Conventional wisdom has always said that if Pete Rose had just been more candid and contrite when allegations of sports betting surfaced, his punishment would have been less severe and, after a few years of public penance and “recovery” from his addiction, he would have been reinstated to general eligibility, added to the Hall of Fame ballot and voted into Cooperstown. National nightmare concluded.
That is not who Pete Rose is, nor who he’s ever been.
Charlie Hustle & The Matter of Pete Rose
The Bottom Line
An immersive Pete Rose experience, for better and worse.
Airdate: Wednesday, July 24 at 9 p.m. (HBO)
Director: Mark Monroe
As it stands, bringing up the all-time hit king’s name and Hall of Fame candidacy with a passionate baseball fan of a certain age — my own introduction to baseball fandom coincided directly with Rose’s quest to pass Ty Cobb’s hallowed record — is a good way to start a fight. (I go back and forth between, “Yes, he belongs in Cooperstown, but with the biggest disclaimer imaginable on his plaque” and “Nope, betting on baseball is the ultimate taboo and one that can never be condoned.”)
A similar conventional wisdom holds that if Pete Rose had used Mark Monroe‘s new HBO documentary Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose as a platform for performative candor and contrition, it probably would have worked on a superficial level. ESPN would have run with the key clips, pressure would have mounted to bring Rose a level of mercy before he sheds his mortal coil, and Monroe would have had the satisfaction of participating in a fun propaganda campaign — while making a mediocre doc that, if nothing else, definitely wouldn’t have needed to be four hours long.
That is not who Pete Rose is, nor who he’s ever been.
Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose is still overlong and repetitive at four hours. But it’s appropriately overlong and repetitive in a way that matches its subject matter, who broke Cobb’s record in large part by being willing to play until the age of 45, a minimum of four or five years after his on-field talent merited. Because of Monroe’s expertise at simply letting Pete Rose be Pete Rose, the documentary is able to straddle a complicated line — acknowledging that for a long stretch in the 1960s and 1970s, Rose was seemingly the embodiment of an American ideal, but then disgraced the game and disgraced himself and has been, at best, glib and opportunistic in admitting what he did.
He was gritty, dynamic and smart, getting more out of his natural skill level than possibly any player ever. He epitomized an American — and particularly Ohio-centric — blue-collar ideal. And he was a compulsive gambler who bet on baseball and has never, to this day, shown any awareness of why that was unforgivable to some purists. (Over the years, he has also been accused, with variable levels of reliability, of ties to corked bats, drug-related conspiracies and statutory rape, all vigorously denied.)
Instead of being clear, conclusive and redemptive, Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose is a complicated snapshot of a man whose greatness and downfall stemmed from similar personality traits. I’m not sure it’s going to end up changing anybody’s opinions, but its journey into an increasingly deep moral muddle makes for fascinating, if unlikable, viewing. Tasked with deciding whether to evolve into Charlie Humility or stick with Charlie Hubris, Rose just can’t help himself, and Monroe laps up the cackling ambiguity.
When Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose is the story of Rose’s early baseball stardom, it’s straightforward and unremarkable, but makes its point. Pete Rose was a fun and exciting baseball player, the anchor of one mini-dynasty — the Big Red Machine Cincinnati teams of the 1970s — and a key piece of the squad that ended a long Philadelphia championship drought.
The documentary is split, though, between three storylines: the linear “career retrospective”; the chronological “tragic downfall” set in the 1980s and 1990s; and the current day, as Monroe and the crew sit for a number of extended conversations with the legend, and follow him on the day-to-day of his current life. Based in Las Vegas, Rose makes frequent visits to Cooperstown mostly as an autograph-signing troll and tentatively tries to work his way back into baseball. The doc is there for the ill-fated trip to Philadelphia in which Rose’s snide response to questions about statutory rape upstage a championship reunion.
The present-day material is the best and most conversationally interesting part of the documentary, as Monroe plays fly on the wall for funny and poignant interactions with fellow Reds teammates and fellow all-time baseball greats, as well as general appearances with a public that, for these purposes, still loves him with undiminished fervor.
As was the case in Steve James’ excellent Bill Walton documentary, The Luckiest Guy in the World, mortality is a crucial character. We’re constantly asked to compare the aggressive, hard-sliding Rose of his youth with the slow, pained gait of the 80-something Rose, underlining suggestions, made by Rose and his myriad on-screen supporters, that it would be a grave injustice if his Hall of Fame induction comes after his death.
That’s a persuasive contrast in Rose’s favor, but the contrast working against him is between the words the gregarious Rose spews and the truth. Monroe keeps his own voice in the documentary to reassure skeptics that follow-up questions are being asked when Rose gives different answers to big queries about his misdeeds. The editing is quick to present, without commentary, evidence when he says things that are obvious misstatements.
Then it’s left for viewers to make their own determinations if there’s something shady about Rose’s near-photographic memory of his baseball exploits — game-scores, opposing pitchers and statistics — and his really fuzzy memory of when he started betting on baseball or the age of a young woman with whom he had a multi-year affair.
Particularly in the doc’s second half, you’ll probably find yourself wincing every few minutes as Rose is given one chance after another for absolution and pushes it away. You’ll wince. You can almost hear Monroe wincing. The only person in the documentary without self-awareness is Rose.
Pete Rose, it must be said, is a tough guy to spend four hours listening to. Sometimes he’s a gifted raconteur and other times he’s snide and evasive with a Neanderthal’s understanding of the changing world. He’s one of those figures who recites lies with such complete certitude that his defenders won’t care when one quote completely contradicts something he said five minutes earlier, much less in interviews from 1992 or 2004. When Ted Keith says there’s something Trumpian about Rose, it’s hard to dispute.
Keith, a scribe with the Sports Business Journal, is the most strident and trustworthy figure in the anti-Rose — or at least the “anti-forgiveness for Rose” — camp, though the doc features a few vague quotes from John Dowd, whose report doomed Rose, and an interview with shady Rose acquaintance and surrogate son Tommy Gioiosa from 2012.
Nearly every other interview is with somebody who unreservedly admires Rose or views his story as a Shakespearean tragedy that still deserves a happy ending. Figures like Al Michaels and Lesley Visser and Mike Schmidt are persuasive, while semi-arbitrary interview subjects like Chad Lowe — he grew up in Ohio, basically — are not. You’ll find yourself noticing a lot of gaps among Rose’s peers — usual-suspect players who are either entirely absent or are happy to appear at events with him but won’t do talking-head segments on his behalf. You won’t wonder why; there are plenty of reasons why being a character witness for Pete Rose wouldn’t be advantageous.
The doc is missing a lot of “official” figures — representatives of Major League Baseball, the Reds, etc. — and Monroe’s general approach isn’t particularly journalistic, so I’m not sure if anything here is “new” or “news” per se, especially in lieu of any fresh confessions from its principal subject. This may keep Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose from being “definitive,” but the show is as close as you’ll get to spending four hours in Pete Rose’s head. If that doesn’t sound like fun, don’t expect Pete Rose to change his story or his way of telling it for your sake.