Book Review - "Charlie Hustle"

Those who know me well would no doubt be surprised, if not amazed, to think that I would ever read, let alone purchase, a book about Pete Rose.  I have never hid my feelings about Ol' Number 14 - great ballplayer, low life human being.

So, what's the story here?

Well, last April Keith O'Brien, author of the book you see pictured here, came to Pittsburgh to address the local SABR chapter.  His address to us about the nature of his book,  the extensive research that he did to write it, plus his responses in the Q&A that followed made me actually want to read this book.  Plus, I figured that if the gentleman makes the effort to come to Pittsburgh to address forty or so SABR members, then, dammit, people should buy his book, so I did.  So did several other members as well.  It sat on my book shelf all baseball season, and I finally pulled it down last month and read it over the holidays.  I can tell you that it is a very good book.

Speaking of the Q&A, my own question to Mr O'Brien was "Did you interview Pete Rose for this book, and if  did so, did you have to pay him?" since I know that Pete would never do anything unless you paid him.  The answer was yes, he did interview Rose, and no, he didn't pay him.   O'Brien made it clear to Rose that this was work of "journalism  and history", that it would reveal all of the warts.  Rose agreed and made no effort to exert editorial control.  Beginning in 2021, O'Brien had extensive telephone and in person interviews with Rose.  He spent three days with him at Rose's home in Las Vegas, and one full day with him at a signing event n Cincinnati.  Soon after, Rose stopped returning O'Brien's phone calls and the personal interviews ended, but Pete gave enough of himself to enable O'Brien to write quite a book.

While this can be considered a biography, it is more a study  of how Rose came to be the person that he became.  His roots in a hard scrabble working class neighborhood in Cincinnati, and his striving to obtain the approval of a demanding father ("always hustle....never stop working") are fully spelled out here.   There is an interesting story about a teenaged Pete taking boxing lessons at a local gym, and getting fight in 1957 with a Cincy amateur fighter named Virgil Cole.  Cole pummeled Rose to the point that his sister feared for his bodily safety, but Pete never went down, and the story became a part of Pete's hometown legend.  Cole never spoke much of the fight, but those who knew him knew the story and when he died in 2003, he rated an obituary in the Cincy paper with the headline "He Once Bested Pete Rose."  Rose never forgot the story either, but the way he told it was that while yes, he lost, but he never went down, he never quit.  "He couldn't knock me out" was how Rose gilded that lily.

O'Brien doesn't spend a lot of time on the runs, hits, and errors of Rose's career.  Whole entire seasons are often covered in two or three pages.  Extensive coverages is given to only three "baseball events"  - the knocking down and injuring of Ray Fosse in the All-Star Game, the terrific 1975 Reds-Red Sox World Series, and the chase leading up to Rose getting hit number 4,192 to break the all-time hits record held by Ty Cobb.  The primary focus of the book, as it should be, was of Rose's gambling and the low life people that he chose to hang out.  (During his various depositions with John Dowd, Pete told him: "John, I was a horse shit selector of friends.")

The last hundred or so pages of the book documents all that went into MLB's and the FBI's investigation of Rose and his downfall.  It is unvarnished and no whitewash job.   Maybe it will allow some people to feel sympathy for Rose, but I don't think that it should.  Rose made his bed, and he slept in it right up until the day he died last last September.

I am not going to get into the should-he-or-shoudn't-he-be-in-the-HOF.  That is a  beaten to to death horse, but I will tell you three things that stood out in this book that tell you all to need about Pete Rose.

One, he had a sexual relationship with a high school girl when he was in his thirties. "She told me she was over 18" was Pete's excuse.

Two, Pete had four children to two wives.  While married to his first wife, he also fathered a child with his mistress at the time. It was a relationship that was flaunted at the time, even Karolyn Rose, his wife, knew of it.  Pete paid support money to the woman, who the author interviewed for this book, for that child, but after a few months, he quit sending her money and never acknowledged her or the child again. Throughout the book, O'Brien always mentions Pete's four kids, but never again mentions that child.  I wish that he would have followed up on that particular odious part of Rose's character.

Three, Rose bet extensively ALL THE TIME.  Multiple bets a day, and each bet for thousands of dollars.  And he lost money.  A lot of money and guess what?  He never paid his bookies for the losses.  When the curtain rang down on the Pete Rose Saga in major league baseball, guys went to jail, and several bookmakers never collected the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands that he owed them.  So in addition to everything else Pete Rose was, he was also a welcher.  The guy had no honor whatsoever.

Rose died a few months after the publication of this book, but nothing needed to be added to the story that Keith O'Brien tells in "Charlie Hustle".   Terrific book.

Three and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.