Why Pick on Pete?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

He was born with the talent to swing a bat, of course; no way could he have ever compiled 4,256 hits, the all-time career record, without it. But it was not his inborn gift that made Pete Rose the symbol of what Americans consider a vital part of the national ethos. He was Charlie Hustle, the man who ran out even his bases on balls, who played with a boyish exuberance and devil-may- care abandon characterized by the belly-flop, headfirst slides that kept his uniform constantly dirty. He soared far beyond athletes who had vastly more natural grace. A whole generation of fathers told their Little League sons to play like Rose if they wanted to get the most out of their ability.

Soon some of those sons may be telling their sons that they had better not imitate Rose's off-the-field behavior. For in the past few weeks Rose has become a very different kind of symbol -- still characteristic of American values, but this time of values hardly anyone likes to admit harboring. Charlie Hustle is well on his way to becoming Charlie Hustler, an emblem of the gambling fever that is sweeping America. This year Americans will spend an estimated $278 billion on everything from state-run lotteries to church-run bingo. The big question for millions of American sports fans today is not "What's the score?" but "What are the odds?"

Compulsive gamblers across the country instantly recognize the pattern of acts alleged in an investigative report to Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti and in interviews with Rose's associates: bets on ten to 20 college basketball games at a time, losses of $400,000 to just one bookie in one spring, desperate borrowing to pay the debts, equally desperate searches for new bookmakers to replace those who would no longer extend Rose credit or even take his bets.

The accusations come from runners who say they placed his bets and from a former bookie who insists he took them, but Rose declares it is all part of a conspiracy to blackmail him. He admits having bet on horse races, football and college- and pro-basketball games since 1975. But he vociferously denies the central charge: that in 1985, 1986 and 1987 he bet anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 on baseball games, including those played by his own team, the Cincinnati Reds. He played both infield and outfield for the Reds for more than 18 years and since 1984 has been the team's manager.

Members of the self-help group Gamblers Anonymous, who see Rose as one of them, nod and say, aha, his reaction sounds like another part of the classic pattern: denial. There is an ancient gag among Gamblers Anonymous members: "How do you know when a compulsive gambler is lying? When you see his lips move."

For the moment, Rose has managed to delay a disciplinary hearing at which Giamatti could suspend him from baseball for a year (if he was found to have bet on any games at all) or for life (if he bet on his own team -- even to win). Norbert A. Nadel, a judge of Ohio's Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas, opened last week by issuing a temporary restraining order barring Giamatti from holding the hearing, which had been scheduled for Monday. In what many critics denounced as a hometown ruling by a judge soon up for re- election, Nadel declared that Giamatti was so biased against Rose that the Reds' manager could not get a fair hearing. Nadel this week will conduct another hearing on a motion for an injunction to bar the Giamatti proceeding indefinitely. Even if Nadel issues the injunction, baseball lawyers are certain to appeal. Legal experts give them an excellent chance of winning; Nadel's initial ruling broke a long tradition of courts' staying out of professional disciplinary affairs.

Under orders from the Ohio Supreme Court, Nadel reluctantly made public the 225-page investigative report to Giamatti prepared by John Dowd, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney. Dowd's case is somewhat weakened because it depends heavily on the testimony of Ron Peters and Paul Janszen, two convicted felons. But Dowd insisted that their stories were corroborated by other witnesses, by tape recordings, by records of Rose's telephone calls and, most important, by betting sheets that a retired FBI expert judged to be in Rose's handwriting. Rose said he could not identify them.

For a good many baseball fans -- and gamblers -- whether Rose can ever convincingly refute the allegations is almost irrelevant. Charlie Hustle has become a symbol not just of gambling but also of the social toleration of it. Many people declare belligerently that even if all the allegations are true, they cannot see that Rose did anything grievously wrong. Had he bet on the Reds to lose, he would deserve severe punishment. But the Dowd report asserts that so far as anyone can determine, Rose bet on his team only to win -- and, many people ask, What was so terrible about that?

