Free Pete Rose: An American Dilemma by Kostya Kennedy Page B

sporting events. Everyone wanted in. Rose had Forward Pass in the ’68 Kentucky Derby and Stage Door Johnny in the Belmont— good calls both—and he even won a little something on the Masters and the Indy 500 that year. He went to the River Downs race track whenever there wasn’t a game to play (“A lot of us went now and then,” says ballplayer Dan Neville. “And you knew that when you went to the track, you would run into Pete.”) Sometimes Rose met his teammate Leo Cárdenas over at Jorge’s restaurant on Vine Street and they played pool with a few bucks on the line. Rose kept his cash in his right front pocket, he said, so that it was always “right where I can reach it quickly.”
    There was a lightness about Pete, whether he had lined three hits in a game or none at all. “I was getting to him,” he told his teammates shortly after striking out four times against Houston pitcher Don Wilson. “You may not know it but I foul-tipped that last one.” He concocted quips that he would use throughout his career: “We were so poor growing up that I had a sister with a tag on her that said MADE IN JAPAN ,” Rose said. When he made the position change to leftfield, slotting in next to Pinson in center, with Harper over in right, Rose came into the locker room and announced, “Well, we had to integrate the outfield sometime.” 4
    That wisecrack was another that thawed the ice in the room, another Roseian flick at racial tension at a time when it continued to run high in America and in Cincinnati. It was the same year, 1967, that race riots erupted across the country, including in Avondale and other Cincinnati neighborhoods. The black families there—men and women and people of every age—raised a fearful hell, angry at their joblessness, their helplessness and the sense that they were being oppressed. A White House study that year declared that nine out of 10 “Negro city youths” would be arrested at some point in their lives. This was also the year that the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to forbid interracial marriage, as 16 states then did.
    That first round of riots in Avondale began a day after Martin Luther King Jr. had visited the simmering city and preached again the importance of nonviolence. But the people of Avondale would not be contained. Plate glass windows were shattered at furniture stores and jewelry shops, and a liquor store got looted. Black shopkeepers taped to their storefronts signs reading SOUL BROTHER in hopes of being spared. White journalists covering the riots got roughed up and knocked around. Debris in the streets was set ablaze and from so many vantage points around there, from the outdoor performance stage at the Cincinnati Zoo, for example, one could hear sirens pealing and see smoke rising thickly to the sky. “I don’t remember all that much about those riots, I think we were on the road,” says Harper. (The Reds indeed were away for nine days.) “I do remember going downtown to watch a fight—you know, a boxing match— with Pete and his dad a little later that summer. I guess that might have been a problem for some people, me being there with two white men, but I will never know. No one was going to hassle you if you were with Pete.”
    Rose had become by far the most beloved Red, a player from Cincinnati’s own soil and, the locals loved to believe, from their own mold. Before games, Rose stood near the dugout, or down one of the foul lines, signing autographs and giving away photos of himself and chattering with fans leaning over the railing, arms outstretched toward him. The love affair was plainly apparent at Crosley Field over the last weekend of September 1968, a couple of games against the San Francisco Giants significant only in that Rose was in a fight for the league batting title with the fine Pirates outfielder Matty Alou. Rose had come into September with a 13-point lead, but he had slumped badly, his average slipping from .347 to .330. Alou was at