news_1_8-04

Associated Press, 1/8/04

A BELLIGERENT ROSE ONLY A BIT APOLOGETIC

by Ronald Blum

NEW YORK -- Pete Rose's book went on sale Thursday, and the career hits leader blames his accusers and medical conditions for the problems that got him kicked out of baseball.

Rose spills his thoughts in a colorful autobiography, "Pete Rose: My Prison Without Bars," written with Rick Hill and released by Rodale Inc. Rose, still banned 14 years later, also concedes for the first time that he bet on Cincinnati Reds games while he was manager in the late 1980s.

The highly touted 322-page book contains no other bombshells. It alternates between apologies for his wrongs and the aggressiveness Rose showed during a 24-season major league career.

Rose writes he has had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Behavior, which he says he got from his mother, and the book contains several quotes from a doctor about the effects. He repeats that he still loves to gamble legally at racetracks, and describes himself as "grumpy, short-tempered and cold-hearted."

He also talks about the emotional moment when he faced his family before going to prison and "humiliating body searches" in prison. He recounts anecdotes of his career such as taking an umpire to dinner after he was ejected from a game and makes a few puerile jokes.

He also compares his compulsive gambling to the behavior of former President Clinton, actors Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder, and blames former Reds manager Jack McKeon and general manager Jim Bowden for not giving Pete Rose Jr. enough of a chance when he played for Cincinnati in 1997.

Rose repeatedly challenges the report on his gambling by John Dowd and the accusations made by his former associates before he accepted a lifetime ban in August 1989.

Rose said at the time of the investigation, he couldn't believe the way baseball treated him, calling baseball's evidence "flimsy."

"I spent 24 years building a baseball career that other players could only dream of," he wrote.

"And I put it all at risk over the thrill of `risk' itself. I spent thousands of hours in the batting cage. I took hundreds of grounders and fly balls each day in an effort to master my craft. I was known for a diligent work ethic that was unequaled among my peers. Nobody worked harder or took the game more seriously than Pete Rose -- nobody. Yet after knowing (Paul) Janszen for only seven months, I trusted him to place bets on the game I loved. How could I be so disciplined in one aspect of my life and so reckless in the other? ...

"I was Pete Rose -- baseball's all-time Hit King. I had more records than anybody on the damn planet. Nothing could possibly be wrong with someone who achieved that much success -- nothing! ... I was Charlie Hustle -- baseball legend. I would not go down without a fight."

Rose writes about the day he went to federal prison in 1990 after pleading guilty to tax charges and talked to his son, Tyler, then 6.

"I had no answer for the betrayed look in Tyler's eyes," Rose wrote. "My dad never let me down on any level and failing my own son was too tough to handle. So hell, I started to cry, too -- rare for me because, like I said, I'm not a warm-and-fuzzy guy. ... As you can imagine, this was the lowest point in my life."

He says that in prison, he was given identification No. 01832-061.

"I never thought I'd be wearing anything other than No. 14 on my back," Rose wrote, adding that guards "couldn't help but gawk at the sight of Charlie Hustle in lockdown."

Rose pleaded guilty to two counts of filing false income taxes by failing to report income and was sentenced to five months in prison, three months in a halfway house and 1,000 hours of community service.

"I'm probably the only person in America to go to jail for underpaying his taxes by 4 percent," Rose wrote. Then he added, "The responsibility rested squarely on my shoulders. I just wasn't ready to accept it."

The book quotes Dr. David E. Comings of the City of Hope National Medical Center on ADHD and how it applies to Rose.

"ADHD kids are very strong-willed. They don't like anyone telling them what to do," Comings said. "Although they can't sit still or focus on subjects of little or no interest, their restless energy when focused can by dynamite. Pete Rose is not unlike Einstein, who flunked English but excelled in math."

Rose says he hopes commissioner Bud Selig will grant his application for reinstatement.

"My actions, which I thought were benign, call the integrity of the game into question," Rose wrote. "And there's no excuse for that, but there's also no reason to punish me forever."

Rose blames former commissioner Fay Vincent for the 1991 rule that bars him from the Hall ballot and wants "to enjoy my Hall of Fame induction ceremony while I was still alive!"

AP Sports writers Joe Kay in Cincinnati and Ben Walker in New York contributed to this report

Cincinnati Post, 1/8/04

ROSE MIXES CONTRITION, DEFENSIVENESS AS HE EXPLAINS GAMBLING ADDICTION

by Barry M. Horstman

NEW YORK -- Six-figure losses, bookies' threats to his family over unpaid debts and his cavalier willingness to jeopardize his place in baseball history marked Pete Rose's long descent into compulsive gambling and banishment from the sport he dominated for a quarter-century, the former Cincinnati Reds star admits in his new autobiography.