This sentiment, of course, is strongest in Cincinnati, where Rose is still a sort of god (Riverfront Stadium, where the Reds play, stands on Pete Rose Way). But those opinions can be heard all over the country. In a TIME/CNN poll taken last week by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, only 30% of the 504 people questioned thought Rose should be suspended from baseball for life if the accusations are correct; 40% said he should be suspended for only one year; and 20% were against any suspension at all.

Baseball's argument is that betting on one's own team corrupts the game. At minimum, it puts the bettor in touch with -- and all too likely in debt to -- gamblers, who may well want to pervert competition for their own ends. At worst, it gives the bettor a financial stake in trying harder to win some games, those on which he has money riding, than others. But to many people this stern morality is as outdated as the 70-year-old scandal that prompted it. In 1919 eight members of the Chicago White Sox were charged with taking money from gamblers to throw the World Series against, yes, the Cincinnati Reds. The rules that Rose is accused of breaking were written in the wake of that scandal. Said a typical telephone caller to a Cincinnati radio talk show last week: "It's not like he's a criminal or anything."

In fact, betting on sporting events other than horse or dog races or jai alai is generally a crime in every state except Nevada. But by now the prohibition, like many other antigambling laws, is hardly ever enforced. Betting goes on so openly that all but a handful of newspaper sports pages print the odds on baseball, football and basketball games. During the football season, the New York Daily News publishes four regular and two rotating columnists who offer weekly advice on which pro and college games to bet; its columns bristle with ads touting betting services offering the same assistance. Asks Bobby Knight, basketball coach of Indiana University: "Why don't the newspapers run whores' phone numbers? Is betting on basketball, football or baseball less illegal than prostitution?"

Sports betting is not even the largest or fastest-growing type of gambling. Christiansen/Cummings Associates in New York City, a leading consulting firm to the gaming industry, figures that all kinds of wagering (except friendly bets between individuals) have increased a thumping 57% in the past five years. Casinos took in more than half of all bets, or $164 billion; sports gambling was a distant second with a $28 billion take, up 57% from 1983. Though impressive, that increase was dwarfed by a 98% jump in the coins clinked into slot machines, a 103% rise in legal bookmaking and a 228% leap in money wagered in cardrooms.

Even those figures understate the spread of gambling fever. The biggest jump is in gambling that state and local governments not merely tolerate but promote. By next January, lotteries will be operating in 32 states and the District of Columbia, including four states -- Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky and Minnesota -- whose voters approved them in referendums last November. In 1964 only one state, New Hampshire, had a lottery. Christiansen/Cummings figures that the lotteries took in $17 billion last year, up 230% from 1983. As the lotteries have proliferated, so have the jackpots: Pennsylvania's $115.5 million drawing in April prompted bettors from Long Beach, Calif.; Long Island, N.Y.; and points between to flock to the Keystone State, where many stood in line for hours to buy tickets. A few years ago, a $5 million lottery prize was front-page news in most of the country; today it barely rates a paragraph on page 27.

Legal gambling has spread into some of the most straitlaced parts of the nation. Take Iowa: six years ago, even church bingo games were illegal there. Now Iowa residents have some of the widest choices available in legal gambling. They can buy tickets in either the state lottery or Lotto America, an organization that some experts think may be the nucleus of a national lottery; it currently operates in eight states and the District of Columbia and expects to sign up two more states this summer. Iowans can also bet at one horse track and three dog tracks, and in two years they will be able to become riverboat gamblers. This spring the state legislature approved a 1991 start for wagering on vessels plying the Mississippi.

Legal gambling begets more of the same in states that fear they will lose money if they do not devise new ways of wagering. Illinois, for example, operates a giant lottery that is believed to siphon much money out of neighboring states. But, fearful that some cash might eventually flow back to Iowa, Illinois House Democrats have recommended starting roulette, blackjack and dice games on twelve paddleboats cruising six rivers that flow through or past the state.

