The first time I met Pete Rose in person, I made sure to arrive 15 minutes early. It was the fall of 2021, and I was in the early stages of writing a book about the baseball legend and controversial American figure. Rose had been granting me interviews on the phone for more than a month, and had invited me to meet him in Las Vegas for three days of meetings.
Anyone who knows anything about Rose is aware that hustle is central to his success and mythology. Rose and I had talked a lot about that mythology on the phone: his working-class roots in Cincinnati, his ordinary talents as an athlete growing up, how he probably never should have made it to the major leagues, much less become baseball’s all-time hits leader, and how he knew, at a young age, that to survive he had to outwork everyone. He had to become his alter ego, Charlie Hustle, an ethos that would propel him to stardom.
For Rose, hustle wasn’t just about sliding headfirst into bases, slamming into catchers trying to block home plate, or swinging in the batting cage until his hands bled. It began, Rose told me, with something basic: punctuality.
“I’m always early,” Rose said. “If you’re late, you might miss something.”
So there I was, sitting on a bench outside my hotel in Las Vegas, 15 minutes early on the day we first met. And there was Rose, pulling around the corner just a few moments later at the wheel of his cream-and-black Rolls-Royce. I looked down at my watch. Pete was 10 minutes early. “As you can see,” he said, “I like to be prompt.” Off we went for our interviews.
It was like we were both trying to prove something to the other. Rose was going to make it clear that he was going to hustle, even at 80 years old, limping on bad knees, and I was going to show him that I understood. I could show up early, too, and work hard in my own way.
“I’m always early. If you’re late, you might miss something.”
For the next three days, I pushed Rose to dismantle the mythology and let me inside his darkness that drove him to self-destruct in the 1970s and 1980s, when he was playing his best baseball and making his worst choices. He was chasing young women, consorting with gamblers and bookies, and placing bets with these bookies on baseball—even his own team, the Cincinnati Reds—in violation of league rules. I wanted him to answer many questions about these topics, but one most of all: Why? Why would he make mistakes that he knew could cost him everything?
This question sits at the heart of my new book, Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball. My interviews with Rose himself were just the beginning. For the book, I unearthed federal-court documents, combed through Major League Baseball’s 1989 investigation into Rose’s gambling, and conducted more than 160 hours of recorded interviews with the people who knew him best, including his closest friends, former players, people who placed Rose’s bets, former commissioners of the game, and the men who pursued Rose in 1989 and finally unraveled the lies he had been telling for years.
Along the way, I realized something: Rose wasn’t a baseball player. He was Icarus in red stirrup socks and cleats. He was bound to fall, like the hero in any Greek tragedy. When Pete came crashing back to earth, the impact would scatter wreckage across the landscape, hurting lots of people. In interviews I conducted, people wept, broke down, or went off, still angry at him.
But my most intimate interviews were with Rose himself, including during those three days in Las Vegas. He’d pick me up at my hotel in the late morning, and we’d go to one of his favorite restaurants. We’d sit there for hours, reckoning with his past, and sorting through the ruins. When it was almost dinnertime, we’d head home in his Rolls-Royce. As we drove, he was still talking and I was still listening—stories about baseball, stories about him, stories about what was and what might have been—but it would all be over soon. By the end of the week, Rose stopped calling me back.
Keith O’Brien is the author of several books, including Paradise Falls and Fly Girls
