Pete Rose: An American Dilemma Read Online Free PDF

know, there was always a chance you might get hurt by Pete during a game. That was just the truth of it. He wasn’t a dirty player but he was balls out. When we were eight years old playing baseball he was like that. When we were 11, when we were 16. Same way all the time. He had scrapes on his arms, you know, and if you got into a close play with him at a base, well you just didn’t want that. That was part of why a lot of guys hated playing against him—and another reason you always picked him for your team.”
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    OTHER KIDS liked Pete. He could joke around with anyone, make a sharp remark about a gal or someone’s wheels, or some funny comment about an incident in a game, and that was enough, more than enough to win them over, on the ballfields or even on the front steps of West Hi in the early morning before the bell. The school was a tall brick building with arched doorways and an enormous U.S. flag before it blowing in the breeze. Some of the frat-boy jocks at Western Hills, the ones who wore the good clothes and had a mind to go to college, they didn’t much like it when the river rats came up and took spots on the sports teams, but the way Pete went about it, they kept quiet. Pete would go over to the track team’s practice and bet a guy he could outrun him and, especially if there were a couple of bucks on the line, he would find an extra burst and win the race. The other athletes respected him for stuff like that, and they knew too that Pete was a fighter with an edge to him, a fearless son of a bitch.
    When Pete couldn’t find a ballgame, when there weren’t even enough kids around to play Indian ball over at Bold Face Park, he’d ride to the river, glove hanging off the handlebars of a second-hand bike and slap a rubber ball against the wall at Schulte’s Fish Garden next to the Anderson Ferry landing. He’d been doing it for years, like something out of a hokey movie, a kid with bat and glove and ball, bouncing it against the wall all day when he should have been doing his long division. The kid swings his bat, 100 swings right side then 100 swings left, and coaxes some grown-up to pitch to him for a while. He swings until his arms ache and he chases the ball even after the sun drops and the light is lousy from the outside bulbs, and then that kid grows up to become that man, the alltime hits leader of Major League Baseball. Someone puts that in the movie and people watching roll their eyes and shake their heads at how terribly trite it is, just another old cliché of the supposed American life. Only this is really how it was for Pete Rose, banging that ball against the side of Schulte’s Fish Garden—the windowless concrete wall with the giant breaching walleye painted upon it. The air there smelled frankly of fish.
    He wasn’t always alone of course; Slick and Bernie came and played rubberball too. It was just that Pete didn’t stop having at it, even after the others went home, and then the next day before the others showed up. At it and at it and at it on bright days or under a lid of heavy cloud, until he himself became a landmark for the folks who lived around there or who lived higher up on Price Hill, folks who might go for a drive with a brother or sister in from out of town, talk them through the scenery a little bit. And here’s the Anderson Ferry I told you about. And that’s the fish place where we go to eat sometimes. And there’s that little pale-faced kid, some river rat, who is always playing ball against the wall.
    From the Schulte’s lot you could see the riverboats floating full of lively passengers on the Ohio. Or sometimes there’d be a long line of commercial barges churning upriver, 15 or more traveling bow to aft, the entire line of them pushed by a single little tug.
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    IF PETE, or later his brother Dave, ever had a problem with one of the neighborhood boys—and problems certainly arose—Harry had his way of taking care of things. He’d bring out two pairs