Even Indian tribes are raking in money by conducting legal gambling. Congress last fall passed a law making it easier for Indians on reservations to institute any type of gambling that is legal in the states where the % reservations are located. The most popular reservation game is high-stakes bingo. Near Franklin, La., 1,200 people every Saturday night jam into a $2 million bingo hall built last September on the Chitimacha Indian Reservation; that is four times the number of Indians living on the reservation. Each player pays a $45 admission fee and gets twelve bingo cards. The payoff on each winning card is $1,000; total prizes every night are at least $40,000. That tops the church bingo games that prompted an ancient wheeze: "Did you hear about the Cadillac dealer? He won a Catholic church in a bingo game."

Legal gambling also prompts more illegal wagering. It was once thought that lotteries and other state-run betting ventures would pull money away from ghetto numbers games, horse parlors operating behind candy-store fronts and the like. But the illegal games usually flourish alongside the legal ones and sometimes even piggyback on them. One example: since the Illinois lottery began daily drawings, Chicago numbers operators have adopted the state's winning number as the winning number in their own daily drawings. Since the state number is regularly aired on television, the numbers runners are saved the trouble of calculating a winning number of their own and communicating it to their clients. But why should anybody break the law to bet money that could just as easily be wagered legally? Well, the numbers operators sell tickets for as little as 25 cents, in contrast to $1 for state lottery tickets, and the illegal game offers better odds. In general, odds in the state lotteries are the worst of any type of gambling. Atlantic City casinos, for example, are required by New Jersey law to return as winnings 75% of the money bet, but state lotteries generally return only 51%.

If there is one opinion on which both gambling experts and ordinary bettors are in unanimous agreement, it is that state-sponsored gambling has been the driving force behind the huge increases in all types of wagering, legal and illegal. Legislators who approve lotteries, legal horse-betting parlors or riverboat gambling are spreading the message that wagering is respectable. "Gambling has been part of every known society," says Dr. Eric Plaut, vice chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Medical School, Evanston, Ill. "What has changed in the past decade is that it is now publicly endorsed. Since the government has got into the business of being an operator of gambling itself, it has given ! ((betting)) an imprimatur." A 60-year-old former bookie and member of Gamblers Anonymous in Los Angeles who gives his name only as Freddy S. says, "All these states have the lottery. All these housewives and welfare recipients are going to get hooked. Kids aren't going to get diapers and food. You can pick up almost any newspaper now and get the lines ((odds on sporting events)). You couldn't do that in my day; you had to pay for that service. All this information, it's just too accessible. It's just too easy ((to bet)) now."

Freddy's grim vision has not quite come true yet, but the extent of gambling among the American people is already as striking as the figures on the amount of money they bet. Dr. Howard Shaffer of Harvard's Center for Addiction Studies figures that the proportion of American adults who bet at least occasionally has risen from 60% two decades ago to 80% now; other estimates range up to 88%. Nor is betting confined to adults: Henry Lesieur, a sociologist at St. John's University in New York City, found in a 1987 study that 86% of New Jersey high school students had gambled within the previous year and 32% gambled at least once a week, mostly on sports events. "At first I didn't believe the rates," says Lesieur. "We double-checked and found that, if anything, we were conservative."

Some experts credit modern technology with contributing to the gambling surge. Computers have made possible the instantaneous distribution of odds on any kind of race or ball game anywhere in the country; bettors can watch the performance of the horses or teams they follow on cable television. Lotteries sell tickets through player-activated computer terminals; churches and charities offer computerized bingo readers. "The new technology makes gambling much more accessible, and it speeds everything up," says Richard Rosenthal, a Beverly Hills psychoanalyst who specializes in treating compulsive gamblers. "It makes gambling much more addictive."

