Pete Rose’s Competitiveness Drove His Rise in the Record Books—and His Downfall

The all-time hits leader never made it into the Hall of Fame after being banned from baseball for gambling, and it clearly bothered him despite his efforts to hide it.

Rose played every position except pitcher, catcher and shortstop in the majors. / Walter Iooss Jr./Sports Illustrated

Pete Rose will go to his grave without being a Hall of Famer and so it likely will remain in perpetuity. And that chafed Rose, a phi beta kappa student of baseball history, every day he took a breath until his last one Monday.

Upon his passing at age 83, his legacy belongs to something even more iconic and exclusive than the hallowed museum in Cooperstown. Rose, for both the better and the worse, became a nearly mythic American character, closer to Paul Bunyan than Paul Molitor. In the baseball club of outsized personalities, he resides with the likes of Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, Casey Stengel and, yes, Shoeless Joe Jackson, his fellow countryman in exile. The stories about them are forever embedded in the fabric of the game, even of this country. Many of the stories are even true. With Rose, however, you wished some of them were not.

His legacy is complicated, but the man was not. Few players were so beloved and despised in equal volumes. Neither fast nor strong nor supremely talented, he willed his way to a record 4,256 hits while playing 500 games at five different positions. He cranked out funny, blunt quotes even more often than he did hits. His defining one may be this: “I’d walk through hell in a gasoline suit to win.”

Rose was addicted to winning. The subtext of that was that he had to constantly prove himself and knew no boundaries. He was maniacal about winning in all ways, which made the temptation of gambling and breaking MLB Rule 21 too strong for him.

I first met Rose in the winter of 1980–81 as he wound his way through the woods and burbs of Pennsylvania on a Phillies media caravan tour. I covered him as a player-manager with the Reds, where he filled reporter’s notebooks as if the words, jokes and cracks came from a fire hose and worked with him during his time with Fox Sports. 

But I came to truly understand Rose nine years ago after spending nearly five hours with him as he drove his Bentley from Las Vegas to the Los Angeles area. It remains one of the most fascinating, revealing interviews I ever have done, though to be honest I did not need to ask many questions. Rose unplugged with nothing but asphalt and time ahead of us was a study in self-revelation. Indeed, I don’t think I ever sat across from anyone who revealed themselves so deeply so easily. If you want to know Rose, I can’t capture him any better than did that piece and that moment in the twilight of his life. His words define him.

While setting an interstate record for F-bombs, Rose revealed his pride and his wounds. He loved baseball too much, if that is possible, because when the game barred him, Rose became a man without a country.

He tried to tell me the Hall of Fame ban did not consume him, but his words and body language behind the wheel that day betrayed him.

“What I will say to you is I don’t want you to sit here and think before I go to bed at night I’m going to pray that I go to the Hall of Fame,” he told me. “To be honest with you, I’m going to pray that I get up tomorrow morning. Seriously. Because I’m 74 years old, and there’s a hell of a lot more behind me than is in front of me.

“Okay, so, based on that, you know, what good is the Hall of Fame going to do me if they put me in after I die? For my kids? Because my kids and my grandkids, I think they have an idea of how happy I would be if I went into the Hall of Fame and not go in a year after I die where they have to be up there without me. You understand what I’m saying? It would be important to them but …”

He felt double-crossed by commissioner Bart Giamatti, who in replying to a question on the day he barred him gave his opinion that Rose bet on baseball, even though it was not part of the official agreement with Rose. Of course, it was true, but Rose liked playing with the truth like taffy to make it fit the imaginary kingdom of The Hit King. He was in Cincinnati when he heard Giamatti in New York.

“We should have went in there immediately and said we’re withdrawing,” he told me. “What he did in reality, he kind of … he kind of broke the faith of the agreement. It’s like, Tom, you’re on trial for murder, and all of a sudden, the jury finds you innocent. The judge is not going to say, ‘Tom Verducci, you’re innocent, but I think you killed him.’ He’s not going to say that.”

Rose caught himself, as much as he could edit himself, knowing he kept hope that commissioner Rob Manfred would reinstate him someday.

“But that’s water over the dam,” he said. “We didn’t react when we should have. The rest is history. But hey, Bart did what he had to do. I have no qualms with Bart Giamatti. When you screw up like I screwed up I’m not going to use any reporter or TV show or radio show to whine about not being in the Hall of Fame.”

Rose was called “Charlie Hustle” for his unmatched, aggressive style of play. / Heinz Kluetmeier/Sports Illustrated

The steroid era made a mockery of home run records. But Rose was proud to know that his hit record has stood the test of time and pharmaceuticals. It’s the baseball equivalent of the Roman Coliseum, a timeless wonder.

“Would it be nice if you could be sitting in the car right now and ride with Roger Maris or Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron?” Rose said. “Those are the guys whose records got shattered. Not mine. If someone beat my record of 4,256 who was linked to steroids, we’d need an eight-hour car ride.”

 I asked him, “How would you handle that?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I would be pissed. I would be pissed. But you know what I’d do? I’d still be willing to give the guy a second chance. And most guys, given a second chance, start to take advantage of it. When a guy starts taking advantage of a third chance, then you’ve got to flush him down the toilet. But America is known for giving second chances.”

I knew where to go. I knew Rose was waiting for a second chance that would never come, as he saw PED scofflaws and miscreants welcomed back.

“When do you get yours?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It may never come. But if it does, I’ll be the happiest guy in the world, because I know what I stood for as a player. Even though I f----d up as a player I respected the game. I really respected the game, that’s why I played like I did.”

In Rose’s narrow world, by playing baseball as if going through hell in a gasoline suit, he earned privilege and protected status.

“I don’t give a f--- how you wear your hair,” he told me. “I don’t care how you wear your socks. I don’t care if you put your pants down over your feet or above your knee. I don’t care. Just be on time and play hard. And help your team try to win. Those are the most important things to me. And I think that’s the biggest reason why I’m so popular today—simply because of the way I played.

“And I like to tell people, ‘How did I play? You know how I played? I played the right way. That’s all I did. I played the right way.’ Don’t give me extra credit because I hustled. I played the right way. I played the way every kid should play. Every kid in any sport should play the way I played. Go out there for two and a half, three hours, bust your ass and come back the next day and do it again.”

He was getting agitated. You could see by remembering how much he gave the game he was reminded of how much he had lost. Persona non grata after all of that?

"Let me tell you something,” he continued. “That’s a trait you should go to the grave with. F--- the other guy! I used to love to show up the other guys. I took that stance in the minor leagues when I used to run to first on a walk. You know, ‘Hollywood! Look at Hollywood! Showboat!’

“Then all of a sudden they look up and I’ve got 130 runs scored.”

He smiled like the cat who swallowed the canary.

“Now you’re not showboating.”

The line, delivered with a showman’s timing, was the pitch-perfect kicker to his story. But the Hit King wasn’t done. No, the point needed to be driven home. Rose nailed it like another fastball on the barrel of his bat.

“Take no f---ing prisoners.”