Pete Rose: An American Dilemma by Kennedy Kostya

Author:Kennedy, Kostya [Kennedy, Kostya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO016000, Bisac code: SPO000000, SPO003020
ISBN: 9781618939449
Publisher: Sports Illustrated
Published: 2014-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

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HE WAS born on Nov. 16, 1969, six weeks after Pete Rose had laid down a two-out bunt hit to edge Roberto Clemente and win his second consecutive batting title. Peter Edward Rose II read the birth certificate. (The “Jr.” just came about, naturally, and stuck, sounding less pretentious than “The Second.”) He wasn’t the first Rose child—Fawn, born late in ’64, would at age four and five play in the so-called father-son game with the Reds—but from the start, he was the one ordained. “Did Pete ever love that boy!” recalls Karolyn Rose. “It used to be baseball first, then Fawn, then me. But when Petey was born he jumped to the top of the list. After baseball I mean.”

Official major league baseballs were placed in Petey’s crib (he liked to rub his tiny fingers along the stitches) and before he had learned to walk his father had taught him to hold a bat in a stance. The 1971 Reds media guide featured Pete Jr., 15 months old, on its cover—no one else, just Petey in a triptych of poses, cherubic in a roomy Reds uniform, preening before a camera and seated before a typewriter like a hard boiled reporter, a bottle of milk, straight-up, on the table beside him.

When Petey was five years old a Baltimore Orioles scout—the Roses’ friend Jack Baker—wrote the kid up a mock professional baseball contract as a lark, specifying that Petey was to become the highest paid player on the O’s. Big Pete laughed loud and hard when he saw the contract and Karolyn had it framed.

All through the mid-1970s, at the height and sway of the Big Red Machine, little Pete and other players’ sons—Ken Griffey Jr., Eduardo and Victor Perez—spent long parts of days and countless stretches of night at Riverfront. Fawn was there too, a determined tomboy in those years, and Petey likes to say that when it came to the Wiffle ball games, “she was better than all of us.”

The kids would grab their gloves and zip around the field and the clubhouse, darting up the tunnel and back just because they could, yelping out to hear their voices echo along the way. They’d clown around with Joe Morgan and eat too many snacks and try on all the batting helmets and sometimes throw a ball around together for a while, down the foul lines, before the team came out on the field.

Petey was always in uniform. He would dress before a full-length mirror, pulling on his regulation Reds issue: double-knit fabric, built-in sash belt, fitted hat, shoes polished just so, his name stitched—not ironed—on the back, above the number 14. Petey was ready to play. “No!” he’d shout if any sort of facsimile outfit were offered up. “I’m not wearing that! I’m wearing what Dad’s wearing!” Karolyn ordered a couple of extra uniforms for little Pete in case one was in the wash.

There was the time that Griffey Jr. threw up after eating too much corn

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