For the great majority of players who bet only occasionally, or regularly but lightly, gambling is no more than an inexpensive amusement. For others, it ruins lives quite as thoroughly as alcohol or drugs. Some of their stories:

-- Marc, 35, began gambling in high school, where he blew a $1,000 savings account his parents had set up for him. In college he gambled away the receipts of a candy store that he managed; in law school he looted his wife's $4,000 savings account. Says Marc: "I would lie awake at night and relive every race, every game, to figure out where I miscalculated." He never did figure it out; by 1985 he had run up debts of $200,000 and joined Gamblers Anonymous. Family and friends thought he had kicked his habit, but in fact he had simply run out of money. In 1987, as his insurance business began to recover, Marc started going to the track again. He conned his wife into letting him take out a second mortgage on their home, telling her it was for investment; he lost the money gambling. His wife threatened divorce, and a business acquaintance from whom he had borrowed money that he did not repay clubbed him over the head. That is why Marc has a steel plate in his head. After a failed suicide attempt, he entered a self-help group at Tampa's Glenbeigh Hospital and thinks this time he really has quit gambling. Says Marc: "I'm a miracle. Most people that get in as deep I did either end up dead, in prison or alone."

-- Howie, 53, board chairman of a Los Angeles advertising agency, has been earning good money legitimately since age 15, when he already owned a Long Island, N.Y., parking lot. Says he: "I used to walk around with $10,000 in my pocket, but my father-in-law had to pay the $300 mortgage each month." In New York he would borrow $30,000 to $50,000 a week and lose about 80% of it over a weekend. "Then I'd steal," he says. Sometimes he would pilfer racks of dresses off the streets in Manhattan's garment district and sell them in a back alley. He adds, "There's plenty of times I've taken a gun and held up people -- and I'm a white-collar person." Fleeing to California to escape bill collectors, he started a successful garment business in Los Angeles but continued betting beyond his means; eventually he was arrested by FBI agents. Says he: "That night I called Gamblers Anonymous."

-- Karen, 42, began gambling at age eight, flipping baseball cards against garage doors. At 13, she shot craps with boys in the co-ed locker room of Ralston Junior High in Belmont, Calif. As a young married woman, she started going to Las Vegas and the poker tables at Gardena, Calif. "All of a sudden, it wasn't the money anymore," she says. "It was the action, the high." On one occasion, she told her young son to wait on a street corner after school, and she would pick him up at 2:30 p.m. for a dental appointment. She went to Gardena instead, and her husband found the boy at 6 p.m., still waiting. On another day, she locked her house and went to Gardena, figuring she would be , back in time to let her daughter in when the girl came home from school at 3 p.m. Hours later Karen was still in Gardena, and her husband found the shivering daughter waiting on the porch in a hard rain. Finally, her husband told Karen, "I love you, and the kids love you, but we can't take this anymore. If you don't get yourself some help, you're not going to be here for Christmas." Karen joined G.A. Though the great majority of gamblers are men, women are betting -- and showing up at Gamblers Anonymous meetings -- with growing frequency.

All of which makes the Pete Rose story more than a gossipy tale about the downfall of an idol. Whether or not he bet on baseball, the last thing America's growing legion of gamblers needs is an example of an admitted heavy bettor blithely denying he has done anything wrong and actually commanding the sympathy of people who continue to worship him. The lure of excessive gambling is too great, even without an exemplar of Rose's stature. Painful as it may be for the millions who admired him as a ballplayer, he should be punished as severely as an objective hearing may determine he deserves. It would help enormously if he would admit his compulsion and seek rehabilitative help. Perhaps then the nation could forget about Rose the Gambler and go back to its once well-justified admiration of Charlie Hustle.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Christiansen/Cummings Associates}]CAPTION: SERIOUS MONEY

. . . piling up a total take running into the hundreds of billions from all types of bets

With reporting by Richard Behar/New York, Lee Griggs/Chicago and James Willwerth/Los Angeles