Exploring Pete Rose's Life: A New Book on His Rise & Fall

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Transcript

00:00All right, so how did you come up with the idea, first of all, to write this book?

00:08I know that you're an accomplished author, but where did you sort of come up with the

00:11idea in your career to say, hey, look, this is the next thing that I want to do?

00:15I'd say two reasons.

00:18The first is, you know, I'm born and raised in Cincinnati.

00:22Born in the 1970s, raised in the 1980s, Pete Rose was the wallpaper, essentially, of my

00:28childhood growing up in Cincinnati, as he was for everybody who was living there at

00:33that time.

00:34And I feel that all too often, we have looked at Pete Rose's story through the prism of

00:41baseball.

00:42And to be clear, there's a ton of baseball in my book, Charlie Hustle.

00:47Frankly, you know, I feel like we've forgotten why we ever cared about Pete Rose in the first

00:52place.

00:53So one of the key things I had to do with the book was reconstruct the entire story,

00:57the rise and the fall of Pete Rose.

01:00But what I wanted to do, Craig, was look at his story through the prism of humanity.

01:06You know, he was an ordinary man, frankly.

01:10I think he's one of the most ordinary, extraordinary athletes we've ever had, a man of ordinary

01:17talents and athleticism, who was never the best player on his own youth baseball teams,

01:25coming from a working-class part of Cincinnati, who scrapes and claws his way to the mountaintop

01:30and then loses it all.

01:32That is just, frankly, a compelling human story.

01:35And I believe that if I could get access to Rose and his inner circle, I could tell it

01:40in a way that we've, you know, never heard it before.

01:44That was one.

01:45And two, you know, as you know, and as you were just discussing in the previous segment,

01:50I mean, the world has changed in the 35 years since Pete Rose has been banned from baseball.

01:55Frankly, the world has changed in the last six years since the sweeping legalization

02:00of sports gambling in America.

02:01And so what better time to revisit the story of one of our most notorious gamblers than now?