Sporting News, The: Still lying after all these years - former baseball player Pete Rose

There's a problem with lying for 14 years, then suddenly announcing that you're now telling the truth. Some people believe you're "telling the truth" only because lying got you nowhere, so you figure it's time to try something else.

Because liars lie, your new tactic is almost never the whole truth. At most you create an illusion of the truth, a manipulation of thoughts and facts designed to persuade everyone, perhaps even yourself, that, at last, truth has been told.

So when Pete Rose says he now is telling the truth, all we can be sure of is that he has something for sale, perhaps an autographed jock strap from the night of 4,256, or, say, a smarmy book with the woe-is-me title, My Prison Without Bars.

This time it's a book written for two apparent purposes: to make a buck and to affirm the obvious.

It says he bet on baseball. We knew that.

It says he lied about it. We knew that.

It says he's not sorry. We knew that.

Though baseball investigators have worked on the fringes of Rose's baseball gambling habit for 30 years, he must believe we all fell off the turnip truck yesterday because he insists he first bet baseball in 1987.

And though he long has portrayed Bart Giamatti, Fay Vincent and John Dowd as evildoers out to flame him, Rose does not apologize to the men whose painstaking investigation has stood the test of time and left Rose only one way out: confession.

Vincent said, "I don't think he's capable of telling the whole story, and he doesn't have the good grace to apologize."

Michael Y. Sokolove, author of the best book on the Rose investigation, Hustle, said, "Guys in sports think people don't keep track of the truth. It has dawned on Pete too late that on this particular thing the truth did matter."

Too late by a long time.

On June 20, 1989, as the storm gathered, Rose laughed and told a story. "One reporter showed up and said, 'I'm on the Pete Rose case,' and I said, 'That's me.'

"He said he'd been covering the Middle East for eight years and hadn't seen a ballgame for 10 years. He'd interviewed Yasser Arafat. Yasser Arafat. And I'm thinking, 'He's here doing me now? What the hell did I do?'

"The guy told me that when he met Arafat, they played chess. So I said to him, 'I don't play chess. You want to play checkers?'"

On that day the year he was kicked out of baseball for good, Rose talked to two writers in his manager's office. The day before, he had said on television, "I never bet on the Reds, and I never bet on baseball."

No one before had heard that denial, Rose said, because he'd said it only to then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth four months earlier.

"It didn't matter if you guys heard it," Rose said, meaning the visiting scribes. "I told you I'd have my day to speak out. That day is now."

For a half-hour, he denied gambling accusations. He impugned those who testified against him. He spun alternative explanations for damning circumstantial evidence. He finally turned defiant, as if defiance were all the alibi he needed.

"Who has put more into baseball the last two decades than me?" he said. "So why am I going to destroy baseball? Why would I destroy my reputation?"

Good questions then, good now. The answers are lost in a psychological spider's web that even Rose, or especially Rose, cannot untangle. He is, after all, a man capable of violating his business's most important rule of integrity; he also can lie through his teeth in a 14-year cover-up of his crime.

It angers up the blood to read Rose's justification for lying. He says he did it because he believed the penalty for gambling on games was too harsh. Since an 1877 game-fixing scheme by Louisville, the punishment has been lifetime banishment.

"I just kept telling myself that permanently is a long goddam time," Rose writes. "Right or wrong, the punishment didn't fit the crime--so I denied the crime."

If you think so much deceit created a burden of sadness and regret, the dispiriting fact is, you don't know Pete Rose. Here he is: "I'm sure that I'm supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something wrong. But you see, I'm just not built that way.... So let's leave it like this: I'm sorry it happened, and I'm sorry for all the people, fans and family that it hurt. Let's move on." Such gall, arrogance, impudence. But, OK, let's move on to the two most important baseball questions in Rose's life.

1) Should he be in the Hall of Fame?

No.

But make him eligible with a caveat. After he does baseball community service, perhaps speeches explaining why insider gambling is bad, he might--might--be taken off the permanently ineligible list. Then baseball writers can vote him up or down. If character is still an issue, here's one vote for down.

2) Should he be allowed to work in baseball?

No.

Granted, drug addicts and alcoholics put the game's integrity at risk. But gambling always has suggested the ultimate crime of game-fixing, committed first in 1877 and most famously in the 1919 World Series. Thus, Rule 21's threat of exile.

A lying, arrogant, impudent weasel who gambles on his games is one small step from game-fixing. Even if he never takes that step, his actions yet are corrosive of public trust.

If Rose demonstrates recovery from his addiction, good for him. Let him buy a ticket to Reds games.

DAVE KINDRED

dkindred@sportingnews.com