| | Two great, mythic figures resurfaced over the weekend. One, Mike
Tyson, is now in reruns, and as such can be passed over until his next
fight, when he throws a hive of wasps on Shannon Briggs during the
weigh-in and then blames him for swelling up like a poisonous toad.
|  | | Pete Rose acknowledges the sustained cheers that greeted him on Sunday. |
The other, Pete Rose, is back, bigger and more sympathetic than
ever. He hasn't been this hot for years.
As we all know, of course, today's hot menu item can disappear
wthin a matter of days. Our attention spans, after all, ain't what they
used to be, and Petey As Victim has only a slightly longer shelf life
than chicken on a radiator.
Still, Pete being a man of the moment, he can revel in the moment
bestowed upon him now. Not only was he named to the All-Century Team as an outfielder (what, right-handed setup man was already full?),
but he has won the support of people who may not have cared a whit for
his self-made predicament.
For this, he can thank that notorious bully, Stone Cold Jim Gray.
At first glance, Gray isn't exactly the kind of person who makes a
room blanch in fear. Yet, in his role as sideline/sideshow reporter for
NBC and Showtime, he had made something of a low-level reputation as the
anti-Ahmad Rashad -- the tweedy-looking chap who will ask the pointy
question while most of his contemporaries are still clearing their
favor-currying throats.
Sunday, though, he became Mike Wallace on psychotropic drugs -- a
fiendish, maniacal inquisitor trying to throttle the truth out of a man
who has spent more time denying it than Gray has had hot expense-account
dinners.
To put it another way, Gray tried to verbally dope-slap a
confession out of Rose on national television, and came off looking
like, well, a dope, slapping.
The hard-bitten reporter in all of us would like to say, "You go,
boyfriend. Give that miscreant the sharp end of your tongue. Make him
squirm before your cruel Jesuitical logic."
The only flaw in that approach is that you can only look good if
you actually succeed in extracting that confession. And unless you've
already got the proof in your small, sweaty mitts and can wave it
derisively in the subject's face, you're probably not going to get that
confession.
Thus, you end up looking like (a) a bully, and (b) a bully who
isn't very good at it. And your subject ends up looking like Spanky in
the Our Gang comedies -- wide-eyed, precocious and as pure as newly
driven Tibetan snow.
Thus, in the court of public opinion, Pete Rose wins again. In fact, he
wins convincingly this time. Were it not for commissioner Bud Selig's
unofficial position on Rose's reinstatement ("Over my cold, dead
corpse"), he might have been carried to Cooperstown on the backs of his
fellow Centurions.
At some point, though, Rose's high gloss will wear off again,
probably while he's autographing artificial limbs at the AMA convention
at $150 per foot. And we'll all be back in the same old grimy
stalemate.
The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take the matter to
court. Each side throws a few lawyers on the fire, makes its best case,
gets a ruling, then the loser claims the judge was a moron, appeals
three or four times and then goes back on the deal at the end anyway.
But at least then, we, the unwashed and slightly funky public, will
finally know beyond the shadow of Pete's beard what he did, who he did
it with, how much he did it for, and whether it violates the only rule
baseball still seems to care about enforcing. And frankly, we're
entitled to that.
We won't get it, though. Rose acts too much like someone who has
something to hide, even if it may not be gambling on baseball, and
baseball's record in court is too laughable to test again on this very
personal and unpleasant spat.
Thus, we are left with the spectre of more incidents like Sunday's,
with Rose winning over the hearts and minds of people who have heard Bud
Selig defer decisions for months on what socks to wear with his brown
suit, and who have watched Jim Gray at his most incisive, and long
instead for Michelle Tafoya grilling clowns at the Grand National
Rodeo.
In other words, nothing was revealed Sunday, and nothing was
settled. Nothing was learned, to be sure, except maybe this -- that Li'l
Jimmy finally will understand the first rule of club-footed interrogation: To get the goods on someone, you need to already have the goods on them.
Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Examiner is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. | |
ALSO SEE
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Lawyer who investigated Rose says he caused 'embarrassing night'
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