Cunningham, the great American picking up the pieces of the greatest Reds Opening Day.
Ever, I'm not sure how we can ever repeat that. It's the
weather, the Jim Scott situation, which was fabulous, the game itself,
and although Keith O'Brien, my guest here is a Saint X guy, I
don't know the last time there was a color analyst from Muller High School talking
about manager David Bell from Muller High School with Bruce Souter on the mound finishing
the game from Muller High School. That has never happened before. I say
that will never happen again anywhere in life. But until then, Charlie Hustle
is the name of the book. It is the defenditive story of Pete Rose's
rise and fall. The Wall Street Journal said quote, I'm not sure there's
ever been a book that does a better job of sketching out Pete Rose than
Keith O'Brien's Charlie Hustle. And Keith O'Brien, welcome to the Bill Cunningham Show.
Off the air. You told me you're a sat X guy, graduated
in nineteen ninety one, but you have vivid memories of Pete Rose. First
of all, why did you think another book had to be written about Pete
Rose? Well, thanks for having me, Bill, great to be back
with you. You know, I feel like all too often people have looked
at Pete's story through the prism of baseball, and I want to be clear,
there's a lot of baseball in my book. But what I wanted to
do here was look at him as a man. You know, this is
the story of an ordinary man from an ordinary working class neighborhood on the West
Side, a man of ordinary talents who is never the best player on his
own youth baseball teams, who climbs and scrapes and claws his way to the
top of the mountain, and then, mostly through his own poor choices,
poor decisions, and addictions, loses it. All. That is, you
know, more than just a baseball story. You know, that's honestly,
Bill, in my opinion, it's a Greek tragedy that just happened to play
out in and around a baseball feel. And you know, I felt if
I could get access to Rose, if I could get access to the people
who were in his inner circle, and if I could tell that story from
the inside, that could be a powerful and compelling tale. And through my
research here on Charlie Hustle, you know, I have you know, found
things that have you know, never been written about before. And you,
in the format of this you interviewed, you have one hundred and fifty hours
of interviews with the people who Pete best twenty seven hours of interviews with Pete
Rose himself until he stopped it. If somebody when Pete Rose was thirteen,
fourteen years old playing little league baseball, he didn't have much of an arm.
It wasn't very fast, had no power. If somebody would say when
he was fourteen fifteen sixteen in Western Hills, Bold Face Parking, see that
guy right over, that little guy right there, he's going to be the
greatest baseball hitter of all time. Nobody would have believed it. So talk
about your access to Pete and how things went south at one point. Then
I want to get into many specifics. Yeah, So, you know,
I, as you said, I interviewed anyone I could who would crossed through
you know, his orbit in the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties,
and of course I wanted to interview Pete. And you know, I figured
that would be a challenge because Pete has never spoken before for a book that
he did not have editorial control over, you know. But you know,
Pete's you know, I think recognized what I was trying to do, and
he certainly appreciated you know, my my Cincinnati roots and and and he did
grant me twenty seven hours of recorded interviews in person and on the phone.
And we didn't have a falling out. Bill. I don't know what happened,
but I was pushing him, you know, I was pushing him into
the you know, the dark corners of his life. And I don't mean
that in a nefarious way. I just mean that, you know, I
feel that if Pete's you know, can can reveal more about why he did
these things, people might understand it better. And I think maybe that I
just pushed Pete a little too much. But I agree with you though about
what you said about you know, if you'd seen him on the West Side
of nineteen forties and fifties, nobody would have picked him out as the player.
Nobody, nobody you in access to Pete Rose in late twenty twenty one
able to conduct all those hours of interviews and were Red's ownership and talk about
nineteen seventy five, seventy six. That's the hallmark of Red's baseball up to
this point. I hope the glory days lie ahead, but nonetheless, fifty
years ago talk about Red's ownership and managers, et cetera. Concerned about Pete
Rose's gambling. Then, Yeah, So one thing I wanted to do with
this book was go back and remind readers why we ever cared about Pete Rose
in the first place. You know, in the last thirty five years,
as Pete has made poor decisions, he's sort of become a caricature of himself.
