When you grew up in the late 1970s and you loved baseball but lived in a state without a Major League Baseball team, this is what you did: Loved the Cincinnati Reds .
Which meant: Loving Pete Rose.
That’s how it was. This was before ESPN, before most blue-collar families had cable television at all. In those days NBC was showing the “Game of the Week” on Saturday, and because the Reds were World Series champions in 1975 and ’76 and averaging 90-plus wins a year for the whole decade – because they were the Big Red Machine of Pete Rose and Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench and Tony Perez and more, more, more – they were on TV all the time. That’s how I remember it, anyway, though that’s not the only explanation for a kid in Mississippi loving the Reds, and by extension, loving Pete Rose.
My dad loved Pete Rose, too.
Pete was an everyman ballplayer, not blessed with an abundance of speed or power. He sprinted to first base for walks, for crying out loud, and so did I the first time I was walked in a youth baseball game. This was Oxford, Mississippi, in 1978, and everyone laughed at me. I didn’t sprint to first again.
Not everyone is as indomitable of spirit as Pete Rose.
News: Pete Rose, MLB all-time hits leader, dies at 83
Doyel in 2018: Youth baseball in Oxford, Miss., was segregated in 1978. Here's what Dad did.
But my dad recognized a kindred spirit in Rose, a blue-collar kid from the westside of Cincinnati. My dad grew up poorer than that, several rungs below “blue collar” on the social hierarchy of Shawnee, Okla. He was in high school when Pete Rose was winning National League Rookie of the Year in 1963, and he was at the University of Oklahoma when Rose collected his first 200-hit season in 1965, and he was in Vietnam when Rose was winning his first two batting titles in 1968 and ’69.
Dad was going to the PX on his U.S. Navy base in Vietnam, where he oversaw the meals for nearly 10,000 soldiers every day, to get the Armed Forces newspaper – the Stars and Stripes – and read about Pete Rose.
Dad doesn’t read the paper much these days, anymore. He’s suffered a handful of strokes, and his eyesight has worsened. He doesn’t go to the PX or any kind of grocery store much these days either. He’s in a rehab facility in Winter Haven, Fla., working to regain enough of his strength and balance for a return home. He doesn’t read his phone much for news these days, either. The strokes, the eyesight … well, it’s just too difficult.
So it was with concern that I called Dad on Monday night to tell him “there’s been news in the sports world,” and to ask him a question:
Did you hear about Pete Rose?
“Oh no,” my dad said. “Did he die?”
"I grew up thinking hustle meant ‘Charlie Hustle’"
Another thing about my dad, these days: His memory’s not as sharp as it used to be. Not for current stuff, like a conversation we had the other day about this or that. Could be an important topic, like his newest medication or the date of my next visit to Winter Haven. Could be something smaller. Hard to gauge the percentage of something he’ll remember these days, but for some reason I’m thinking of Pete Rose’s .348 batting average in 1969.
But some things? Like, baseball things? My dad’s brain is a steel trap.
“I can remember one specific day,” he says, and before he finishes that thought, try to imagine how hearing this feels for me, his son, his acolyte, his follower. My dad was – my dad is – larger than life, just this enormous power source, barrel-chested and cocky and, ahem, a whole lot like the ballplayer we know as Pete Rose. These days, seeing him turn 79, seeing him spend his days in a bed in a rehab facility or, for a change of view, in a wheelchair in the hallway, is staggering. It’s the way life is, but it’s not the way life should be.
Not my old man’s life, anyway.
My old man should be reliving the great moments in his life, sitting at a restaurant table or living room couch and telling stories that has the room laughing out loud. At the very least, he should be quietly remembering some of the best moments of his earlier days, or my childhood, or both.
And then comes a night like Monday, the death of Pete Rose at 83, and the gravity of that – the shock – breaks through all those strokes, and all these months of fuzziness.
