Thanks to all for the wonderful feedback on my ESPN.com tribute to Wayman Tisdale, the former Oklahoma and NBA star who passed away last week. The story link is here: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/columns/story?columnist=kreidler_mark&id=4170151
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Pete Rose says he’d give Alex Rodriguez a second chance, because, hey, good guys do bad things, right? Or at least things that other people see as bad.
You know: People who don’t get it. Who never played the game. Who aren’t jocks.
My favorite snippet from Rose’s radio interview with Dan Patrick is his assertion that using steroids is a worse transgression than betting on your own team to win, as he admits he did. I love the passage for the beautiful economy of Rose’s lies.
Pete is counting on you to be either too lazy or too young to get to the truth, which is that he was a degenerate gambler willing to bet on anything from a pro game to which of those spiders was going to get to the top of the fence-post first. He bet on all sports. He bet on baseball. He bet on the Cincinnati team he was managing, about which he had the ultimate insider’s advantage – everything there was to know about his players’ injury situations, states of mind, etc.
If you choose to believe that Rose only bet on his team to win (according to Pete, he loved his scrappy Reds so much that he would only bet that way) then, by all means, enjoy yourself. Just don’t confuse that with chivalry.
Rose denied all of his gambling issues until he got ready to write a book and profit from the admission. He then acknowledged most of the allegations, but adamantly denied betting on baseball. For that admission, he waited nearly another 15 years, until it was time to write another money-maker. A hit on the talk-show circuit, a sure thing at autograph-whore sessions, Pete Rose became one of the most accomplished liars in American sporting history – not long after concluding his career as one of the greatest players ever.
In so doing, Pete created the template that almost every disgraced athlete has used since then: deny, deny, deny, to the point that the people who love you and want to believe you actually start doubting the mountains of evidence against you. And when push comes to shove, at least find a way to make a buck off the sleazy truth.
So, yes, I suppose it’s fair to say that Rose won’t be getting my Hall of Fame vote if he’s ever reinstated to the game. (That sound in the background, you hope, is A-Rod wincing at the thought of being “endorsed” by the most notorious gambler in baseball since the Black Sox scandal.)
See the Dowd Report at http://www.dowdreport.com/.
News summary of Rose’s radio appearance May 14: http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4166083
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It feels foolish, doesn’t it? It feels foolish to even venture a guess anymore about who’s using in sports and who isn’t. It’s a sucker’s bet every time, trying to find the clean stars. Manny Ramirez isn’t a shock, exactly, but he is one more guy you have to cross off the list. Just ludicrously careless.
Still, I’m a parent, and parents don’t give up so easily. They know the truth in a way that makes it unavoidable: Their children love, love, love having sports heroes. It’s got nothing to do with what Charles Barkley thinks about being a role model. He is one. LeBron is one. Peyton is one. Manny is one. And every time one of them goes off the rails, he ruins something for a kid in a way that leaves a deep, lasting impression.
It really is that simple.
So baseball is loaded with losers and louts, but you knew that. The more interesting thing, by far, is figuring out where you’re still willing to go with your hopes on behalf of your kids, the ones who still love pro athletes and want to believe in them.
In the wake of Manny’s news, I thought immediately about Derek Jeter, as follows: Please be clean. (He’s at the top of one of my sons’ lists, with David Wright at the top of the other’s.) And I decided that Jeter almost certainly is, that it’s going to be okay. He’s a safe hero, comparatively. A sucker’s bet, I know, but we’ve all got to invest hope in something.
Herewith, a quick, shoddily researched but heartfelt list of bona fide winners who I think my two baseball-playing, baseball-loving sons can believe in:
Now go out there and don’t make me look stupid.
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