Pete Rose: An American Dilemma Read Online Free PDF Page A

though. Not like centerfielder Ronnie Flender—known as Nobbie—who lived over on Beechmeadow, well up from the river and who would later play minor league ball for the Reds. Nor did Pete have the air of a prospect like smooth Eddie Brinkman, pitcher and third baseman. Even when Brinkman was just a sophomore, everyone said he was going someplace, that someplace turning out to be 15 seasons as a major league shortstop.
    Still, Pete could play. Unpolished, a little herky-jerky, sure, but coach Pappy Nohr liked his grit and his smarts. Pete pushed his way in at second base, gradually worked his way up the batting order, became the best bunter on the team. He was a switch hitter, and had been since nine years old when his dad and uncle Buddy said that he should learn the skill because it would give him a better chance to keep making teams. He could hit O.K. from both sides, a lot of sharp ground balls, and he was always getting on base. At the West Hi athletic fields on Ferguson Road, the baseball diamond and the football field shared space, with first base smack in one of the end zones—making this a small piece of North American earth on which Pete Rose in the late 1950s spent a lot of happy moments. At the early morning practices Pete’s dad, overcoat on, was most often the only dad who had come out to watch.
    The boys at West Hi were one crew cut after another, and the girls all had bobs. If you drove a car with any rumble in it (Pete, until the very end of high school, did not drive any car at all) you brought it around so people could hear and see. The school board built roadblocks—speed bumps we’d call them now—into the driveways and into the parking lot out back.
    Pete didn’t go much for studying. There was hardly a class he could stand, except gym, of course—which had the added bonus of being cotaught by Mrs. Cook with the dimples, the cutest teacher in the school. Pete flat-out flunked his sophomore year, putting himself, he would joke, on the Five-Year High School Plan. He might have made up the 10th grade coursework in summer school, but Harry determined that playing baseball over those months, legion ball and for local sponsored teams, would be a better use of Pete’s time.
    In what would have been Pete’s senior year, the kids at Western Hills devised a class theme and a slogan that appeared on hallway posters and echoed from teachers when they addressed the students en masse, a theme of enthusiasm derived from a Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation. Pete wasn’t attending the Bandwagon variety show at the high school gym or mingling at the Hi-Y socials with the other jocks on Tuesday nights. He wasn’t hanging around the parking lot listening to Elvis and the Everly Brothers on some kid’s Bel Air radio. Yes, he wore his tie to school sometimes, but picture day, no, that wasn’t for him. Not that year or any other. Who could sit still that long, anyway? 1 When it came to the social scene at Western Hills, in other words, Pete was not exactly conforming. And yet if there was a student who embodied West Hi’s student spirit and its proud new slogan, maybe more than any other among the hundreds in that sprawling school, it was Pete. The Emerson quote read: Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm .
    “Pete was not fast and he was not strong and for a lot of years he was tiny,” says Jim Luebbert, who played ball with Pete at Sayler Park. “I mean tiny. But if you were choosing up sides for a baseball game, and you wanted to win the game, you picked Pete first. There was not any question about it. There was no, ‘Maybe I’ll take this guy or that guy.’ You picked Pete. He’d get in there at catcher and just run the game, have everyone on his team rallying together.
    “And we were all guys who could play. We cared about baseball. All that stuff that Pete would be famous for—the way he went so hard with all that energy—he was already like that then, far back as I can remember. You