“I can remember one specific day,” as he’d been saying, “when there was a pop-up that went to the edge of the dugout of the opposing team and Pete was standing there in his usual posture. He was just waiting to pounce, and the ball didn’t bounce right, and he was right there and picked it out of the air.”
Dad’s describing, I think, one of Rose’s most memorable hustle plays, when he caught a foul ball muffed by Phillies catcher Bob Boone during Game 6 of the 1980 World Series.
“I grew up thinking hustle meant ‘Charlie Hustle’ – and I can’t do anything less than he would do,” Dad’s telling me, before going on one of those side trips he makes sometimes. “That picture sticks in my mind. Those two pictures I just mentioned, they stick in my mind.”
Two pictures, Dad? You told me just one.
“Oh?” he says. “Well I can remember him near the dugout. I saw him pick that one ball that he shouldn’t have been able to catch.”
That’s right, Dad. You told me about the foul ball he caught, but you said “those two pictures I just mentioned.” What was the other picture?
“I don’t know,” he says. “You’re asking me like a reporter, and I feel like a source and not your father.”
Right now you’re both, Dad.
Doyel in 2015: Pete Rose's brother works at a grill in Mooresville, and says: "We could be closer"
U.S. soldiers at Vietnam loved Pete Rose
All the Navy grunts loved Pete Rose. That’s what Dad’s remembering from Vietnam. And it makes sense, right? Before the gambling scandal, before he was banished from baseball, Pete Rose was a self-made man who made his mark playing our national pastime. He wasn’t just of America.
He was America.
The same holds true after his scandal, probably.
But in the early 1970s he was one of the best players in the world, on his way to becoming the Hit King. He retired in 1986 with 4,256 career hits, surpassing Ty Cobb’s record of 4,191, two numbers a kid who loved baseball but lived in a state without a Major League team doesn’t need to look up. Those are numbers you know as surely as you know your own birthday.
And in the late 1970s, Dad was asking his son to become a switch-hitter, like Pete Rose.
“Do you remember that?” he’s asking me Monday night.
Sure do, I’m practically shouting at him, giddy, having the best conversation with my dad in months. I even crouched like him!
“That I don’t remember,” he says, which I find odd, but maybe that’s the strok—
“Yeah I do!” he says. “You hunched right over, just like he did.”
What we’re doing Monday night, this is how Dad and I used to communicate. Sports was our love language, and baseball was our earliest dialect. He drove us once to St. Louis to watch the Reds play the Cardinals. George Foster had four hits that day, including a double and triple. Dad remembers an extra-base hit. I remember Pete not being there, Pete playing for the Philadelphia Phillies, the first important pro athlete of my childhood to switch teams. It felt blasphemous.
Just looked up George Foster’s career on baseball-reference.com, and it appears Foster’s four-hit game at Busch Stadium happened on Sept. 1, 1980. Sounds right.
Doyel from June: Happy Father's Day, Robert Doyel, author, judge, destroyer of segregated baseball league
Doyel from 2017: The Christmas I learned the truth about my Grandma, and my dad's poverty
As Monday night rolled along, long after Dad and I had finished our Pete Rose conversation, he sends me a text. He says he’s just remembered the other thing, the second of those two pictures he’d mentioned earlier in the night. He sends me this text, and it’s not entirely clear because, you know, but he appears to be describing the same play – the catch of Boone’s bobble – a second time.
Just as well. That’s a forever memory of mine, too, Pete Rose hustling just because, in the right place at the right time because where else would Charlie Hustle be? Now I’m finding video of the play – from a world before ESPN to one with Google and YouTube, all in the same lifetime – and remembering the rest of it:
Pete Rose stabbing the ball with his glove and strutting back into fair territory, holding the ball aloft like a torch, and then bouncing it one time off the AstroTurf at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia before strutting to first base. He’s so barrel-chested, so cocky, and someday I’m going to miss my dad – I mean, I’m going to miss Pete Rose – so much.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar .
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Pete Rose's death stabs at my childhood, but rekindles my Dad's forgotten love language
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