And I think baseball fans and even Cincinnatians have forgotten why we ever cared
in the first place. So to go back and to chart that rise.
And of course, you know, he's at the peak of that rise,
right Bill nineteen seventy five, seventy six. And and but even while this
is happening, there are already concerns about his behavior off the field, his
behavior specifically with with gamblers, but also you know, with the mistresses in
his life. And you know, based on my reporting, by the mid
nineteen seventies, those things were open secrets in the Reds clubhouse and even in
the Reds ownership box. And based on my reporting in nineteen seventy eight,
right around the time that Pete began his forty four game hit streak, a
hit streak that we haven't seen the likes of, by the way, since
nineteen seventy eight, there was some kind of intervention in the office of Red's
president Dick Wagner. Major League Baseball sent a representative who was the head of
security for Major League Baseball at that time, and the discussion that day in
Dick Wagner's office was about gambling and gambling debts. And you know this,
of course is you know, eleven years before Pete's problems his addiction, frankly
will will make you know, national headlines in nineteen seventy eight. Whatever happens
that day in Dick Wagner's office makes no headlines at all. And as far
as the Reds wanting to cut ties with Pete Rose was his off field behavior.
I guess the numerous affairs and cheating on his wife, et cetera.
Wasn't They're real focus on it. I think a lot of baseball players and
a lot of people in radio, TV and authors of books do exactly the
same thing. But the issue was did Pete's gambling and seventy eight have something
to do with the Reds deciding to let him go. Yeah, let's remember
what's happened in nineteen seventy eight. The longtime general manager, Bob Hauseum has
stepped down. Bob Hausum loved Pete Rose and who was taken over as the
president of the Reds, but Hausum's deputy all these years Dick Wagner. And
you know, Dick Wagner had a puritanical streak to him, He had sort
of a militant streak to him, and Dick Wagner had never really been fond
of Pete Rose. You know, Pete was not Dick Wagner's favorite flavor of
ice cream. And so these two guys, you know, don't get along
already, but absolutely based on my reporting, you know, you know,
Wagner is concerned, he's concerned about Pete's behavior off the field, and you
know, by the end of that year, you know, he makes the
roads no real offer. You know, this is the first first time Pete
Rose is going to be an unrestricted free agent. You know, he's going
to go test the market. There are lucrative offers out there from Philadelphia,
Atlanta, Kansas City, Pittsburgh. He's not going to get a lucrative offer
from Cincinnati. Because Dick Wagner doesn't want Pete Rose around anymore. They made
that decision to get rid of him. And then he goes to Philadelphia and
wins the national title again, he wins the World Series in Philadelphia. Did
his behavior of gambling continue in Philadelphia? And it was not an issue there?
You know, it's clear that you know, Pete has routinely been betting
with bookies going all the way back to the early nineteen seventies, you know,
based on my interviews with Pete, in interviews I did with others,
you know, it begins on the West Side, you know, with a
with a man named Alfonse Esselmon al Esslman, who was a well known bookie
in Cincinnati in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Uh. And it does continue
deep into the eighties, you know, through the Phillies years, through even
his one brief year in Montreal, and and by nineteen eighty five, eighty
six, eighty seven, based on reporting I did, interviews I did with
three different men who placed his bets on baseball and and and including my own
review of a of a betting notebook that one of these men capped. Pete
is betting a ton. And you know, we all know now about gambling.
We can do it on our phones. You know, everybody can do
it on their phones right now in Ohio, you know, And and even
the every day better knows you can't look at the rack of baseball games today
and place wagers on ten or twelve games and hope that that's going to go
well for you. It's not going to go well for you. And you
know, unfortunately, by the mid nineteen eighties, that's what Pete is doing.
He is he is placing bets on eight, ten, twelve games a
day. And this was at a time when any gambler didn't have access to
the information we have today. You know, he's placing bets on games he
knows very little about, and he's losing a lot of money. Bill you
know, at points in nineteen eighty six, based on my reporting, the
review of this notebook, an interview with the man who kept with this notebook,
you know, Pete's losing as much as thirty thousand dollars a week.
