Title: Charlie Hustle
Rating: 5 Stars
This book struck home to me. When the Cincinnati Reds won their back to back World Series starting in 1975, the Big Red Machine was my team. Even though baseball was no longer quite at the peak as America’s pastime, it was still huge to me. I knew all of the names of the Reds’ starting players and pitchers. At the center of it was Pete Rose. I admired his toughness and his aggressiveness. Unlike some other players, it seemed that he was always working for it and taking nothing for granted. Nothing made this more obvious than his sprints to first base after drawing walks and his fearless headfirst slides.
Probably because both of my parents were from the deeply conservative Midwest, the Reds were the family team. At the time, Cincinnati was a solidly Republican town. The Reds reflected that. They had a strict dress code. Long hair and facial hair was not allowed. We were heartbroken when the long haired hippies of the Oakland A’s defeated the Reds in 1972. My mom loved how excited Pete Rose always seemed to be when playing baseball. My dad thought that Rose was one of the players that played baseball ‘the right way’. Of course, it probably didn’t hurt matters that Rose was one of a relatively few white superstar baseball players in the 1970s. Rose seemed to be one of those superstar athletes that were also great role models.
The first half of the book is about his rise. Born and raised in the Cincinnati area, he was the ultimate local boy makes good story. Pete was a small, scrawny boy that was driven by his very athletic, if frustrated in his dreams, father. Pete became obsessed with baseball, constantly practicing his swings and his fielding. Through a family connection, he was able to connect with the Reds’ organization at its very lowest level for a grand total of $7,000. He didn’t care; he was playing professional baseball. Full of energy and confidence, he quickly made his way up the ranks, making it to the major leagues in 1963, at the age of 22. He was always the first to arrive and the last to leave. Baseball was his everything. One time, even when he was a legitimate star and celebrity, he freely spent hours after regular practice pitching batting practice to George Foster, just to give the young player the opportunity to get better.
With his seemingly boundless energy, it might have turned out well for him if he could simply have played baseball 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Unfortunately, he did have free time and it’s a pretty severe understatement that he did not make good use of it.
He became an out of control gambler. It wasn’t so much the amount of each bet, although that was a problem, but the sheer volume of bets. He’d make multiple simultaneous bets. He’d make so many bets that it’d be nearly impossible for him to come out a winner. It almost seems as if he couldn’t watch a sporting contest without having a wager to keep him interested. He ended up deeply in debt to multiple bookies.
Given his high profile, he knew that he couldn’t make the bets himself. He brought in various sketchy characters to make bets on his behalf. He’d get so close to them that they’d move in with him so that they’d be constantly available to him. He’d go down to spring training, where he and other sketchy friends would do what they called a triple header. After training practice they’d go out and bet on horse racing, dog racing, and jai alai.
It’d finally reached the point where he figured that, to make money, he better start betting on baseball. Not only that, but he didn’t exactly cover his tracks. As the feds started closing in on Midwestern bookie operations, Rose’s name kept coming up. At the time, the most respected sports magazine was Sports Illustrated. Once major league baseball heard that Sports Illustrated was conducting an investigation, the league knew that it had to try to get ahead of it. It conducted an investigation that quickly and easily determined that Rose was betting on baseball.
Even when faced with with all of the evidence against him, Rose refused to admit that he gambled on baseball. Due to this recalcitrance, the league commissioner felt that he had no choice but to enforce baseball’s very strict rules against betting on baseball and banned him for life. It took fifteen years for Rose to finally admit that he gambled on baseball. By then, it was (at least up to now) too late. Over 80 years old now, time is running out for him to be inducted into the Hall of Fame while still living.
On the one hand, it’s kind of a tragic tale. Rose is a man that clearly has Hall of Fame credentials. He has more hits than any other person that ever played the game. Rose gave over twenty years of his life to the game. Many men in the Hall of Fame are drunks, liars, and cheaters. Ty Cobb, an inaugural member of the Hall and Tris Speaker, a member of the second class, apparently conspired together to throw games.
On the other hand, Rose had his chances. There’s a good chance that if he’d just promptly admitted his sins to the commissioners that they would have fined him or suspended him. Even worse, the main person that actually turned on him did so because Rose didn’t pay money owed him. If Rose had simply given him $30,000, the investigation might not have gone anywhere. At the time, Rose kept tens of thousands of dollars in cash in bundles at his condo. Some of his choices are maddeningly.
Although gambling is what did Rose in, there are other things in his past that demonstrate his character. In 1974, at the age of 33, he began grooming a fourteen year old girl and ended up having sex with her before she was sixteen. While married, he had numerous affairs. One ended in the birth of a child. He had no part in the child’s life but did pay child support until he decided that he didn’t want to anymore. One of his roommates was a heavy steroid user. That same roommate acted as a drug mule, driving kilos of cocaine from Florida up to Cincinnati. Several of the bookies that he worked with had links to organized crime. Although he never admitted to it, there’s a reasonable chance that his boundless energy was supplemented through the use of amphetamines.
From a baseball point of view, possibly the worst unproved accusation had to do with his batting. By the time that he was in his forties, he was relentlessly on the pursuit to overtake Ty Cobb’s hits record. The problem was that, by the time he reached 42 or so, his batting average began to decline precipitously. That is, until he had an unexpected resurgence and started hitting better. Well, it turns out that a person has publicly admitted that he was corking Rose’s bats. That is, he illegally altered Rose’s bats to make them lighter so that it’d be easier for Rose to make contact. If true, that is blatant cheating.
I found this book fascinating to read. Spread in this read were moments of great amusement to me. For instance, when Pete Rose broke Cobb’s record, a network broadcast announcer stood up, turned to the camera, help up a Budweiser and said, “Pete Rose, this Bud’s for you”. That is a hilarious product placement. An equally amusing product placement was when, after being named MVP of the World Series, Rose was given, as his award, a GMC Pacer. Amusing because the Pacer was possibly the ugliest, slowest, and most poorly built car of its generation. At the time Rose was driving Rolls Royces and Porsches.
Finally, I learned one piece of trivia that will always stick with me. I never thought about it, but I never knew how Pete Rose got the nickname Charlie Hustle. In 1963, Rose was at his first major league spring training camp, as always desperate to make his mark. One game, the Reds were playing the mighty, legendary New York Yankees. In the fifth inning, Rose laid down a bunt and then sprinted safe to first base.
Mickey Mantle was so shocked by the ridiculousness of a ballplayer bunting during a meaningless spring league game that he decided to come up with a derisive name for Rose. Talking to his buddy Whitey Ford, they first thought about Henry Hustle before finally settling upon Charlie Hustle.
Yes, the nickname that Pete Rose, even now in his 80s is known by, was originally a Mickey Mantle insult.
dorkenstein 