, surpassing Ty Cobb’s all-time mark.
On Memorial Day weekend four years later, in the visitor’s clubhouse after a game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, the gambling storm clouds gathering over his head above the field, here I was, sitting across from him, watching baseball’s all-time hit king munch on ham and applesauce, talking boxing and — believe it or not — gambling.
Here’s the column I filed for the Port Huron Times Herald, May 29, 1989.
CHICAGO — The ham went first. Then the green beans. Pete Rose was working on the applesauce when a somewhat naive postgame visitor asked him if he was going to play again.
“If I do,” Rose said, casting a knowing eye at a roomful of writers, “I’ll call you.”
His Cincinnati Reds had just lost a 6-1 battle to the Chicago Cubs, their second straight loss at Wrigley Field. But the loss didn’t bother Rose. Not much does, it seems.
Though a pending investigation of gambling charges against him hangs over his head like the Sword of Damocles, Rose seemed as unflappable behind a manager’s desk as he did at home plate. It didn’t take much to imagine him standing in that funny little crouch, bat in his hands, that barrel chest about to burst through Cincy’s red and gray.
The barrel bore a different label Sunday. One that might have been funny a year ago. Yesterday, it was almost poignant, if one can imagine anything being poignant where the thorny Rose is concerned.
What Pete wore was a T-shirt with a red and white cartoon of him riding an old nag of a racehorse. “Run For Rose,” it read. In light of Rose’s reported failures at the track, that nag looked very much like one he might have bet on.
Rose, of course, had never admitted anything about placing a bet,
“I just like to watch the horses run,” he said recently. There’ll be no surrender here.
Sitting behind the desk, he looks pretty much as he did when he played. The coarse mouth, the burning brown eyes, the granite jaw. He’s put on a little more weight, as you knew he would, but the only real sign of age and maybe stress is at the very top of a thick clump of hair that refuses even a hint of a curl. There resides a bald spot about the size of a baseball, appropriately enough.
Yet there are no outward signs of stress. Pete’s willing to talk about anything. And when the postgame talk came around to the upcoming Leonard-Hearns fight, Rose got excited. Boxing, after all, means two things we know Rose loves — action and money.
“I like Leonard,” Rose said. “To lay off like that, them come back and win…man, that takes talent.
“We’ll be in L.A. (June 12 — the night of the fight),” Rose said, after checking with the Reds’ PR man. “I guess I’ll have to see it on HBO.”
“I used to box,” Rose continued, “back when I was 112 pounds. But that was enough. I’ll take this way of making money. You know, if a young kind wants to test you and gets you in a fight, if he beats you up, you send him back to the minors.”
Rose had everyone laughing. He got up and went into the bathroom and lathered up for a shave. He was looking at himself in the mirror for a minute. Then he spoke.
“The other thing I like about Sugar Ray is he’s the one who enabled all those lighter fighters to make the big money. “Hands of Stone”(Roberto Duran) never made no big money ‘till Leonard came along.”
Rose made a couple more swipes with the razor then flipped it into the sink.
“Hearns has got a nice punch but he’s got a glass chin. He’s a good fighter but I gotta go with Leonard.”
“So,” a writer said, “Pete Rose is telling everybody, “Put your money on Sugar Ray Leonard.”
Rose started to turn, then the writer corrected himself. “Maybe I better not say that “Pete Rose says bet on Leonard.”’
“You can bet on boxing?” he replied, flashing that irrepressible grin that no courtroom in the world is going to take away.
“Gee, I didn’t know that,” Rose said, drawing his heartiest laugh yet from his postgame gallery. “Shows you what a gambler I am.”
—-
Re-reading this column all these years later after having watched the HBO four-part series on him, it strikes me that Rose still sounds exactly like the same guy now. Though he was told to “reconfigure his life” — whatever that was supposed to mean — he never really did, any more than he could have reconfigured himself. The threatening clouds of a major-league baseball investigation were everywhere, you couldn’t ignore it. But as you saw, Rose was non-plussed. Still is, somehow.
A couple years later, I got a phone call on the Sports Desk asking me if I wanted to interview Pete Rose? He was hawking some new Sports Drink and would be in Marine City, Michigan on Monday afternoon and I could have 15 minutes. Great. I drove down to Marine City, walked inside this little drug store and there’s Pete Rose, sitting at a card table with a few bottles of some Sports Drink that looked like it had been concocted in someone’s garage. “Pull up a chair,” he said, reaching up to shake my hand.
It was fun. Nobody stopped or seemed particularly interested in Pete Rose being in Michigan in January so I had him all to myself. And he was hilariously off-color, much of what he said unprintable but he made sure to give you enough to write a good column. Finally, still laughing, I looked at the clock, saw my time was up and got up to go.
“Where you going?” Rose asked, looking annoyed.
"Your PR guy said 15 minutes. You gave me 20. It was great.”
“You’re not going to leave me here with this a-hole, are you?” he asked. “Sit your ass back down.” That was Pete Rose.
I write a lot more about Pete, his career and the peculiarities of his case in my forthcoming baseball book, “Diamond Duels,” which is available on pre-order on Amazon now and will be published on March 4, 2025. I think you’ll all enjoy it. Even all these years later, Pete Rose is still worth talking about.
Here’s his record-breaking hit:
Good stuff John!