In "My Prison Without Bars," which went on sale nationwide today, Rose wavers between contrition and defensiveness in detailing a serious gambling problem that he denied for years until it cost him his reputation, job and freedom -- and which some argue that he still has not fully confronted even as he seeks to use the 322-page book to undo some of that damage.

Advance publicity and published excerpts already have generated headlines over the book's most tantalizing revelation: Rose's admission, after 15 years of denials, that he bet on baseball while managing the Reds.

The manner in which Rose blends his mea culpa with contentious dismissals of the evidence against him and, to use his words, the "scum" and "stool pigeons" who provided it typifies his book-long difficulty in living up to his assertion in the foreword that "I don't blame anyone else for my problems."

"I still can't believe I let things get so out of control," Rose wrote. "But it's like that old saying, 'When you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.' Hell, I was scratching all over."

Although Rose realized that betting on baseball was the sport's cardinal sin, he explains that he rather lightly ignored the potential threat to his career as he desperately searched for a strategy to stem his mounting gambling losses on other sports.

Baseball, he writes, simply seemed to offer an opportunity for him to bet on the sport he knew best, and also, after his playing days ended, and he was strictly a manager, to try to recapture some of the highs that he had experienced on the field.

Rose links his gambling to the obsessive-compulsive and risk-craving behavior common to addicts. He also says he has waged a lifetime battle with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder -- which made it impossible for him to concentrate on schoolwork and many other activities and Oppositional-Defiant Behavior, a propensity toward conflict.

The various conditions produced what Rose characterizes as "Pete Rose Logic."

"I can't honestly remember the first time I bet on baseball," Rose says. But he recalls that the first time that he began openly talking about it was in 1986, when, while watching the National League playoffs between the Mets and the Astros, he remarked to friends: "Betting on the playoffs makes the games more exciting to watch."

Rose's fascination with gambling began in his childhood, when the Sedamsville-Riverside area where he grew up was filled with clubs and saloons with craps games, poker and blackjack tables, and when neighborhood bookmakers felt little need to conceal their profession.

His father "routinely bet the horses and occasionally shot craps," and young Pete also accompanied his dad to the track.

By the time he made the Reds in 1963, Rose was spending many of his days at the races. In a precursor of things to come, that briefly drew the attention of top baseball officials, who expressed concern to Rose that his frequent gambling might bring him into contact with "undesirables."

It would not be until the 1980s, however, that Rose's gambling would begin to careen out of control as he used a network of local and out-of-state bookies to wager ever-increasing amounts on football and basketball games.

The scope of his gambling was underlined by the $30,000 "settle-up" figure that he worked out in the mid-1980s with bookmakers, meaning that he would normally wait until he had won or lost that much before either collecting his winnings or paying off his debts.

"I didn't realize it at the time, but I was pushing toward disaster," he said.

Around that time, Rose "hit an all-time low" as his luck "went from ice-cold to Mr. Freeze." By the fall of 1985, Rose notes, he began to look upon Monday Night Football as a game played "only -- to give me a chance to get even from what I'd lost on Sunday."

During one three-week period, Rose wrote 11 $8,000 checks to a New York bookmaker -- a figure selected to stay below the $10,000 threshold that triggers additional bank scrutiny -- and "dropped another six figures to -- other guys." He always bet big, Rose said, because "$100 a pop -- didn't do it for me. -- I needed to have more writing on it."

With it seeming that he could not pick a winner in the numerous basketball and football games he then routinely bet on, "the temptation got too strong" to try to capitalize on his expertise by betting on baseball Rose said.

Rose stresses that whenever he bet on the Reds, it was always to win, and claims that he "never took an unfair advantage" in any of his baseball wagers. He never bet more or less based on his knowledge of injuries or other inside information, and never allowed his wagers to influence his baseball decisions, Rose said.

While acknowledging staining baseball's reputation, Rose argues that the 14 years in which he has been banned from the game under a lifetime suspension constitutes an excessive punishment.

"My actions, which I thought were benign, call the integrity of the game into question," he said. "And there's no excuse for that, but there's also no reason to punish me forever."

His gambling "hurt myself and my family far worse than -- baseball or any of its fans," Rose contends.

At the height of baseball's investigation into the gambling allegations, his then-19-year-old son, Pete Rose Jr., then playing for an Orioles farm team, was greeted by Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" every time he stepped to the plate at one ballpark.

During an argument over one gambling debt, Rose said that one of his contacts threatened to burn down his house or "break my kids' legs.'' And later, when income tax evasion charges triggered by the gambling inquiry landed Rose in prison for five months, his 6-year-old son Tyler was taunted by classmates chanting "Your daddy's a jailbird."

Though being banned from the sport he loves since 1989 has been a purgatory, Rose says his gambling problem produced an even worse punishment.

"Watching my son leave the (prison) compound was the hardest thing I ever had to do," he wrote. "It was the only time in my life that I ever felt helpless."