And that's at a time when he's only making a half million dollars a year
as the Reds Reds manager, So it's a lot of money. Keith O'Brien,
did he bet on baseball while in uniform for the Reds and the Phillies.
This is under great dispute, and Pete is adamant that his betting on
baseball begins in October nineteen eighty six, during the playoffs that year, the
two months after his last at bat as a player. Based on my reporting,
the review of this betting notebook and the interview and an interview with the
man who kept this notebook, Pete's betting on baseball begins at a minimum in
early nineteen eighty six, not long after opening day. And it begins bill
because Pete right now, at this time in nineteen eighty six, betting on
March Madness, betting on college basketball does poorly. He loses a lot of
money in March nineteen eighty six betting on basketball, and coming into that spring,
it seems that his choice to maybe crawl out of that hole is to
bet on baseball, to bet on the one thing he knew the most about.
And this is thirty thousand dollars a week net. So if he was
making fifty thousand dollars a week, every dollar was going toward betting on whatever
he could bet on. It's a disease. It's an illness, and Pete
Rose never confronted it until sometime in the nineteen nineth when he wrote that book,
and he wrote the book to confess to it so that he could make
money off that. One can only imagine Keith or Brian, what if Pete
Rose had not done any of that, he would be the most honored baseball
player in America today. He would be throwing the first pitch of Opening Day,
He'd be doing whatever it did. Can you speak about the impact on
Pete's family and friends? And you know he was close with Marty Brenneman,
he was close with not so close to Johnny Bench, when he was close
to Joe Morgan. Can you talk about the impact his gambling had on his
family and friends. You know, it's hurt a lot of people. Bill.
You know, his close friends have worried about him over the years,
worried greatly. And his lies about about his bets on baseball lives that he
held on to for fifteen years. You know, those hurt lots of people.
And it didn't just hurt baseball. It didn't just hurt memory of Bargieamanti.
It hurt his close friends. When he wrote that book in two thousand
and four where he finally revealed that he had been lying all these years,
even his closest friends didn't know that he was about to change his story.
They were caught off guard by the revelations in that book. And you know,
in the early nineteen nineties Bill one man goes to prison protecting Pete Rose,
it was Tommy Giosa. Tommy was one of Pete's closest friends in the
nineteen seventies and eighties. Tommy refuses to cooperate with Major League Baseball when they
come knocking in the spring of nineteen eighty nine, and because he's not going
to cooperate, because Tommy is not going to tell Baseball what he knows,
federal authorities pick him up in April of that year and he faces a litany
of charges that, unfortunately for Tommy, he chooses to fight and he ends
up serving more than two years in federal prism. So, you know,
Pete lives hurt a lot of people. And you know you mentioned something before.
Bill, You know, you know Pete has deserved, you know,
all the criticism he's received over the years for his lives, for his behavior.
My book doesn't defend that at all. But you're right, you know
this, this pattern is the behavior of an addict. And all of us
probably have had someone in our lives and our families who has struggled with addictions,
right, and people who are addicted struggle to admit the truth. All
right, we got to run the name of the book, as Charlie Hussel
the Wall Street Journal says, it's the best one written in the subject matter.
You're going to sign this book? Where will you be over the weekend
or whatever? Where will you be if anywhere? I will be at Joseph
Beth Books in Rookwood on Tuesday next week, April second, and I will
be doing an event with Dell Hi Historical Society the following night on Wednesday,
April third. All right, Keith O'Brien, thank you very much for coming
on the Bill Cunningham Show, and good luck with the book. We'll see
what happens. And once again, Keith, thank you very much. Thank
you. Bill. Let's continue with more the Pete Rose story. It never
ends, by the way, He's going to turn eighty three years old in
July. Eighty three years old four fourteen forty one. He was born Bill
Cunningham, News Radio seven hundred WULW. Spring is here and prices are soaring everywhere grocer