Brrok Review – “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball”
The complicated life of Pete Rose is presented in great detail by author Keith O’Brien in his recently-released book, Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball. O’Brien crafts a compelling narrative through extensive research, using decades of newspaper articles, federal court documents, FBI files, MLB’s 1989 investigation into Pete Rose’s gambling, along with hours of interviews with people around Pete, both in the past and the present. He even spoke to Pete on the record for more than two dozen hours.
Early in the book, we learn about Rose’s childhood growing up in Cincinnati with a father, Big Pete, who was an accomplished local athlete in baseball, basketball, football, and boxing. Big Pete was a looming presence in the life of the young Pete Rose, always pushing him to outwork everyone on the baseball diamond, and taking Little Pete to the racetrack on weekend afternoons. As it turned out, baseball and gambling would be the overriding passions of Pete Rose’s life, for better and for worse.
I was not yet born when Rose began his career, but I belong to one of multiple generations of baseball fans who grew up watching Pete Rose succeed on the field during his long career. He was a 17-time All-Star, the NL Rookie of the Year in 1963, the NL MVP in 1973, and World Series MVP in the 1975 Fall Classic. He got on base three times in the legendary Game 6, which is on the short list of the greatest World Series games in baseball history.
Rose was a key cog in “The Big Red Machine” that won the World Series in 1975 and 1976. Two years later, the whole country followed his pursuit of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1978. Not long after, Cincinnati Fans were shocked when Rose left his hometown team to join the Philadelphia Phillies as a free agent in 1979, which was the year I fell in love with baseball as an 8-year-old fan of the “We R Fam-A-Lee” Pittsburgh Pirates.
Rose, along with other baseball players in the 1970s and 1980s were bigger stars and much more famous to the general public than the baseball players of today. His teams played in six World Series from 1970 to 1983, at a time when half of the TV-watching households in the U.S. watched the World Series. By comparison, last year’s World Series between the Rangers and Diamondbacks had a 14 share, meaning just 14 percent of TV-watching households watched the five-game series.
Showing himself to be a hustler on and off the field, Rose parlayed his baseball success and his frequent postseason performances into TV commercials for Swanson’s Hungry Man Dinners, Jockey brand underwear, Aqua Velva, Wheaties cereal, Kool-Aid, Grecian Formula hair coloring for men, Tegrin shampoo, Nestle Crunch chocolate bar, basically anything that would pay him to push their product. I remember them all.
In the 1980s, he appeared on the The Baseball Bunch, hosted by longtime Reds teammate Johnny Bench, and a new generation of young baseball fans grew to love him. Many of us choked up on the bat like Rose and mimicked his crouch at the plate. I was the perfect age to enjoy The Baseball Bunch and I watched every episode. In his appearances, Rose was all about the fundamentals, like how to correctly field a throw at first base or round the base aggressively looking to take an extra base after a hit. When he talked about the fundamentals of baseball, he reminded me of my Little League coach.
My generation of baseball fans watched the veteran Pete Rose play in the World Series with the Phillies in 1980 and again in 1983, before he transitioned into a player-manager with the Red in his final seasons as he relentlessly pursued Ty Cobb and that record-breaking 4,192 hit.
All of this is chronicled in Charlie Hustle, but the book also details the specifics about what was happening in Pete Rose’s life behind the scenes. The 12-year-old me watching Rose on The Baseball Bunch didn’t know any of the sordid details of Rose’s life, like his infidelities as a married man, including a relationship with a teenage girl who was half his age, and his longtime associating with gamblers and drug dealers. As a kid, I just knew Pete Rose, the ballplayer, and loved everything about his game.
The book took me on an emotional journey, from the highs of re-living the day Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb’s all-time hits record to the lows of Pete’s inability to save himself by refusing to be honest when faced with banishment from baseball after the 1989 Dowd Report came out. The majority of the book carries us to this defining moment in his life, when Pete Rose is confronted with the evidence against him, yet refuses to give in and admit that he bet on baseball.
I was 18 years old when the Dowd Report came out. I didn’t want to believe it. I refused to believe it. I believed Pete Rose. Then he spent the next 15 years claiming he never bet on baseball until finally admitting he did and I felt like a fool.
While reading Charlie Hustle, knowing Rose’s history now, I often found myself wondering who Pete Rose was deep down inside. What was he thinking as his gambling debts piled up, as his marriage crumbled, as he was sleeping with a girl half his age? All those years lying about betting on baseball; how did he live with that lie hanging over him? In the end, I think I was looking for a depth of character that just isn’t there. I get the feeling that Pete Rose doesn’t think beyond his next hustle, his next opportunity to make a buck or a bet.
The book also touches on the post-MLB life of Rose as he travels from autograph show to autograph show, still the same Charlie Hustle working as hard as ever as he ages into his 80s. The recent proliferation of sports gambling, now embraced by MLB and the other major sports leagues after being legalized in many states across the country, has some longtime Pete Rose fans calling for his lifetime ban to be lifted and wanting him to finally get inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Others are adamantly opposed to both. Charlie Hustle presents the facts and lets the reader decide.
This book came out before the recent news that Ippei Mizuhara, the interpreter for the most famous baseball player on the planet today, Shohei Ohtani, allegedly stole $4.5 million from Ohtani to cover his gambling debts. There is an ongoing investigation and it’s the biggest gambling story in baseball since Pete Rose agreed to a lifetime ban 35 years ago. For baseball fans in general and particularly in light of the Shohei Ohtani investigation and the incessant promotion of gambling during baseball games these days, Charlie Hustle is a must read.
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