Pete Rose slowly eased into his chair at Cincinnati’s Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and sighed, seemingly feeling all his 80-plus years during the second episode of HBO’s new docuseries about baseball’s exiled hit king.
From his seat, Rose beckoned for Marty Brennaman, the former Cincinnati Reds play-by-play announcer. The two men have known each other for decades. Brennaman approached and was eventually joined by his wife, Amanda Ingram Brennaman.
“You look good,” Rose said to Ingram Brennaman. “Still got them jugs, don’t you?”
“They’re still a part of me, yeah,” Ingram Brennaman replied in a deadpan. “They haven’t gone anywhere.”
Brennaman and Rose giggled as Ingram Brennaman called them old, dirty men.
The interaction seemed to belong to a bygone era, perhaps the one a half century ago when Rose was baseball royalty, before he was banned for gambling on games (including his own team’s). Mark Monroe, the director of the series, “Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose,” could have chopped the scene. Instead, he said he wanted to depict how Rose treats both friends and strangers.
And it set up a 2022 clip later in the series showing Rose brushing off a female reporter’s question about a statutory rape allegation, flippantly saying, “It was 55 years ago, babe.” (In 2017, in an unrelated defamation suit pursued by Rose, an unidentified woman said in a sworn statement that she had begun a sexual relationship with him in the 1970s when she was 14 or 15; Rose acknowledged the relationship in a court filing but said that it started when she was 16.)
“There was a lot of talk by the entire creative team to try to show Pete in what he thinks is appropriate or what he thinks is OK to do in public,” Monroe said, adding: “He’s kind of stuck in 1965, 1970. And I think in that age he was a person who could do a lot of things that no one would say anything about.”
“Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose,” a four-part documentary premiering Wednesday on Max, is a refreshing antidote to today’s blizzard of sports documentaries produced by athletes’ own production companies, pumping out sanitized versions of their triumphant journeys. Rose, a son of Cincinnati who won three World Series, three batting titles and made 17 All-Star Games, had no control over the final cut. But, on a decades-long quest to unsully his name, he was a willing participant as long as someone was going to tell his story.
“Everybody’s got an opinion about me,” Rose said during a recent telephone conversation. “But I got the only opinion that counts, to be honest with you.”
Honesty. With Rose, not the most reliable of narrators, most problems originate with that. He drew a lifetime ban in 1989 after baseball found that he bet on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds. Shortly after, baseball’s Hall of Fame decided those on the permanently ineligible list would not appear on its ballot. Rose denied the gambling accusations until finally admitting to them 20 years ago, timing the confessions to the publication of a book.
“What was most intriguing to me was the story of a man who was the best of the best, but also his own worst enemy,” J.J. Abrams, the filmmaker and an executive producer of the docuseries, said. “It’s a story full of contradiction. Inspiring and heartbreaking, hopeful and tragic. I’m not the world’s biggest baseball fan — but the story of this man was still deeply compelling to me.”
Monroe, whose credits include being a producer on 2022’s “Lucy and Desi,” joined the project after the character actor Greg Grunberg, a passionate baseball fan and longtime friend of Abrams, began imagining it with the producer Glen Zipper. Although he did not closely follow baseball as child, he figured lots of people had heard of Rose, the cog of those Big Red Machine championship teams in the ’70s.
Rose was not the most athletically gifted. But no one in baseball outworked him, and he proudly took on the nickname Charlie Hustle, bestowed on him by two Yankee legends, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, during a spring training game early in his career. (Whether the nickname was a compliment or a sarcastic dig remains open to interpretation.)
Nearly 21,000 people have played major league baseball across nearly 150 years. None have more hits than Rose’s 4,256 — a feat he wears proudly, and literally. Stitched prominently on the popped collar of Rose’s shirt seen regularly throughout the docuseries are the words “Hit King.”
The hustling has continued even after his life in baseball came to an end, earning him a substantial income by signing autographs. As Rose says in the docuseries, he moved to Las Vegas figuring tourists with disposable income would likely want to meet a celebrity while on vacation.
“He was an entertainer when he played,” Monroe said. “He’s an entertainer now. I think he saw being an entertainer and saying provocative things as a way to make noise, which is a way to make money, in a way to be relevant and to be someone who someone would pay for an autograph.”
Throughout the making of the docuseries, Monroe found himself as the fact checker, trying to draw the line that distinguished the athletic hero and the mortal man.
A claim by Rose that he never lifted weights at a Gold’s Gym linked with steroid use and the sale of illegal drugs is dismantled by a photo of Rose lifting weights at said Gold’s Gym. That a rookie Rose initially gravitated to Black players on the Reds like Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson because the white players shunned him because of his brashness is accurate.
“It’s not the end of the world if I said something I shouldn’t have said,” Rose said. “I don’t think I did.”
Rose spoke from Cooperstown, N.Y., home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, a place he can enter physically but not yet eternally. One does not arrive at Cooperstown on accident. Only on purpose. Last weekend, fans flocked there for this year’s inductees into the Hall of Fame: Adrian Beltre, Todd Helton, Joe Mauer and Jim Leyland.
Rose makes the annual pilgrimage to sell his signature. “I do as well as anybody that comes here to sign autographs,” he proudly pointed out.
“Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose” will surely resurface the debate over whether Rose should be eligible for the Hall of Fame and if the punishment fit the crime, especially now that sports betting has become more widespread. In the documentary, Rose says he would have received more mercy from baseball had he been an alcoholic or abuser.
Monroe has his own opinion on the matter but is keeping it to himself so viewers can draw their own conclusions. His goal was showing Rose as more than just a great baseball player.
Rose said he did not participate in the documentary to restart the Cooperstown conversation.
But that doesn’t mean enshrinement, and soon, isn’t important to him.
“Going in the Hall of Fame is not going to help anybody if I’m six feet under because going in the Hall of Fame is really for your family and your fans,” Rose said. “You’d like to be here when your family celebrates and your fans celebrate, not somewhere looking down or looking up, whichever it may be.”
He spoke of himself, and of Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez (both tied to the use of performance-enhancing substances) — players who possess some of baseball’s gaudiest statistics and are not in Cooperstown.
“All I can say about that is we made mistakes and baseball has a hard time with people who make mistakes,” Rose said. “I did what I did and I’m sorry I did it back in ’88, ’89. You know how many years ago that was I’ve been suspended? That’s a long time for betting on a baseball game.”
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