<i>Charlie Hustle &amp; the Matter of Pete Rose</i> (2024)

There will surely be other documentaries about Pete Rose. There will never, however, be another to ask him anything new or for elaboration about anything. They may present previously unseen interview footage—surely director Mark Monroe has some on his cutting-room floor. Historians will reconsider lenses through which to look at what exists, and to suss out new ways of organizing their arguments. For all intents and purposes, though, Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose stands as Rose's last testament.Rose personified baseball for an entire generation. Gen X, specifically. His rookie year was 1963, two years before the oldest of us was born. He retired as a player in 1986, when the youngest of us were shy of our sixth birthday. I was ten years old during the 1989 season. My name was drawn in a raffle to go with a group to Riverfront Stadium to see the Cincinnati Reds host the Atlanta Braves. (I am obligated by oath to acknowledge that my mother suffered through a migraine that whole day. The kind where light and sound are both painful and the slightest of either causes overwhelming pain and nausea. She became Mother of the Year Emeritus for that.)En route, a man in charge of the expedition asked if I wanted to go down on the field during batting practice. Obviously, I accepted, and I was one of three kids who got to meet Peter Edward Rose. Number 14. The Hit King. He could easily have dodged us. He was the manager, after all, and his job was to prepare for the game. We'd have all understood that. Instead, he invited us to join him in the dugout. He signed my baseball and whatever souvenirs the other kids had.More than that, though, he must have spent a solid five minutes talking baseball with us. He didn't seem inconvenienced. He seemed eager to chat. He asked us to see our batting stances and swings. I was too shy to do it, but the others did. He gave feedback about their stances and swings. Had them try his suggestions for adjustments. Imagine being a kid and getting tips on how to bat from Pete Rose himself while the Reds were still in the cage! I forget what he said to me, but it was encouraging.Seventeen days later, Pete Rose was banned from baseball.In the first episode of Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose, Rose asks Monroe if he has “an angle.” It's a fair question. Monroe says he doesn't, that he only wants to hear what Rose has to say, the way he wants to tell it. Monroe doesn't, however, let Rose go unchallenged. He cuts frequently from Rose to someone or something contradictory: another interviewee, a contemporaneous newspaper, archival film. The documentary sets that tone early, with differing accounts of even the origin of Rose's moniker. It's agreed that it was bestowed on him during spring training by Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford of the New York Yankees. But Rose claims it as an expression of respect for his all-out baserunning in the ninth inning to win a game that, truthfully, meant nothing, thereby impressing the Yankees legends. Ted Keith, formerly of Sports Illustrated, tells us that Rose had run hard and fast to catch a ball hit to the outfield, thirty feet over the wall. “Charlie Hustle” was meant derisively. Notably, Keith qualifies his anecdote as “the version I've heard.”It would have been more germane to have asked Jeffrey Lenkov about his agenda. Aside from being one of the doc's producers, Lenkov is also an interviewee. Not as a former teammate or journalist, but as Rose's attorney. There's no question Lenkov hoped Rose would use the opportunity to present himself as a sympathetic, contrite sinner seeking redemption. At times, though, it seems Lenkov is thisclose to groaning about how he has the most difficult client to represent who has not held the office of the presidency.Initially, I was concerned about the documentary's scope. At four hours long, there was plenty of time to explore Rose's complicated legacy. Or, rather, his legacies. Monroe structures the series around Rose's legacy as a gambler excluded from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. (Really, the Hall of Fame. The Museum celebrates the Hit King with an entire display featuring his bat, cleats, and glove.) Because, let's be honest, that's how every conversation about Rose has been framed for thirty-five years: Should he be in the Hall of Fame?Monroe explores not only the cases for and against, but the ins and outs of the Hall's policies that have kept him off the ballot. We learn about how the Hall's directors squeezed in a policy change just before Rose's eligibility would have begun that made anyone banned from Major League Baseball (MLB) ineligible for induction, and reactions to that. We also see footage from a press conference in which the current MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, points out that MLB does not own or operate the Hall. The Hall implemented that policy and the Hall could repeal it at any time. It's difficult to see Manfred pivoting from that position even after Rose's death. Monroe also shows how cozy MLB has gotten with gambling under Manfred's oversight, a point many people feel undermines the ethical purity on which the ban was predicated in the first place.We're presented with firsthand accounts from Tommy Gioiosa, Rose's betting proxy, conspirator, and, ultimately, his fall guy. Gioiosa clearly understood the most important thing that Rose somehow never did. He uses his screen time to own up to his role in Rose's shady business, as well as some of his personal wrongs at best tangentially related. He comes off as the sympathetic, contrite sinner seeking redemption that Lenkov spent years hoping Rose would.Gioiosa fell on the sword for Rose in a court of law but is the star witness against Rose in the court of public opinion. He links Rose to the mafia and drugs. He characterizes Rose as an unscrupulous manipulator whose obsession with winning a bet on the Kentucky Derby superseded his obsession with winning a game managing the Cincinnati Reds.The most damning part of Rose's legacy as a human being remains his statutory rape of a girl who was only fourteen years old at the beginning of the relationship he maintained with her when he was thirty-four. He was never prosecuted for it, as the statute of limitations expired by the time it was known. I went into Charlie Hustle wondering if and how this, more than any other topic, would be addressed. It's broached at the end of episode 2, though only briefly. To his credit, Monroe presses further to open episode 3. In lieu of focusing on the woman who'd broken her silence, Monroe focuses on Rose's handling of the matter. It's primarily organized around his offensive response to sportswriter Alex Coffey when she confronted him about it at an event honoring the 1980 Philadelphia Phillies championship team: “It was fifty-five years ago, babe,” said Rose. Monroe shows us the entirety of a subsequent exchange that was clearly a public relations effort, but seemingly not told to Rose. He offered to sign “a thousand baseballs” for her before eventually apologizing. The exchange illustrates how Rose traded on his fame. He could make up with people by trading on his own market value. That came easily to him. Apologizing, much less feeling sincere remorse, seemed beyond him.All things considered, Monroe handles the matter responsibly. Rose's victim retains her anonymity. Details of the years-long relationship are kept to a minimum. We don't need to know much else beyond Rose himself affirming that it's true. It's heinous, but it's also part of Rose's legacy as a human being. Monroe doesn't let it go unacknowledged. Otherwise, the documentary avoids delving much into Rose's personal life outside the public record that doesn't pertain to baseball one way or another. If Alex Coffey hadn't confronted Rose at a Phillies event, it's possible Monroe might have sidestepped this, too.That baseball Rose signed for me (also signed by Dave Collins, Eric Davis, and Chris Sabo) went into a little display stand that also had a place for a card. That game had also been Kahn's team card giveaway day. I originally displayed it with Rose's card from that set. Sometime after his ban, I replaced it with his 1989 Topps card. It was the last card the company made of him prior to the ban, but more importantly he's looking over his shoulder at the camera in the photo. He literally turned his back to us. When I learned about the statutory rape, I rotated the ball and replaced him altogether with Eric Davis.The night he died, though, I decided it was okay to let my inner ten-year-old compartmentalize when Pete Rose was still a hero and let my forty-five-year-old self sift through the rest. Remembering his days as a hero doesn't nullify anything else, and it doesn't constitute forgiveness. I rotated the ball back to his signature and restored his card from that giveaway team set. As Marc Monroe showcases in Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose, part of his legacy is also how he made us feel as fans before all these things came to light.