"Pete Rose"

(My Prison Without Bars)

-pete rose, with rick hill

2004

If you've never read a book about sports (and perhaps never wanted to), this might be the exception you should make. And not for any reason that will be obvious to 99% of readers...to most, this will be just another mindless jock book. But if you have a keen eye for the human condition, this book occasionally (and perhaps even unintentionally) touches upon a kind of honesty that not one writer in a hundred comes near. There are moments of self-revelation that are viscerally frightening, perhaps all the more so because it never strays far from the macho attitude.

If i tell you that pete rose is a sociopath, can you understand that i'm not singling him out? That we are all of us in some degree sociopaths, and it is only up close that his breathtaking inhumanity stands out?

Words are manipulations, and pete never strays too far from his primary motivation - to convince you that he's remorseful, that he's served his time (in prison literally), and as his crimes were so much less toxic to baseball than steroids, would we PLEASE allow him into the Hall of Fame already? He's angry about the hypocrisy with which he's been treated, and it's a fair point. He maintains that he never for one second compromised the integrity of the game, and you're inclined to believe him.

To that i say...well, whatever. Awards and honorifics don't mean much to me.

But the visceral part of this book is in how pete genuinely tries to come to terms with his sociopathic side. He never uses that word, but he talks openly of his inability to perceive the feelings of others (or himself). It's obvious he's been in therapy, and the term "oppositional/defiant" is invoked often. You do get the sense that beneath his bravado, a part of him is genuinely ashamed, mostly because his dead father never would have approved of lies. He speaks of his father in heroic terms...and while you want to admire that, you also realize that something in pete's childhood was cripplingly dysfunctional. And again, pete is not unique in that regard. In this culture of fear and alienation, we are all of us irrevocably damaged by the time we're adults.

The final chapters fall back into the self-mythologizing, ain't-it-great-to-be-me nonsense that every other sports memoir offers up. But on the way to that place, there are some detours that are disturbing and...admirable.